George F. Kennan: An American Life (9 page)

On the day Swiss newspapers announced the impending execution of Sacco and Vanzetti, the wife of the consulate concierge intercepted Kennan, quivering with rage, expecting him, apparently, to cable the president immediately to demand their release. Acknowledging it as a “
mauvaise
affair,” Kennan slunk shamefacedly out of the building, “but I couldn’t help feeling that there was something glorious in the fact that that poor little dried-up woman, who putters around all day in the dirty basement of a Geneva office building, should . . . want to assault a vice-consul because she considered that somewhere, thousands of miles away, human beings were going to be cruel and unjust to two of their fellows.”
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Kennan’s Geneva assignment was temporary—he was, in effect, summer help while the arms control conference was under way—and at the end of August he reported for duty at the U.S. consulate in Hamburg, where the State Department had originally intended to send him. It was one of those places that quietly spread tentacles of both beauty and evil. There was a melancholy loveliness in its boulevards and a thrilling strength in the machinery of its harbor. But there were also “dismal, sooty streets” that looked like West Pittsburgh or South Milwaukee, and “unutterable horror [in] the lurid, repulsive alleys of St. Pauli,” from which American seamen too frequently found their way to the consulate to “inflict their lives on mine.”
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These juxtapositions left Kennan attuned “to all the struggle and tragedy and discord of the world as well as to all its harmony.” An expatriate wedding caused him to conclude gloomily that “we are all expatriates” from another, more kindly world, “the memories of which fade from us with our childhood.” But other days found him enjoying the beer halls, relishing the harbor lights as darkness set in, or sleeping until nearly noon on a clear, brisk autumn Sunday. An evening at the theater had him wanting “to lay my head on the expansive shoulder of the fat lady ahead of me and heave vast blubbers. Only the sense of my consular dignity . . . restrained me.” On another evening he marveled at the exquisite taste and incredible technique of a young pianist named Horowitz, said to be near death from tuberculosis, whose “nervous spidery fingers trembled on the keys,” while his “whole body [vibrated] tensely to every note of the music.”
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As did Kennan himself, it seemed, to whatever he happened upon. A walk to the post office on the tenth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution caught him up in a communist demonstration: thousands of people marching with red flags in the rain behind sickly fifes and drums, singing the “Internationale,” listening to speeches from soapboxes, protesting the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti. Fully aware of communism’s “falseness and hatefulness,” he nonetheless felt “a strange desire to cry.” The experience hinted at “the real truth upon which the little group of spiteful Jewish parasites in Moscow feeds—. . . that these stupid, ignorant, unpleasant people were after all human beings—that they were, after centuries of mute despair, for the first time attempting to express and to assert themselves.”
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Meanwhile, the European political scene was a world of its own, which most people knew nothing about. One minister could denounce another, provoking counterdenunciations, but underneath this “prattling of bitter little men,” the great forces of nations and classes made their own unaffected way. And so, at the great fall fair in front of the cathedral, “[m] en yell . . . wheels revolve . . . lights blink . . . whistles blow . . . people laugh . . . people eat . . . human life flows along in all its variety and in all its monotony . . . and behind it all . . . the gods themselves dance on, in high indifference!”
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Kennan wrote in his memoirs that the Foreign Service had steadied “a young man by no means ready yet for complete personal independence.” Maybe later, but not at this point. Six months abroad had left him with increasingly unsettling mood swings, and by November he was close to the breaking point. While at a charity dance on a new passenger liner in the harbor one afternoon, Kennan saw a tramp freighter glide past and felt a sudden urge to exchange his cutaway for a sailor’s dungarees. He would sail

But then the orchestra struck up, he drank some more champagne and found someone to dance with. “Perhaps it was just as well.” Ten days later George F. Kennan sat down and, in the formal language he had been trained to use, addressed a letter to the secretary of state. “Sir,” it read, “I have the honor to submit herewith my resignation from the Foreign Service of the United States.”
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“Mr. Kennan gives no reasons for the tender of his resignation,” a puzzled State Department official noted, although he did record that William Dawson, who had taught George at the Foreign Service School, thought health might be the explanation. An efficiency report from Geneva had described the new vice-consul as physically “rather delicate.” After pondering the matter, the Office of Foreign Personnel offered a compromise: sixty days of leave in the United States, with the opportunity for “consultation” before making the resignation final. “Don’t be a damn fool, George,” Dawson admonished him. “Take [the leave], and then resign.” Kennan agreed and left Hamburg in mid-January 1928. Spurning the comfort of a passenger liner, he signed on as a supercargo on an American tanker, enjoyed a stormy four-week passage to Norfolk, and suffered the embarrassment, upon arrival, of having a suitcase stolen containing his copy of the
United States Consular Regulations
. The volume, he tried to assure his superiors, would probably be of no value to the thief.
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Kennan had in fact cited “urgent and unalterable personal reasons” in his resignation letter, but he had not elaborated on them. His memoirs say only that living in Geneva and Hamburg convinced him, given his “spotty” education so far, of the need for postgraduate study.
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There was, however, a more pressing priority: George had fallen in love and was engaged to be married.

She was Eleanor Van Someren Hard, the daughter of William and Anne Hard, Washington journalists and pioneering radio commentators. They lived in one of the Georgetown houses where students from the Foreign Service School were invited to parties, and that is probably where George met Eleanor. “She was not inhibited at all,” he remembered. “Come and meet these people,” she would insist. “This was very good for me.” The family appeared to be unconventional: Mr. Hard had been thought, during the war, to be a radical; Mrs. Hard favored women’s emancipation; Eleanor “wrote poetry and patronized queer people.” But at a deeper level, they were conservative individualists: their proximity to the opposite camp had hardened their allegiance. They struck George as thoroughly American, “accepting material prosperity as the just due of a spotless conscience.” He was enthralled, began dating Eleanor, and “either I fancied myself in love or I thought I ought to [be].” There was no physical intimacy: “This was innocent, according to the ways of those times.” But before leaving for Geneva, “I did bring myself to ask her to marry me, and she said she would.”
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Eleanor confirmed, decades later, what George remembered. Despite having “the Charleston as our lamamba, the hip pocket flask as our pot,” they were to the right of most young people even then: “How close to the Edwardians we were!” Flappers flourished, but under “our minimal dresses beat hearts not too far from Little Women.” George was serious and self-disciplined, she was easily distracted and dependent on fun. Both were bright, but “we had absolutely nothing else in common.” Eleanor’s mother disapproved, convinced that George “would never amount to anything.” And so when he arrived back in the United States, he found that he would not be marrying Eleanor after all. “Very late in life,” she recalled, “my mother asked me if she had made a mistake—she was utterly surprised by George’s success. I could assure her that we would have been totally incompatible.”
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“I went through the usual melodramatics of a person of that age when such things happen,” a much older George acknowledged, “but it lasted about three days. I was over it at once. I don’t blame her at all.... I don’t know what the hell I was doing, to tell the truth.” Jeanette, however, saw that the effects had been substantial. One reason was the engagement ring, which had belonged to their mother and was never returned: “That was quite a blow to him.”
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And although George himself did not record—or if he did, failed to preserve—anything about the engagement in his diary, he did write Jeanette a long letter about it after he returned to Europe. “[T]hese last few months,” he began, “have witnessed far greater and more important experiences in the life of G. F. Kennan than have been described in his letters to his parents. Since I saw you last I have finally passed the big turning-point, and I feel, for the first time in my life, that I have just about found my place in the world.”

There were, as he saw it, “two vitally contrasting ways of life.” One was as lived in most of Milwaukee, almost all of Princeton and the Republican Party, and certainly the drawing rooms of northwest Washington. “There were splendid girls, in this America.” Falling in love with and marrying one of them could be the greatest experience of life: one built one’s home in the rock of the country. “Oh Netty, don’t think that I didn’t feel the force of all this.” So “when Eleanor took me in hand, . . . it was no wonder that it struck deep.” George realized, for the first time, “that I could beat the people I had always envied at their own game. I saw that I could become both respected and powerful—that I, too, might someday make the very pillars of the State Department tremble.”

But “I would never have been happy in the life I so nearly entered. I am too much of an extremist, and there are other factors in connection with an unfortunate youthful environment which would have marred the picture.” George did not explain what those were; however, there was no choice but embrace fully the other way of life. That would involve, bleakly, “the renunciation of all individualistic hopes,” even if some might be realized accidentally:

George would stick with the Foreign Service for a few more years, but it would have to realize “that I am a queer duck, and that it can’t demand too much.” During working hours, “I belong to it body and soul.... But when the last visa applicant has left, and the accounts are done, and the door of the Consulate closes behind me, I am George Kennan, and if the government doesn’t like it, it can whistle long and loud.”

As to alternatives, only time would tell. George sensed potentialities, among them “a moderate talent for words,” but he would need to have something to say and hoped that he might one day. In the meantime, he must select from currents of life those that seemed to be flowing in the right direction and align himself with them, “faulty and imperfectible as I may be.” “Poor Netty,” he concluded, “you draw all the melodramatic letters, because you are the only person before whom I may safely act melodramatic. As long as you and I both live you will probably continue to be the butt of epistulary [
sic
] histrionics.”
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Histrionics there certainly were. “For on this night,” Kennan wrote portentously in his diary on March 26, 1928, “I make my last reluctant obeisance to the obscure gods of Washington—to the cool, derisive deities, who have taken without compensation the two best years of my life.” He would miss “the hurdy-gurdy man in Church Street, on hot summer evenings, ... grey and white buses streaming along Sixteenth Street, in the shadows of the shuttered Russian Embassy . . . charity balls in the Willard Hotel . . . where the softness of the atmosphere and the subdued lilt of the music contrasted so cruelly with the cheapness and vulgarity of the guests . . . shady streets in Georgetown, where the old brick houses sung [
sic
] to themselves the songs of a still, deep past . . . [and the] cool, dark corridors in the State Department.” But now the train had begun to move, and the Capitol dome loomed above the lights of the switchyard, then faded from view: “These and a thousand other memories return now to taunt me for the homage I have done them. They sear like fire, for in every one of them lies the glow of failure!”
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It’s hard to know, reading passages like this one, whether George was using his diary to substitute for not having anyone close at hand in whom to confide, or whether he was simply practicing to become a writer: a few passages show critical appraisals from a Princeton friend to whom George showed them.
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What’s clear is that he was not leaving Washington having failed professionally. Instead the Foreign Service had gone out of its way to show that it wanted to keep him on.

Dawson played the critical role. The State Department, he pointed out, would finance three years of graduate study at a European university if Kennan would seek proficiency in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, or Russian. Despite the absence of formal diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Kennan chose Russian, supposing that there would someday again be official Americans there. “But I also had a mind to the family tradition established by the elder George Kennan.” And so on March 29, three days after his despairing farewell to Washington, the younger George was accepted into a new Foreign Service program for “language assignments” in “Eastern Europe.”
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