George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  They did not, but the State Department was sufficiently concerned that it sent one of its most trusted investigators, J. Klahr Huddle, to assess the situation. “It is difficult to express just what happened to the staff of the Moscow Embassy when Mr. Davies arrived,” Huddle reported back. One problem had been the difficulties of importing into the country all that the Davieses had wanted to bring. This included an entourage of sixteen aides, servants, and relatives, as well as a phalanx of freezers filled with the food they would consume while in residence at Spaso House. They demanded transportation on private trains—a concept unfamiliar to the Soviet railway authorities—together with Leningrad docking facilities for Mrs. Davies’s yacht, the Sea Cloud. The ambassador showed up at his Mokhovaya office only twice before returning to the United States in March, but he left behind three thousand envelopes to be stamped, sealed, and mailed: these contained fund-raising appeals for the Mount Vernon Girls School in Washington, of which Mrs. Davies was a trustee.

  A man of broad knowledge in many fields, Davies was reluctant to acknowledge, Huddle noted, “his lack in the present one.” Soon after arriving he asked Henderson to produce, on two days’ notice, briefings on all the other European states, specifying their leadership, population, culture, religion, economy, alliances, and the status of their relations with the U.S.S.R. He quickly developed a dislike for Kennan, Huddle reported, which was unfortunate, “because Kennan prides himself on his knowledge of Russia, is very sensitive, and does his best work with a little encouragement and praise.” Overall, Huddle concluded, the ambassador in his first two months at Moscow had “very seriously” imperiled the morale of the embassy staff, and “when I arrived, [it] was almost at the breaking point.”13

  George confirmed this to Jeanette: it would be some time before the effect wore off, and “I can take my profession seriously again. If I had had a little money, you would probably already have seen me trooping back to Wisconsin to start life over again.” Annelise added that the Davieses “are just awful.... I am trying to calm [George] down as best I can and just laugh it all off,” but “[i]t is worse than I ever could dream it to be.” The problem, Kennan later explained, was that men like Davies required underlings “to cover up their mistakes, to toss them meaningless baubles to keep them occupied, [and] to go on doing the important things under the surface.” By March, the staff could at least look forward to the temporary departure of the “Davies ménage,” at which point, Kennan predicted, “the sun will begin to shine, the flowers to peep through the ground, and the little birdies will arrive from the South and tell us what a nice world it is after all.”14

  The second of Stalin’s purges was going on that winter, which made the atmosphere all the more oppressive. “[E]verybody was so scared,” Annelise remembered. Davies gave a dinner for thirty-six people, of whom six were soon executed, “including the man who sat next to me.” The ambassador insisted on attending the trials, but before doing so asked Kennan to

  go through the testimony and make for me a brief topical abstract of all of the various crimes recited, giving the name of the perpetrator, [and a] description of the crime in general terms not to exceed a sentence for each; as, for instance, “Three mine explosions, by blank, blank, blank.” I should like to have that soon.

  He then brought a furious Kennan along to whisper translations of the proceedings: “During the intermissions I was sent, regularly, to fetch the ambassador his sandwiches, while he exchanged sententious judgments with the gentlemen of the press concerning the guilt of the victims.”

  Davies assured the State Department that the trial had established “a definite political conspiracy to overthrow the present Government.” He was careful to point out, though, that the trials had not been fair by American standards, because the accused had been denied counsel, were forced to testify against themselves, and their guilt had been assumed from the start. He also saw to it that the department got another perspective. Noting that “Mr. Kennan has been here a great many years and is an exceptionally able man, thoroughly familiar with Russia,” Davies took the unusual step of forwarding his interpreter’s assessment of the trials, along with his own.

  They were not that far apart. Kennan’s report emphasized the ease with which confessions could be coerced but acknowledged that the defendants had “probably done plenty, from the point of view of the regime, to warrant their humiliation and punishment.” What really happened might never be known: “[t]he Russian mind, as Dostoevski has shown, . . . sometimes carries both truth and falsehood to such infinite extremes that they eventually meet in space, like parallel lines, and it is no longer possible to distinguish between them.” In a significant acknowledgment of Kennan’s expertise, Robert Kelley, now the director of the Division of Eastern European Affairs, sent both reports to the secretary of state, Cordell Hull: they represented, he observed neutrally, “two points of view based on different methods of approach,” differing “only in degree” in their conclusions.15

  Embassy security was another of Kennan’s concerns. While the Davieses were back in the United States, Thayer discovered a crude listening device—lowered on a fishpole in the Spaso House attic—in the wall behind the ambassador’s desk. Intrigued, the staff tried to catch the culprit, a project that required the rigging of trip wires, alarm bells, and in one instance Kennan’s spending an uncomfortable night in the billiard room with a nonfunctioning flashlight and an empty revolver. The results, in the end, were inconclusive. Davies was “displeased that we had ever inaugurated them,” fearing that they would compromise his public image of popularity with the Soviet leadership. It hardly mattered, for the ambassador “was not in the habit of saying things of any consequence, either in the bugged study or anywhere else.”16

  “[Q]uite frankly I think that [Kennan] has been here quite long enough—perhaps too long for his own good,” Davies had by then written the State Department. “He is of a rather high-gear, nervous type” and had been ill “ever since I have been here.” Given his health along with the difficulties of raising a young family in Moscow, it would be good for all concerned if Kennan could be transferred to a post where living conditions were easier. The loss to the embassy would be serious, but it was “not fair to Kennan not to give him a chance to get well.”17

  Kennan, for his part, was ready to go: as his comments about the “psychology of old men” suggest, he had been ready even before the Davies “ménage” appeared on the scene. “This has been, for me, the most unhappy winter on record,” he wrote Jeanette at the end of March from Yalta, where he had taken a few days off to visit Chekhov’s last home. But winter was coming to an end, “and with it, I hope, will end my sojourn in Russia. Life has its ups as well as its down[s], and we’ll see what a new post, a new chief and new surroundings will bring.”18

  He was not displeased, therefore, when the State Department informed him in June that he would be reassigned to the American consulate in Jerusalem: “I sent to London for a bunch of books on the Palestine Mandate and prepared to forget, for a time, that Russia had ever existed.” But Kennan was horrified to learn, almost simultaneously, that the department had eliminated the Division of Eastern European Affairs, his administrative and intellectual home in Washington. Kelley, its chief, was as surprised as everyone else, and the library he had assembled was broken up—although not before Bohlen had rescued several hundred of its most valuable books and hidden them in an attic. “I was shocked,” Bullitt wrote R. Walton Moore, the State Department counselor. “[T]he division which Kelley built up was the most efficient in the world in its handling of these highly complicated questions.”19

  The official explanation was efficiency. Eastern European Affairs was to be merged, along with its Western European counterpart, into a single Division of European Affairs. Moore confirmed rumors, however, that the White House had ordered the change: someone had persuaded the president, perhaps unwisely. Just who was unclear. Kennan suggested long afterward that if there ever had been “the smel
l of Soviet influence” within the government, this moment was more plausible than any that Senator Joseph McCarthy’s followers had identified. There is no conclusive evidence for this allegation, but it is reasonable to assume, from the fact of Davies’s appointment, that Roosevelt wanted a new approach to Moscow. It’s certainly possible, then, that the new ambassador had at least some role in shaping this new arrangement.20

  However it happened, Kennan saw that Soviet-American relations were henceforth to have “the outward appearance of being cordial, no matter what gnashing of teeth might go on under the surface.... [N]ot only were we career officers in Moscow an impediment, but so was the Division of Eastern European Affairs.” The president, it appeared, knew nothing about, or cared nothing for, what they had accomplished. “We could never forgive F.D.R. that he had done this to us.” And so “I could only conclude that my approach to Russia had outlived its usefulness.”21

  III.

  “At first I thought it was awful,” Annelise wrote Jeanette of the Jerusalem assignment, but she soon changed her mind. At least the climate would be warmer, the roads would be better, and there would be the chance to study biblical history. George had even begun learning “the Yiddish language.” Kennan’s transformation into a Middle East expert was not to be, however, for on August 13, 1937, while on leave in Paris, he received an unexpected cable signed by the secretary of state himself: “Your work in Moscow has been so useful in character that Department is considering advisability of assigning you to the European Division to deal with Soviet affairs. While your personal preference may not be controlling, it would be gratifying to know before the assignment is actually made that it would be agreeable to you.”22

  Kennan’s superiors, former and current, had quietly arranged this. Bullitt had insisted, after learning that Eastern European Affairs was to be abolished, on the need to strengthen Soviet analysis in Washington: Davies “cannot be counted on to handle the Russian situation in a serious manner.” Henderson, from Moscow, strongly seconded the idea and suggested Kennan. It would be a waste to send him to Jerusalem: “George has developed a lot during the last two years.” Meanwhile Messersmith, Kennan’s chief during his Vienna recuperation, had conveniently become assistant secretary of state for administration and could oversee the change in plans. Finances would still be tight, and his rank would still be unimpressive, George wrote Jeanette, but “some of my best friends” had come out on top in the “palace revolution.” So he replied to Hull that an assignment in Washington would indeed be agreeable.23

  After a quick trip to the Riviera to see Kent, who was studying there, the Kennans picked up their children in Kristiansand, and by early October George was back in the city he had left, with bitter disillusionment, a decade earlier. His diary recorded a mixture of moods:

  October 17: Out to Mount Vernon. . . . Bracing cool air; cloudless sky; warm autumn sunshine. Shapeless, droopy people—stuffy from Sunday morning waffles and funny papers, tired from not walking—staggered out of shiny automobiles and dragged themselves around the grounds of the old mansion.... Grasshoppers flicked themselves around before us. An occasional late bird sang from the hard, many-colored foliage. The corn was stacked in the fields.... It was very nice and encouraging, but in the distance the roar of the Sunday traffic on the big turnpike was never lost, and it was never clearer that man is a skin-disease of the earth.

  October 24: Lunch [with Annelise, at the Raleigh Hotel]. The dance band wore flowers in their button-holes, and dark suits. Most of them ground out their stuff sleepily and mechanically. Only the piano player, the leader, spun delicate webs of improvisation around the melodies, in a nonchalant, dreamy manner, looking restlessly around at the guests as he played, and only occasionally giving a glance to his instrument or a gesture of command to his men.

  October 25: A day of despair, in the middle of such a horribly senseless city, and of wondering whether there were not still—somewhere in America—a place where a gravel lane, wet from the rains, led up a hill, between the yellow trees and past occasional vistas of a valley full of quiet farms and woodlands, to a house where candles and a warm hearth defied the early darkness and dampness of autumn and where human warmth and simplicity and graciousness defied the encroachments of a diseased world and of people drugged and debilitated by automobiles and advertisements and radios and moving pictures.

  Washington reeked of cigar smoke and automobile exhaust, rang with shrill voices and the slapping of backs, and it seemed that “[n]obody stayed there very long.”24 Still, there were compensations.

  Despite their limited budget, the Kennans managed to rent a comfortable eighteenth-century house in Alexandria: largely unfurnished except for its own roaches, it was a step up, nonetheless, from the Mokhovaya. Thayer’s wealthy relatives gave George and Annelise a “horsey” fall weekend outside Philadelphia, and they even attended a Christmas reception at the White House: “Very dull, of course,” Annelise reported, “but it was fun to see the place, its occupants and the other guests.” It had been, George acknowledged, a happy time.

  We are getting used to the feeling of not having any pocket cash and even the general condition of bankruptcy failed to detract from the Christmas spirit.... We spent the last farthings on a grand big tree and things for the kids’ stockings, a vase of flowers and a bottle of New York State claret, charged a turkey and a plum pudding at the corner grocer’s, and had a real celebration.

  Two months later George got a promotion that raised his salary to $5,000. This was not much, he explained, but “[o]nly one man who entered the service when I did has gotten as high, so there’s a certain amount of satisfaction involved.”25

  George had arrived in time to help Bohlen, who would replace him in Moscow, retrieve the hidden books from Kelley’s library and place them in the State Department office he would now occupy. It was, in effect, the “Russia desk” in the newly constituted Division of European Affairs, and Kennan was the resident specialist on that country. Relishing the old building’s “solid cool corridors, its unruffled placidity, . . . its distinct distaste for anything which smacks of exaggeration, haste, or excitement,” Kennan used his position to try to balance Davies’s reports—still misleadingly optimistic, he thought—on what the life in the Soviet Union was really like.

  The authorities, he emphasized, had restricted the activities of foreign diplomats, with the expectation that, “like well-trained children,” they should be “seen and not heard.” Officials once friendly to the embassy had disappeared in circumstances suggesting “exile, imprisonment, or disgrace, if not execution.” Soviet citizens entering the United States should be watched with a view to determining “where they were and what they were doing.” Kennan tried to explain to a puzzled Secretary of State Hull—it was the only meeting they ever had—why Russian communists were arresting American communists who happened to be in the Soviet Union. He prepared a brief report on Comintern activities, spent a fair amount of time on Soviet-American trade, and devoted very little to explaining why the moment was not right to seek Moscow’s cooperation in demarcating the Alaskan boundary in the Bering Sea.26

  The spring of 1938 brought Kennan two professional recognitions, only one of which he knew about. The latter was an invitation to lecture at the Foreign Service School, where he had been a student twelve years before. He spoke on “Russia,” quoting Neill Brown’s dispatches from the 1850s to show how little had changed since tsarist times. He found it “almost impossible to conceive of our being Russia’s enemy,” but “I cannot see that the possibility of our being Russia’s ally is much greater.” The United States must simply show patience: in a close paraphrase of Bullitt’s 1936 “swan song,” Kennan insisted that “[w]e must neither expect too much nor despair of getting anything at all.”27

  The recognition of which Kennan was unaware came by way of espionage. On April 22 he drafted an internal memorandum, not meant for circulation beyond the State Department, questioning Davies’s optimism about the future
of Soviet-American relations. “According to the theories on which the Soviet state is founded,” Kennan pointed out, “the entire outside world is hostile and no foreigner should ever be trusted.” Davies’s dispatch found its way into the official compilation of documents on U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union for this period, published in 1952. Kennan’s commentary did not. But thanks to the enterprise of Aleksandr Troyanovsky, the Soviet ambassador in Washington, both documents wound up, in the summer of 1938, on the desk of Josef Stalin.

  Troyanovsky had got them “by conspiratorial means,” he explained, and “absolutely no one” in the Washington embassy or at the Soviet Foreign Ministry knew that he had done so. Davies, “a typical bourgeois,” had both positive and negative things to say about the Soviet Union, but he had to contend with hostility in the State Department, led chiefly by Kennan. He “speaks Russian well and is a nephew [sic] of the celebrated George Kennan, who in the 1880s [sic] wrote the well-known book, ‘Siberia and Hard Labor,’ which we all read at one time or another.” Kennan’s attacks on Davies showed that he was “trying to turn Roosevelt personally against us,” but despite these efforts the president and Secretary of State Hull “have not lost their equilibrium and in general take a comparatively acceptable position toward us.”28

  The security breach would have appalled Kennan, had he known of it, but the notoriety might have pleased him: Stalin personally underlined the most significant sections of Troyanovsky’s report. Kennan could not have disputed the Soviet ambassador’s assessment of his intentions, or his lack of success, for the moment, in seeing them realized. Stalin, no doubt, filed the information in his capacious memory, for future use.