George F. Kennan: An American Life (104 page)

A less needy friend was the formidable
Die Zeit
editor Marion Dönhoff, an East Prussian aristocrat who had joined the anti-Hitler resistance during the war and then, in 1945, escaped on horseback to the west, just ahead of the Red Army. George saw her as “a rare phenomenon in German life: a person who has preserved a real knowledge and understanding of the values of the past, a clear conscience, and a detached judgment, into the modern age.” That she had done this without self-pity was the source of her strength, “now so widely recognized.” When Dönhoff’s nephew, Hermann Hatzfeldt, enrolled as a Princeton graduate student in the mid-1960s, the Kennans treated him as a surrogate son, and after inheriting Schloss Crottorf, the Rhineland family estate, he would host them there, along with his famous aunt, for many visits over many years.
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The most famous of George’s female friendships, however, was one about which the father of the woman involved would have spun furiously in his grave, had it not been encased under tons of concrete just outside the Kremlin wall. She was Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva, the only daughter of Josef Stalin, and on the evening of March 6, 1967, she appeared at the U.S. embassy in New Delhi to request political asylum. She had with her a memoir that, Ambassador Chester Bowles informed Washington, was likely to sell extremely well if published with “timely guidance from some American whom she trusts.” Bowles arranged to fly her to Rome, and shortly after midnight on the tenth, Connie Goodman (as Moench was now, having recently married) got a phone call “from a gentleman I knew to be connected with the C.I.A.” He was Donald “Jamie” Jameson: “I’ve been trying very hard to get in touch with Mr. Kennan. Can you tell me where he is?”

Upon learning that he was at the farm, Jameson waited until a more reasonable hour to call: “We have a tremendous defection.” The agency had the manuscript. Could Kennan assess it, both for its intelligence value and with a view to possible publication? It arrived in Princeton on the sixteenth, by which time Kennan was in bed with the flu: “I read it through the night, and realized that this was not only publishable but also probably worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.” After receiving this information, the State Department asked Kennan to meet Alliluyeva in Switzerland, where the authorities were now hiding her: the news was out, and journalists were on her trail. So he flew to Milan, and the Swiss smuggled him across their border. They were “very good at this sort of thing—don’t ever underestimate the Swiss!”

“George Kennan was tall, thin, blue-eyed, elegant,” Alliluyeva wrote of their first meeting, which took place at a safe house in Bern on the twenty-fourth. “That hour proved that fantasies and dreams could sometimes come true.” She should indeed publish, he told her, and perhaps also emigrate to the United States. It would be unlike the Soviet Union, but she would have friends, not least his own family, who would welcome her to the Pennsylvania farm, a place like “your Zub-alovo.” That was the dacha outside Moscow where Alliluyeva had grown up, and “I knew then that he had read my manuscript very attentively.” Kennan had already found her a lawyer, his Princeton neighbor and Institute trustee Edward Green-baum, who in turn secured a publisher’s advance that made Alliluyeva wealthy before she ever set foot on American soil. She did that on April 21, and
The New York Times
described the scene: “A vibrant figure danced down the steps of a Swissair jetliner,” approached the microphones, and said cheerfully, in English, “Hello there, everybody!”
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Now a media sensation, Alliluyeva at first sought refuge on the Long Island estate of Stuart H. Johnson, whose daughter, Priscilla McMillan, was translating her memoirs: the Kennans went there to greet her, using young Hatzfeldt as their driver. “Annelise by nature was very calm,” Svetlana recalled. Neither “a university professor, nor a writer, nor a historian,” she would “give good advice.” George, in the meantime, was trying to portray Svetlana not as a “defector” but “as a human being in herself.... She is a remarkable and courageous woman.” The elder Kennans were about to leave for Africa and then Norway, though, so Joan offered to host—and hide—Stalin’s daughter in East Berlin.

Svetlana spent two months incognito at the Cherry Orchard with Joan, Larry, and their two young sons. The house reminded her, as it had George and Annelise, of a prerevolutionary Russian country estate. She found something special in every room, especially George’s study on the third floor: “full of sunshine, reflected in squares on the yellow parquet floor,” it was “rather empty, and this was the most wonderful part of it.” One wall was full of books, Russian newspapers, and journals. There was a big plain wooden table with no drawers, “so convenient for work, it seemed to invite one to settle down.” By the window was a hard rocking chair, “polished by time,” and nearby an old-fashioned typewriter, sitting on a stand “nailed together by the professor himself.” Svetlana had confided in her, Joan wrote her father, “that she loved you very much, [and] missed you.” This was “not to be interpreted in some overly emotional sense—it meant simply that you were the first person she met after leaving India, with whom she had an instant rapport.”
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Soviet propagandists, by then, were trying to discredit Alliluyeva: she was, they claimed, psychologically unstable; her arrival in the United States had been a plot to divert attention from the upcoming fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution; Kennan had arranged it. So she retaliated, on a day when no grown-ups were present to try to stop her, by summoning Joan’s and the farmer’s children, their babysitter, and Christopher, then seventeen and just back from his spring term at Groton. She had him light the hibachi. On it went her Soviet passport, incinerated before small solemn American witnesses, its ashes then scattered in the Pennsylvania wind.
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After his return from abroad that fall, George introduced Svetlana to Princeton. They walked through the Institute’s woods, toured the university campus, and visited the chapel, “leaving outside his black poodle [Krisha], who followed us everywhere. No one paid the slightest attention to us, and this was the best thing I could have wished for.” She rented a house and became, for several years, a neighbor. Bill Bundy remembered a dinner, in 1975, to which the Dilworths, the Taplins, the Kennans, and Alliluyeva came. “Let’s have some music,” someone said. So “George started playing his guitar, singing these sad Russian songs, and, well, Svetlana brightened, she effervesced, in a way that I didn’t ever see her do on any of the other half-dozen occasions we met her. Her devotion to George was very clear that evening.”
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“Dear George,” she wrote him the following year from California, where she had recently moved, “you are unhappy—and this is very obvious—because you constantly betray yourself.” What followed was a bizarre form of poetic justice. Kennan, famously, had analyzed Stalin from afar three decades earlier. Now Stalin’s daughter, from a shorter distance and in still slightly erratic English, was analyzing him.

Like Lincoln, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, and Frank Lloyd Wright—Alliluyeva had lived briefly at Taliesin West, the late architect’s compound—Kennan had been “
born
to be constantly misunderstood.” She saw in him the aging Tolstoy, “trying to be an old homebody, a patriarch of all big family crowd;
so what?
You were never good in this role.” He never would be, “no matter how much you might try—in full sincerity—to brake your own bones to fit
that
pattern.” He needed “freedom; travel; opened sea; life on the boat and with the Nature; life on the farm, among trees, animals and manual work.”

Changing one’s life, however, took an effort. She had done it by leaving the Soviet Union. He could do it by separating himself “from that killing vanity of Hodge Road; from that depressing Norwegian narrow practicality; from constant calls from Washington, D.C. which only frustrate you, and remind you that you are a ‘retired ambassador.’ . . . Because, George, you deserve to be happy, you deserve more than anyone else to live
your way.
”
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It’s not clear whether George showed this letter—one of many he received from Alliluyeva—to Annelise. When later asked about her in his presence, however, Annelise succinctly said a lot: “George, you don’t realize—there’s something about that female! She gets a little jealous!” It was an unusual reprimand. For if Annelise resented George’s need for female companionship—or the need of other females for George’s—she rarely showed it. “Whatever difficulties she and my father might have had were never aired in public,” their daughter Joan recalled. “She never spoke disparagingly about him, aside from the minor frustrations common to all married couples.” With an even temperament and practical good sense, self-pity was not her style. “She had a healthy sense of herself.... She was like the rock of Gibraltar.” George had been “extraordinarily lucky,” Frank Taplin concluded. Annelise was “the greatest thing that ever could have happened to him.”
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The Kennans went to Africa in the spring of 1967, George later explained, to “cure my ignorance, since I’d never been there.” The trips—there turned out to be two of them—came about through his friend Harold Hochschild, an Institute trustee with extensive mining interests in the region. The United States–South Africa Leader Exchange Program and the African-American Institute sponsored the visits, drawing on help from the State Department to arrange an arduous schedule of tours, luncheons, receptions, dinners, press interviews, and meetings with public figures. Kennan also lectured on his historical research but found his audiences more interested in the Vietnam War and in the now-famous Alliluyeva.
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Determined to miss nothing, George kept an unusually detailed diary, employing undiminished descriptive skills to capture Johannesburg’s sprawl and the aridity of the plain surrounding it; the California-like cultural sparseness of Pretoria; the stately elegance of the Blue Train to Cape Town; the excitement of standing at the windswept tip of the continent, where great swells from the Atlantic collided with smaller ones from the Indian Ocean. He noted jarring contrasts: modern universities, luxurious country clubs, and efficient mining operations, but also townships into which Bantus were being relocated against their will. Kennan had no objection in principle to the idea of separate development, having long believed that race shaped culture. Recent American efforts to pretend otherwise had even left him sympathetic to apartheid, he confessed to Dönhoff in 1965. But separation should not require humiliation, and that was what bothered him about South Africa.

In the Transkei, the first of the “homelands” the white minority government had established, the Kennans visited a hut with a thatched roof and a dirt floor, surrounded by human and animal excrement because there were no sanitary facilities. It was, George guessed, how most of the territory’s residents lived. He found it “heart-rending” to see how cruelly apartheid oppressed the people he met, “particularly the younger ones.” He doubted, therefore, that it could last.

It was a relief, paradoxically, to arrive in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, where Kennan saw fewer signs of “racial tension and artificiality.” The chief excitement there was a visit to a game preserve near Beira. Lions appeared, as expected, but just at that moment the Kennans’ Volkswagen minibus broke down, unexpectedly. “So there we stood” while the driver nervously attempted repairs, “with our heads sticking out above the roof . . . , surveying the scene, but powerless to move.” A passing car at last rescued George and Annelise from the prospect of being eaten.

The next stop was Lusaka, in Zambia, on June 4, and here things began to fall apart. Arriving exhausted, George found that his hosts had lined up, beginning early the next morning, a long series of calls “on people I did not know, whose country I had never seen, and with whom I had nothing in common.” One was President Kenneth Kaunda, to whom he was introduced as “Mr. Frost.” Even worse, Kennan was asked to meet exiles from South Africa, Mozambique, and Rhodesia who were seeking to overthrow the governments of those countries. A set of book proofs he had needed to work on had not caught up with him. And then, on June 5, war broke out between the Israelis and the Arabs. If it escalated, “we would be stuck here for God knows how long.”

“I was over-reacting,” George knew, “not sleeping, not digesting, suffering—literally—from a touch of jaundice and viewing everything with a jaundiced eye.” But to continue in that condition would be unfair to the organizers and to the remaining countries they had him visiting. So he proposed, and Annelise agreed upon, a quick escape to Norway. “I feel terribly about having to break off the trip,” George wrote Joan from Kristiansand, but had it gone on it would have ended badly. He hoped to go back: for the moment, though, “I must go out and mow the lawn.”
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