George F. Kennan: An American Life (28 page)

Annelise had rented a house in Bronxville, New York, shortly before Pearl Harbor, and was there with the children when she learned of George’s internment. The State Department told her not to expect him back before March: “I just keep praying that nothing will happen to make it more complicated than it is.” Beyond that, she had no information: “I never had heard a word about him. No communication whatever.” Shortly before his release, George was able to send a message through the department asking about his family. It reached Annelise as a telegram from the secretary of state. “I was sure he was dead,” she recalled. “I was so furious. I sat down and wrote a telegram [that] said: ‘I’m glad for the first opportunity to tell where we are and the welfare of the children.’ He never got it.”
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Frieda Por, who examined George soon after his return, found that he had lost fifteen pounds, his stomach problems had returned, and it had been only “through the exercise of great willpower that he was able to continue carrying out his heavy responsibilities.” On the basis of her report, the State Department authorized a forty-five-day leave.
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The Kennans used it, not to relax, but to buy a farm.

“I am a great believer in the power of the soil over the human beings who live above it,” George had told his Badheim University “students” in one of his lectures on Russian history. His private reasons for wanting a farm were more complicated. A happy personal life, he had concluded while interned, would never be possible. Professional satisfaction was out of reach because Americans, “biologically undermined and demoralized,” had a broken political system. The solution, then, was “the sort of glorified gardening called gentleman farming, . . . the only form of playing with toys which is not ridiculous in elderly men.” (George was thirty-eight at the time.) But he could not ask his wife and children to give up “the advantages of education and all personal amenities.” The ideal thing, therefore, would be to combine agriculture and diplomacy, “[f]or the same sort of catastrophe is not likely to hit both of them simultaneously.”
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The Kennans had no farming experience: only a book, called
Five Acres and Independence.
They would not be able to manage a farm alone, but they could, Annelise pointed out, rent it to a resident farmer: “I’m always a little more realistic than George.” Wisconsin was out as long as he remained in the Foreign Service, so the farm would have to be near Washington. They began looking, then, in the Gettysburg region of southern Pennsylvania. “It is lovely rolling country, with beautiful rich soil,” George wrote Jeanette.

By the last week in June, the Kennans had given up the Bronxville house, stored their furniture, and set off “after the fashion of modern pioneers: the whole damned family, including the dog [the disgraced Kimmy, now forgiven], the phonograph and the typewriter, in an old Ford car—and with no home on the face of the globe.” Their address, for the near future, would be simply “General Delivery, Gettysburg, Pa.”
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“[W]e haven’t bought a farm yet,” Annelise added a few days later, but despite the temptation “to say to hell with it all, let’s go somewhere nice where we can swim and sail and loaf,” they were still at it “with all the perseverance that a Scott [
sic
] and a Norwegian can muster.” They had seen one promising possibility: a 238-acre farm with an enormous three-story house, a smaller one for a tenant farmer, a tobacco barn, and a three-car garage, owned by the children of a Jewish emigrant, Joseph Miller, who had used it as a temporary refuge for Jews fleeing Nazi Germany. The house was ugly, awkward, filled with junk, and had not been cleaned since the old man’s death: “It was just like the Cherry Orchard without the orchard.” The price was $14,000, which would require, Annelise worried, “such a big mortgage.” A few days later, she wrote again: “Jeanette, hold on tight—yesterday we bought it!”
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On July 21, 1942, George reported to his sister that the family had spent its first night in their own house. There had been cobwebs everywhere, “and I had no idea what sort of beasts or ghosts would emerge.” Only a few doors had banged, though, and “we are starting on our first full day of country life.” The motor for the pump had rusted and the well had silted up, but “never mind, we’ll make it.” By the next morning, he was relishing

It was not clear “whether we’ll be able to swing it financially, or whether [the farm] will gradually eat us up and ruin us, too.” But he had no regrets. “I have the sense of having my hands on something really solid.... I can see the results of my own handiwork, and they are results that last.” On the door frame leading into the house the Kennans discovered—and thought it right to keep—a mezuzah, the Jewish acknowledgment of the blessings of life.

That evening George took Grace, one of the tenant farmer’s children, and Kimmy on a walk through towering stalks of corn. While the dog flushed pheasants and chased rabbits, George climbed a cherry tree to survey his estate. It was astonishing, he explained to his sister,

Located just outside the village of East Berlin, Pennsylvania, the farm allowed at least one economy. Beginning with this letter, and continuing until the supply ran out, the Kennans used stationery George had brought back from the other Berlin, scratching out the German street address and adding a carefully placed “East” and “Pa.”
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The
East Berlin News-Comet
reported on July 24 that the Miller farm had been sold to “a Mr. Kennedy of New York and Washington, D.C.,” who with his wife and two children would use the property for leisure activities and as their summer home. The editor, Harriet Tierney, had gotten the news from the town barber, Lavere Burgard, who later corrected the story to say that the name was more like “Cannon” and that the buyer “had something to do with the government.” The George Shetters, who owned the local restaurant, confirmed this information, noting that the gentleman in question had made a long-distance phone call from there. East Berlin had little experience with important outsiders, and so the rumors began to fly. Mrs. Tierney then took it upon herself to settle the matter by driving out to the Miller place to find out who the newcomers were. Satisfied, she wrote another story introducing the Kennan family to East Berlin.
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The psychological distance between the two Berlins was even greater than the physical distance, so for the moment—uncharacteristically—George Kennan was happy. But he was still in the Foreign Service and there was still a war on; hence on September 8, 1942, George loaded his family into the back of a borrowed milk truck, leaving Kimmy—who was to stay behind on the farm—racing desperately after them. Grace went to Washington, where she would spend the year in boarding school, while Annelise and Joan accompanied George back to Lisbon: his new assignment was to be counselor at the American legation in Portugal. The trip this time was by air. “It is just surreal to go so far so fast,” Annelise wrote of the three-day flight via Bermuda and the Azores. “Somehow it doesn’t seem right.” She regretted leaving so soon. “Little by little my roots have fastened in the States,” she assured Jeanette. “I like the country and love the people—in spite of what George thinks of them.”
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George, for his part, accepted the wartime obligation of overseas service but envied those who could perform it in uniform. Military life carried risks, but survivors would return with the laurels “simply by virtue of their participation.” Diplomacy too had its dangers, but there would be no rewards.

Internment had at least taught him that “there is nothing worse than a vacillation between hope and despair.” Strength came from having one or the other—“possi-bly they are the same thing.” Kennan recorded these gloomy thoughts because “I feel that if I hold them constantly before me I shall be able to do my job with greater detachment, greater humor, less nervous wear-and-tear, and, paradoxically, greater enjoyment.”
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“I am neither happy nor unhappy,” he wrote Jeanette from Lisbon. He could never feel at home in a place, however beautiful, “where it never snows, where the hot summer is the dead dormant season, and where the grass gets green and the crops are put out in the fall. But I’m doing my job as best I can and—hell—it’s war.” Finances were again a problem: “We are broke, as usual.” Portuguese living costs were high, Grace’s school fees were a drain, and income from the corn crop had been slow to show up: “I hope the people in East Berlin won’t get too excited about our arrears.” Annelise was helping out by working in the legation press office. She found it “fun to get into a field which the Germans have had very much to themselves and see the results.” Nevertheless, she added, “[w]e almost turn handsprings to save 15 dollars a month.”

With the Anglo-American landings in North Africa on November 8, the war news was better. But Annelise’s family in Norway was having a hard winter, and early in 1943 she learned that her father had been arrested. “He will take it,” George told Jeanette, “just about the way our father would have, in similar circumstances.” It was, though, Annelise emphasized, a grave, even life-threatening situation, made all the more frustrating by the fact that there was nothing they could do to help. Meanwhile George’s job offered “no triumphs, no glory, no recognition—not even the satisfaction of physical hardship and combat. When the war is over, I won’t even want to talk about it.”
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There was one unexpected drama, though. On February 22, 1943, the Pan American Airways
Yankee Clipper
, a long-distance seaplane that set the standard for luxury transatlantic air travel at the time, crashed in the Tagus River as it was landing in Lisbon. Rushing to the scene, Kennan found, among the survivors, his Princeton classmate and fellow Foreign Service officer W. Walton Butterworth, who despite being in shock had managed to swim to shore with a briefcase of classified documents. George got him to a hotel and into a hot tub, filled him full of brandy, and pinned the papers on a clothesline to dry. The clothes, presumably, were left to dry on their own.
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Portugal, with Spain, had maintained an uneasy neutrality in the war. But whereas Generalissimo Francisco Franco had tilted his country toward the Axis, the Portuguese, honoring the spirit if not the letter of their ancient alliance with Great Britain, had inclined in the opposite direction. Politics and geography attracted intelligence services from all sides: Kennan estimated that eleven operated in Lisbon simultaneously, several of them employing double agents. “There were so many spies,” the British diplomat Frank Roberts recalled, “that they completely obliterated each other.” One of Kennan’s unannounced tasks was to try to straighten out at least some of the confusions.
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There were many. The Office of War Information was portraying the Portuguese prime minister, Dr. António Salazar, as a Franco-like fascist. The Board of Economic Warfare was withholding food and arms in an effort to discourage the Portuguese from providing wolfram and other strategic commodities to the Germans. The Office of Strategic Services was organizing a rebellion against Portuguese rule in the Azores. The British were stockpiling fuel there with a view to securing air and naval bases for the forthcoming invasion of Western Europe. Meanwhile Bert Fish, the amiable but placid American minister in Lisbon—Roosevelt appointed him as a favor to a Florida senator—had made no effort to reach any agreement with Salazar on overall Portuguese-American interests. “Ah ain’t goin’ down there and get mah backsides kicked around,” Kennan recalled him explaining. “He’s too smaht for me.”
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Sorting this out required that Kennan focus for the first time on grand strategy. What, exactly, did the United States want from Portugal? To what extent were its practices consistent with its priorities? Were those priorities consistent with one another? Did any single agency or official know everything that was going on, or care? How did all of this relate to winning the war, or to what would happen when peace returned? The problem was not just that of a right and left hand failing to communicate. The more appropriate analogy would have been a confused Hindu deity with multiple arms, each appendage busily at work on projects of which the others were unaware.

Kennan’s first approach was a traditional one: he studied the situation and, in February 1943, drafted a long analysis, sent under Fish’s name to the State Department, which specified, as the critical American interest, obtaining the Azores bases. It suggested letting the British negotiate the arrangements, justifying them under the Anglo-Portuguese treaty of 1373. Any other course, it warned, risked destabilizing the Salazar regime, perhaps even provoking German intervention. When the department did not respond, Kennan followed up with another dispatch pointing out that Salazar seemed inclined toward an alliance with the Western powers. This elicited no reply either, just “that peculiar and profound sort of silence which is made only by the noise of a diplomatic dispatch hitting the Department’s files.”
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