George F. Kennan: An American Life (13 page)

Over the next year and a half, George Kennan’s character began to take on much of the shape it would retain for the rest of his life. It’s best to think of it as triangular, held taut by tension along each of its sides. Professionalism was one of these: it was during this period that Kennan established his reputation, within the Foreign Service, as the best of its young Russian specialists. He would maintain that preeminence throughout his diplomatic career, and then transfer it successfully to the vocation of history. A second side was cultural pessimism: Kennan had begun to doubt whether what he thought of as “western civilization” could survive the challenges posed to it by its external adversaries and its internal contradictions. He never wholly reassured himself that it would. The third side was personal anguish: where did he as a husband and a father and a professional and an intellectual—but also as an individual tormented by self-doubt, regretting missed opportunities—fit into all of this? As happens with triangles, adjustments on one side could not help but affect the others.

Personal anxieties were not new, but they now had a new context. The date is June 13, 1932, the place Riga. A young man who has just become a father trudges home along the river after an excruciatingly boring day of work. The weather has cleared, and the late, low northern sun lights his way. A familiar temptation appears in the shape of a small, freshly painted Swedish passenger steamer, due to sail that evening for the Baltic island of Visby. “Why should I not go on board and ask to be taken along as a guest?” It is only a dream, but the details are vivid enough to fill a diary page when he records them. “Just now,” though,

And so he reaches home, with his mind circling through thoughts like these as if some kind of rosary. “There is only responsibility and self-sacrifice; all else is meaningless, all else is vanity, all else is not even interesting; adventure, mystery, even justice do not exist. Learn it, repeat it, comprehend it, wrestle with it, embrace it, cling to it.”
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Most young fathers have felt such urges and suppressed them; few, however, take the trouble to write them down. Kennan claimed at the time that his “notes” were a protest against pointlessness. He always felt, he explained years later, “that there should be greater things happening in life than I could see around me, wherever I was.” Diaries provided a private place to write about them: they were “a protective exercise for myself.... When I was happy and busy, I wasn’t writing.” Annelise confirmed this. “When you read his letters, you would think he was always just so blue.” Even Jeanette, from a distance, at times thought so. In daily life, though, as Annelise knew better than anyone else, “he can be so gay.” He had, she was sure, a “dual personality,” and what he wrote tended to reflect only the morose side of it.
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The diary entries, therefore, should be read with this in mind. On June 14, for example, George followed up his fantasy about sailing to Visby with the appalling observation—by today’s standards but by that day’s as well—that “[w]omen are like the leaden centerboards on sailboats. They keep the boat upright and on its course, but they are not the motive power which makes it go.” To “go fast before the wind, you have to eliminate them at all times. And one of them is all you can use; any more pull you down.”
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But Annelise, had she read this, would probably have been more indulgent than insulted, for this was a young man’s backward bad-tempered glance in the direction of the independence he had chosen to give up. It did not mean that George was about to turn his fantasies into reality and sail away, unstabilized, from his wife and daughter. The marriage would last for seventy-three and a half years.

“One might well dream of the past,” George admonished himself a few months later. One might “watch life outside, through the bars.” But one could not participate in it. Pride and spirit were inconsistent with responsibility for other people, so he had become the model married man, faithful “in the ordinary sense as well as in the intellectual.” Promiscuity was not sinful, “it was merely sloppy.” Confusion, disorder, and uncertainty always accompanied it. And if monogamy was unhealthy, then a certain amount of physical discomfort was the price one paid for dignity.
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These outbursts of despair over ordinary life provide a clue, then, as to what to make of the self-described “complaints against civilization” that were beginning to pepper George’s diaries:

A literal reading of these rants might lead to the conclusion that the third secretary of the U.S. legation in Latvia was becoming a dysfunctional fascist—an Ezra Pound of diplomacy. But this side of Kennan existed alongside his stable marriage and, even more strikingly, his professionalism: two weeks after insisting that he was at the end of his mental rope, he came closer than anyone else of his generation to predicting the Soviet Union’s economic and social development over the remainder of the twentieth century.

He did so in response to a query from Robert P. Skinner, the American minister in Riga, as to whether the population of the U.S.S.R. was content with its government. Kennan replied, a bit pointedly, that in a country where millions of people had been killed in military operations, exiled to prison camps, or forced to emigrate—“where the ideals, principles, beliefs and social position of all but a tiny minority have been forcibly turned upside-down by government action”—and where that same regime harbored an ideologically driven hostility toward the rest of the world, “it is scarcely to be expected that most of the people should be as happy as those in other countries.” Nevertheless the army, the factory proletariat, and urban youth had benefited from Bolshevik rule: young communists in particular were “as happy as human beings can be,” having been relieved to a large extent “of the curses of egotism, romanticism, day-dreaming, introspection, and perplexity which befall the youth of bourgeois countries.”

Still, this situation could not last. If the materialist phase of development succeeded, then consumerism—“autos, radios and electric ice-boxes”—would drain away ideological zeal. If it failed, anger over unkept promises would paralyze the regime. Either way, the artificiality now sustaining Soviet self-confidence would evap orate.

Kennan’s analysis went to Washington, but apparently no one read it. He himself forgot about it, and when shown the report sixty-eight years later, he wondered whether it had been “a dream or a premonition.”
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It was neither, but it was as good an illustration as one might hope for of how his triangular personality operated.

A professional who was nothing more than that might have replied to Skinner’s query with what could be gleaned from Soviet newspapers and magazines, radio broadcasts, or interviews with émigrés and recent travelers to the U.S.S.R. But Kennan added cultural pessimism to his professionalism: he had developed it in criticizing American consumerism, but he now applied it to a system based on “dialectical materialism” to show how it might someday succumb to a different materialism: too many automobiles and ice-boxes could crash it, but so could too few. To this “no-win” prognosis, Kennan brought another, drawn from pessimism about himself: young people, when cast adrift from the stabilizing influences of tradition, principles, and personal responsibility, were apt to founder.

What this report reflected, therefore, was indeed the “far-seeing eye” that the State Department inspector in Riga three years earlier had sensed.
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What Kennan’s diaries reveal, however, is the personal tension that lay behind his professional accomplishments, and that would in the future endanger them.

“Election day today,” Annelise wrote George from Kristiansand on November 8, 1932. “I expect Roosevelt will win. . . . I wonder what they will do about Soviet Russia.”
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So did many others, not least the Russian specialists the Foreign Service had been training. It had done so because it anticipated, even if it did not want, diplomatic recognition. The State Department continued to hold out against the establishment of formal ties long after most other government agencies, business organizations, academics, journalists, and politicians had come to favor it: a persistent opponent was Robert F. Kelley himself, who began the program from which Kennan benefited. Kelley and his colleagues knew, however, that the Soviet regime was not going to disappear anytime soon, that the pressures to deal with it would become irresistible. Franklin D. Roosevelt had given no clue during the campaign as to what his attitude might be, but his willingness to jettison ineffective policies—whatever their purview—was clear enough. So there were expectations, by the time he took office in March 1933, that the department’s young Russianists would soon have more to do than simply watch events from a distance in Riga.
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Life there, in the meantime, had become more difficult. The Foreign Service had begun to reduce pay and allowances. George was tired from working too hard, Annelise reported to Jeanette: “He isn’t gloomy at home or with me. I know you must think he is from his letters.” Even on a shoestring, they were still entertaining. And they were planning a winter break in Norway.
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It took place against the background of Hitler’s coming to power, and here Kennan’s “far-seeing eye” failed him. He found Germany “pitiable and slightly repulsive in its sleep, loud-mouthed and obstreperous in its waking hours. God knew which condition was preferable.” The Nazi revolution was not “a real awakening,” though, but “only a nightmare.” So the month in Kristiansand, which the Nazis would occupy seven years later, was idyllic. There were days of skiing and sledding, nights of eating and drinking, and at the end of the visit he wrote Jeanette with a sense of contentment that must have astonished her:

There were, he added, no great hopes in such a life, but also no great horrors. So why go on storming heights, frazzling nerves, and beating wings against the limitations of human existence when a person could live like this, “reconciled to death and oblivion, but sure of the comfort and security of his measured days”?
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It was as if Kristiansand had become the ship on which the younger George had more than once dreamed of sailing away.

Back in Riga, he wrote one weekend in May, the baby had been put to bed, they didn’t want any supper, the evening sun was shining horizontally into the living room, and the shouting of children playing outside mingled with the clock’s ticking to complete the day’s boredom. “I am 29 years old and presumably in the prime of life.” Weekdays were busy: “I’m still enough of a kid to become absorbed in my work, when I have to do it.” Relaxation allowed thinking about the future. The real priority, “timid government clerks that we are,” was to hang on until another career became possible. The Foreign Service had yet to decide what to do with him: “We may stay on here indefinitely. We may very well be transferred tomorrow.” Where? The chances were as good for Moscow as for Peking, Berlin, or even Washington.
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It was not up to Kennan to decide such matters, but his superiors in the State Department had begun to notice him—despite neglecting his prophecy on the Soviet Union’s future. A report on Moscow’s gold and foreign currency accounts, prepared in the fall of 1932, elicited praise from Under Secretary of State William R. Castle, Jr. And a study of Soviet commercial treaties, prepared in April 1933, with the possibility of recognition in mind, made its way through the State Department to the White House itself. This was, however, an inauspicious initiation into the Washington policy-making process, because while negotiating terms of recognition with Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov the following November, President Roosevelt suggested precisely the language—relating to the treatment of foreign nationals inside the U.S.S.R.—that Kennan had advised against using.
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