George F. Kennan: An American Life (3 page)

“It was a very straight-laced family,” the younger Kent remembered. “No movies or card-playing on Sunday, never a swear word. For example, ‘darn’ was considered too strong to use, and ‘damn’ was completely out. Once when I was taking French in high school I said ‘Mon Dieu’ and my father scolded me for it.” Jeanette was even reprimanded for discussing the birth of puppies at the dinner table. The children were brought up in the Presbyterian Church, and their father made a point of reading the Bible all the way through several times. The girls learned to play the piano, but only for the purpose of accompanying hymns on Sunday evening.

Even here George was left out, for although his half-brother was also taught piano at an early age, that instrument was not thought appropriate for George, who proceeded to learn it on his own. He was, to his disgust, dispatched to dancing school, an indignity to which he responded with “sullen rages and sit-down strikes.” Musical talent was there, though, and it showed up at unexpected moments, as during the summer task of picking strawberries with Jeanette. “George would harmonize with me, knowing what I was going to sing, because it was so obvious. But it wouldn’t have been obvious to anybody who didn’t have a great deal of music in him.”
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The Kennans were also literary. His father had collected a large library, from which George read extensively: “I had nothing else to do.” Writing and speaking were also important, Kent junior remembered: “When I would write letters home, I would sometimes get misspellings corrected in the letters I received back.” Jeanette recalled “the speech in our house [as] very, very correct.” While still little, she and George would have supper together at five o’clock, and “we carried on some wonderful conversations. We liked big words, and so when we’d find a new big word, we’d use it.” One was “reputation.” They weren’t sure what it meant, “but we brought it into every sentence, while we ate our cream of wheat with maple sugar on it.”
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Still, something was missing in family life on Cambridge Avenue. When the children were older and allowed at the dinner table, George and his siblings would flee at the first opportunity, preferring the company of books to that of grown-ups. “It’s unusual for a family, I think, to disperse like that,” Jeanette pointed out. “But we just never played games together, or sat around. I don’t recall any real merriment when we were just ourselves.” George recalled “daydreams so intense and satisfying that hours could pass in oblivion of immediate surroundings.” His intensity became a family legend when an aunt, traveling with the brooding boy, felt obliged to tell him: “Stop thinking for a little while!”
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Jeanette would later reflect on how little home life George had. He lost his mother without ever getting to know her. He loved Cousin Grace but lost her too. He gained a stepmother, but never regarded her as a real mother. His father, George himself later admitted, “was so much older, and I still remained so shy that I seldom really talked with him.” How much did all of this matter? “I sometimes wondered,” George recalled in his old age, “whether all the grown-ups were not really deceiving me, and whether one day they would not come out and say: ‘You little goose. Did you really think that we cared anything about you?’ ”
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They never did, of course. Many children fear rejection, most of the time it doesn’t happen, and it certainly did not to young George. Despite the losses with which he grew up, he was hardly bereft of adults who cared. Milwaukee and its environs were full of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends to whom the Kennan children could look for sympathy and support. “Everybody felt so sorry for [us],” Jeanette recalled, that at Christmas “we were showered with things.”
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And next door there were even surrogate parents.

Edward and Ida Frost were wealthy and well educated, owned a large house at 945 Cambridge Avenue, and lacked children of their own. The middle name Florence had picked for her son reflected the Frosts’ friendship: he was George Frost Kennan. After her death, Constance remembered, “they had us over there and would read aloud to us. They were just second parents to us, always.” “They were so close to our family,” George added, “that we called them Uncle Edward and Aunt Ida.” No fence separated the two houses, so the Kennan children always had a large yard available for baseball games and other activities. The Frosts even installed a special telephone line so that the families could keep track of one another. They remained, in young Kent’s memory, “very strong, charming people, more outgoing and convivial than either my father or my mother.”
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So too was Florence’s family, the Jameses, with whom George spent a great deal of time. “They were
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elite, which the Kennans weren’t,” Jeanette observed. Their wealth came from the insurance business: Florence’s father and brother both served as presidents of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. “They were not at all like my father’s family,” George commented. “They had none of the intellectual ability that my father obviously had. They were tough, handsome, but not intellectual.”
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There was uneasiness between the Kennans and the Jameses. George’s father made a point of recording, long after Florence’s death, that her mother had not looked favorably on his attentions toward her daughter and had even sent Florence off to Europe in an unsuccessful effort to head off the marriage. The Jameses “set great store by charm,” Frances explained. “I don’t think Papa fulfilled it.” And then there was the matter of finances. “Kent Kennan is a very good lawyer,” Florence’s brother Alfred was said to have observed, but “[he] is a very poor businessman.”
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The Jameses paid for the house on Cambridge Avenue into which Florence and Kent moved after their marriage, and Florence’s bequest to her children included a second house in the James family compound on Lake Nagawicka, some thirty miles west of Milwaukee. It was, George remembered, “where the doors and windows of life were opened.” The Kennan and James children spent joyous summers there, swimming, boating, fishing, riding ponies, playing in haystacks, staging amateur theatricals, watching fireworks go off over the lake on the Fourth of July. Short nights provided other impressions: the wind rippling the trees, the waves lapping gently against the shore, the hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, the droning of insects—and then off in the distance, growing nearer, then fading away, the rumble, rush, and lonely whistle of the great trains on the mainline of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, just north of the lake, hurtling through the darkness, on the way to crossing a continent.
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The trains at Nagawicka were not the only connection to a wider world. Just a short walk from Cambridge Avenue were McKinley and Juneau parks, which looked out over Lake Michigan. For a boy who loved boats, the oceans that lay beyond were not difficult to imagine. Lake steamers lined the docks along the Milwaukee River, even as bicycles, electric streetcars, and automobiles were crowding horses off the streets. Milwaukee had about 300,000 inhabitants at the time of George’s birth, three to four times the number when his father had settled there in 1875. A large percentage were recent immigrants: there were German, Irish, Scandinavian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Russian Jewish neighborhoods. Foreign languages were spoken and read throughout the city. It even had a Social Democratic Party that, drawing heavily on the immigrant vote, elected a socialist mayor in 1910, the first in the United States.
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Nor was there anything provincial about George’s family. The Jameses traveled widely, were knowledgeable about art, and supported it locally. George’s aunt on his father’s side had married a Frankfurt German, Paul Mausolff, who impressed his nephew with his goatee, his pince-nez, and his knowledge of languages. And George’s father’s first name honored Louis Kossuth, the failed Hungarian revolutionary who had been touring the United States at the time of Kent’s birth in 1851. Kent knew Europe well, having spent two years there during the early 1880s recruiting immigrants for the Wisconsin Central Railroad, and spoke German, French, and Danish. He had then worked as a mining engineer in the western United States and in central Mexico. Appointed tax commissioner for the state of Wisconsin in 1897, Kossuth Kent Kennan made himself an internationally recognized expert on income tax law and in 1910 published a widely circulated book on that subject. Two years later he took his family back to Europe, where he studied the German tax system while his children learned the language.
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And then there was the other George Kennan, who had no middle name but whose life in many other ways prefigured that of George Frost Kennan. Born in Norwalk, Ohio, in 1845, fifty-nine years to the day before his namesake, this Kennan was a cousin of George’s grandfather, Thomas Lathrop Kennan. His first trip abroad had come in 1865, when he accompanied the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition to Siberia in a spectacular but unsuccessful effort to link Europe with North America via Alaska and the Bering Strait—the effort fell through when the Atlantic cable began operating the following year. Subsequent journeys to Russia followed, and by the 1890s the first George Kennan had become the most prominent American expert on that country.

Through his books, articles, and speaking tours, this Kennan did more than anyone else to shape the image of Siberia—and to a considerable extent that of tsarist Russia itself—as a prison of peoples. He delivered more than eight hundred lectures on the regime’s persecution of Jews and dissidents between 1889 and 1898, reaching roughly a million people. When the Russo-Japanese War began in 1904, six days before George Frost Kennan’s birth, President Theodore Roosevelt turned to the elder Kennan as one of his chief Russian advisers.
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Four decades later the younger Kennan held hopes—mostly unfulfilled—that another Roosevelt would similarly listen to him.

The parallels, George Frost Kennan reflected in his memoirs, went well beyond sharing the same name and being born on the same day:

With no mother and a distant father, it was only natural for young George to identify with this famous relative, who had no surviving children of his own. “He used to send me, on each of our common birthdays, something—one of his books on a couple of occasions—which he signed for me.”
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“[Y]ou have a son who bears my name,” George Kennan wrote to Kossuth Kent Kennan in December 1912. “It would be a great satisfaction to me if I could feel that certain things which have personal or historical interest and which have been closely associated with my work could be transferred to him when he becomes old enough to understand them and take an interest in them.” Kent’s son was “still very young, and I don’t know him at all, but I have confidence in his parentage, and in the training that you and your wife will give him. . . . If I live to be as old as your father, I may see your boy grown to manhood, but life is more or less uncertain after 65.”
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Even here, though, there was rejection. George Frost Kennan met George Kennan only once, shortly after this letter was written, when Kent took his son for a visit. Young George interested the old man, but his wife Lena resented the boy’s sharing her husband’s name, as well as that of their only son, who had died at birth. “She didn’t like my coming. She thought that this was another branch of the family trying to horn in on his fame.” Years later George learned that Mrs. Kennan had taken his thank-you note as an indication of inadequacy: “ ‘Any boy who writes such a stupid letter, nothing’s ever going to come of him. We should never see him again.’ And indeed they didn’t. So he never knew that I was going into Russian studies.”
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“How sad it was,” Jeanette would later reflect, “because George Kennan died in 1924, and George would have been twenty, so that he would have been old enough to have been interesting.” It’s not clear that the rejection affected George much at the time, although he would surely have been aware of it. As he grew older, though, and as his own career in Russian studies began to develop, identification with his famous but inaccessible relative became unavoidable. Despite the memory of his own father, “whose son I recognize myself very much to be, I feel that I was in some strange way destined to carry forward as best I could the work of my distinguished and respected namesake. What I have tried to do in life is, I suspect, just the sort of thing the latter would have liked for a son of his to try to do, had he had one. Whether he would have approved of the manner in which I have done it, I cannot say.”
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Some solace came, therefore, from these extensions of George’s immediate family across space: from the Frosts next door and the Jameses at the lake to another George Kennan and the wider world he inhabited. As the young George grew old enough to place his family in time—to understand that he had ancestors he would never know—their legacies provided a kind of refuge. “I wonder whether you will ever feel that panic[k]y urge to run for help,” George wrote his daughters while interned in Nazi Germany in 1942, to “dim, gnarled, pioneer forefathers. They would have received us unceremoniously, made us work from morning to night, ascribed all our sorrows to dyspepsia, and driven us to distraction. But they would never have disowned us or thrown us out.”
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