George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  “I think it’s so extraordinary,” Chip Bohlen later recalled. “He really sees things in a somber light, particularly as far as the United States is concerned.” And yet “I don’t mean for one minute the slightest suggestion that he wasn’t a patriotic government servant. Indeed he was.” Kennan viewed himself as so American that he had trouble distinguishing his own character from that of his country: he had always found it difficult, Bohlen remembered, to “divorce his visceral feelings from his knowledge of facts.”40 Because he was by nature a pessimist, he took a pessimistic view of the United States. Whatever inward glow he may have felt appeared rarely in what he wrote, but the winces—and worse—were always there. Faith in America left him doubting democracy: an American-bred authoritarianism, hence, was the only alternative.

  Wisconsin was an exception. Despite the loneliness of its highways and the bleakness of its small-town life, it was, Kennan believed, a “compact commonwealth” with an admirable balance between industry and agriculture, a sturdy population, and a tradition of humaneness and good nature. Could it not become, like some of the small neutral countries of Europe, a refuge for decency and common sense? But this too was personalizing the country: Wisconsin was home and therefore his own refuge. It was a place where he could “conceivably be content,” confident that he was doing something worthwhile. Salvation lay in smallness, whether of government, avocation, or aspiration.

  The time for that, however, had not yet come. Kennan was “much too broke and in debt” to contemplate retirement from the Foreign Service. Moreover, Europe was heating up, what with Hitler’s annexation of Austria in March and his demands for Czechoslovakia’s German-speaking Sudetenland: “I did not want to miss the climax.” So Kennan made his plea to his friends in the State Department, and they responded, in August, with instructions to depart as soon as possible for Prague.41 It would be, also, a “compact commonwealth,” but one surrounded, unlike Wisconsin, by Nazi German authoritarianism.

  SEVEN

  Czechoslovakia and Germany: 1938–1941

  “ALL IN ALL, I THINK IT IS AN EXCELLENT SOLUTION,” KENNAN wrote Bullitt in August 1938. The assignment to Prague was “eminently satisfactory.” He would be the only secretary in the American legation. He knew German, “and I find that I can read Bohemian with little difficulty, after the effort I’ve put in on Russian.” His time in Vienna had given him an interest in Central Europe. The only disappointment was that “I cannot have another chance to work with you.”1

  The timing could hardly have been better—or worse. On September 12 Hitler threatened military action against Czechoslovakia if it did not give up the Sudetenland. The resulting war scare led British prime minister Neville Chamberlain, on the fourteenth, to request a meeting: it took place the following day at Berch-tesgaden, the dictator’s mountain retreat. That same day The Washington Post ran a photograph of George and Annelise with Grace and Joan, aged six and two, under the headline “Alexandrian and Family Headed for Danger Zone.” The editorial cartoon that day showed a skeletal finger turning the clock back from 1938 to 1914. The Kennans sailed from New York aboard the SS Washington on September 21, only to run into the great hurricane that would, when it hit Long Island and New England later that evening, kill some seven hundred people. “It was a fitting and ominous beginning,” George recalled, “to the coming tour of duty in Europe.”2

  The ship’s radio allowed its passengers to follow the developing crisis, but only sketchily. They did get the news that Chamberlain had met Hitler again at Bad Godesberg on the twenty-second, that Hitler had rejected the compromise Chamberlain proposed there, and that war was rumored to be only days away. Alarmed, the State Department advised George by radiogram that “[y]our family should not proceed to Prague at this time.” They landed at Le Havre on the twenty-eighth, where they learned that Hitler and Chamberlain would hold a third meeting at Munich the next day with the Italian prime minister, Benito Mussolini, and the French premier, Édouard Daladier. With no way to know whether to expect war or peace, the disembarkation took place in “almost complete pandemonium.” “For me,” George remembered, “the war really began on that day.”3

  Despite the confusion, he managed to telephone the American embassy in Paris, which told him to bring himself and his family there. They arrived by train that evening, driving to the hotel through blacked-out streets, to find an airplane ticket to Prague for George only—the family would go to Norway.

  I got up alone the next morning in the darkness, and kissed my children good-by as they lay asleep in their beds.... [F]or the first time there was brought home to me a tiny part of that vast human misery summed up under the term of war-time separations. During the next four years, I was destined to see my children only on rare and brief occasions; and it was a loss which no victories, no reparations, no acquisitions of power could ever make good.

  Kennan’s plane, the last one for weeks from Paris to Prague, departed shortly before the one that would fly Daladier to Munich. Bombers were visible on German airfields, ready to take off. Czechoslovakia looked more peaceful, “[b]ut there were hundreds of thousands of men, down there, poised to shoot at each other, or not to shoot, depending on the outcome of the events of the day.”4

  The silence in Prague, when Kennan arrived, was unsettling for someone so recently in New York. It seemed implausible “that this quiet spot, where the swallows wheeled in the sunshine over roofs of Spanish tile and the sound of church-bells drifted down the hillsides, [could be] the center of world attention, and might within twenty-four hours be laid waste by German bombers.” But the city was packed with people snapping up newspapers, while correspondents clustered around radios in the hotels, waiting for word from Munich. As rumors of the settlement began to come in, “horror and bitterness” swept the city. Kennan had to be careful, walking through the darkened streets, not to speak English loud enough to be overheard. The next day the Czechs listened to the official announcement “with all the excruciating sadness of a small people” who had tried to preserve their independence, “only to be cheated at last of the fruits of their efforts.” They faced a future over which they had no control, seeking solace where they could while “the hand of misfortune—ponderous and relentless—smashed one after another of their most cherished creations.”5

  I.

  “Prague is wonderfully beautiful,” George wrote Frieda Por in mid-October, “but it is a sad time that I have experienced here.” With the Germans occupying Czech territory to the north, west, and south, the city was almost completely cut off. It had, hence, a museumlike atmosphere.

  The old streets, relieved of motor vehicles by an obliging army, had recovered something of their pristine quiet and composure. Baroque towers—themselves unreal and ethereal—floated peacefully against skies in which the bright blue of autumn made way frequently for isolated, drifting clouds.... And the little groups of passers-by still assembled hourly in the market place, as they had for centuries, to watch the saints make their appointed rounds in the clock on the wall of the town hall.

  But the world had bid farewell, it seemed, to the civility these monuments represented: this was a new and more brutal age. In the church near the City Hall, a priest instructed his congregation on how they should respond to the Munich betrayal. “Let them turn their faces from it. Let them abandon all hope of the virtue of the human race and seek their solace in a just, unbending, and stern God.” Meanwhile, on the square outside, “[f]at Jews sat gloomily over their coffee cups and German papers.”6

  George’s legation duties were light. “The work—after all the headaches of Moscow and the Department’s Russian desk—seems like child’s play,” he wrote Cousin Grace. The minister, Wilbur J. Carr, was “as nice and kind as he can be.” But there were, as always, irritating Americans to deal with. One was “an attractive young lady,” indignantly tossing “a most magnificent head of golden hair,” who demanded to know what the legation staff of eight proposed to do about the thousands of refugees fro
m the Sudetenland who would be descending on Prague in the next few days. “We relegated her . . . to the category of ignorant, impractical do-gooders, and were relieved to get her out of the office.” She turned out to be the journalist Martha Gellhorn, later a close friend, and George realized in retrospect that both had lessons they could have taught each other.

  Even more exasperating was “young Kennedy” whose father, the American ambassador in London and another of Roosevelt’s political appointees, had sent him on a “fact-finding” mission. The kid was “obviously an upstart and an ignoramus,” so with the “polite but weary punctiliousness that characterizes diplomatic officials required to busy themselves with pesky compatriots,” Kennan got him to Prague through German lines and back out again. It was a shock when the memory suddenly returned while Kennan was ambassador to Yugoslavia in the early 1960s, the kid having appointed him to that position. “By just such blows, usually much too late . . . , is the ego gradually cut down to size.”7

  Kennan was living, for the moment, in a flat presided over by an unpleasant German woman “whose stupidity is counter-balanced by a most amazing meticulousness and efficiency.” She had fixed his few clothes “as they have never been fixed in their lives. Yesterday she even discovered that I had a book with uncut pages and spent half an hour indignantly setting that matter to right.” With no car, he was hiking regularly in the countryside, sometimes fifteen or twenty miles a day, although he had to stop doing so in an improbable Abercrombie and Fitch outfit—a red mackinaw coat with matching breeches—because it made him look German: peasants muttered angrily whenever they saw him. Like the resentment of city-dwellers on hearing English, these were small, if misdirected, signs of defiance. 8

  Meanwhile the German army—“those gray-clad figures which were to become so familiar to all of Europe during the coming three years”—was ominously near. Traveling north through the Sudetenland at the end of October, Kennan found the officers he met receiving long lines of Czech, German, and Jewish refugees with equal courtesy. It was the first of many occasions on which he would wonder about “the strange qualities of that vast organization . . . , which has so stern a conscience for the correctness of its own behavior toward those who have submitted to its authority, and then—once its military work has been done—turns over its helpless charges without a quiver to the mercies of the National Socialist Party and the Gestapo.” Already “Jews not wanted” signs were showing up in shabby Sudetenland hotels, but a young German soldier with whom Kennan shared a train compartment was “filled with childish confidence that a better life had come for all concerned in that unhappy district.”9

  George was making that trip to meet Annelise, who was driving their American car south—it had, with the family, crossed the ocean on the SS Washington and then taken refuge in Norway. The plan had been to rendezvous at the Hotel Flensburger Hof on the German-Danish border, but the police had taken it over, so George went on into Denmark, stationing himself on the outskirts of a town through which Annelise would have to pass. As tended to happen at tense moments, he was coming down with a bad cold that not even the warmth of aquavit could alleviate.

  Finally, just as I was beginning to despair, she showed up—tearing like a bat out of hell and armed with that determined look, in the face of which neither time nor tide nor sleet nor rain are of any particular avail. When she saw me she stopped with a screeching of brakes that brought the village to its feet and the doughty Danes were treated to the sight of what they must have considered one of the quickest and most successful pick-ups on record.

  They got back to Flensburg that evening, and “I subsided into bed with a fever of 101° and teeth rattling like a machine gun.”

  After a long wet drive the next day the Kennans checked into the Bristol Hotel in Berlin, where they ran into old Moscow friends, the journalists Demaree Bess and Walter Duranty. It was a new experience to find themselves there “at the peak of Germany’s amazing development of strength, [recognizing] that here was at last a power—in a sense Moscow’s own monstrous progeny—prepared to meet the Kremlin on its own terms.” The Kennans lunched with Cyrus Follmer the next day, had tea with the Kozhenikovs, “who hadn’t changed a bit,” and then dinner with Charlie Thayer, now stationed in Berlin. After dinner, in his apartment, they sat up most of the night listening to Russian music while “talking, talking, talking as I suppose only people can who have lived in Russia and felt that strange, direct need for human communication which seizes everybody in that vast, drab country.”

  The car broke down on the way back to Prague, requiring its temporary abandonment in a village next to a new industrial plant—a project of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goering—where “[g]reat chimneys faded up into the night sky and enormous spurts of red flame lit the dark countryside.” But on the third-class train into Dresden, tired German workmen sat silently, heads in hands, saying nothing about National Socialism. Dresden mechanics, “whose urban prestige demanded that they outdo their provincial colleagues,” got the car going again, and it got the Kennans to Prague without further incident.10

  They found there an apartment in a seventeenth-century palace. With walls a foot thick and nothing symmetrical, “you had a feeling of security as great as though you had been in an air raid shelter.” It didn’t matter that the Czech army was auctioning off its horses in the courtyard. The animals, at least, were indifferent to their fate. Grace and Joan arrived in time for Christmas, along with the handmade red cribs that had accompanied them to Moscow and Alexandria. “[F]or a few brief months, while the clouds of war and desolation moved steadily closer and an uneasy lightning played on the horizons of Europe, we again had the luxury of a home.”11

  There was still a diplomatic community, and although social life was not very cheerful, “it is quite enough as far as we are concerned,” Annelise wrote Jeanette, “George particularly!” There were opportunities for tennis, horseback riding, ice skating, even dancing: “The other night I found myself having scrambled eggs and sausages at 5 o’clock in the morning. I hadn’t been up so late since we were in Russia.” Nonetheless, she noticed, the world outside was making itself known. “One Sunday we visited at an estate which is now in Germany. While we had tea the Gestapo was announced. Queer feeling.” George urged his sister to visit while there was still time. Prague had been preserved “only by a damn thin margin.”12

  II.

  Despite his sympathy for the Czechs, Kennan’s first reaction to Munich had been one of relief. Their country’s fortunes, he was sure, lay in the long run “with—and not against—the dominant forces of this area.” The Allies had erred in breaking up the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I, and certainly in leaving three million Germans within Czechoslovakia’s boundaries. No state could have survived as a democracy under those circumstances. At least Munich had preserved “a magnificent younger generation—disciplined, industrious, and physically fit—which would undoubtedly have been sacrificed if the solution had been the romantic one of hopeless resistance rather than the humiliating but truly heroic one of realism.”13

  That view assumed, though, that the Munich settlement would stick. Kennan’s travels around the country quickly convinced him that it would not. The Germans were demanding what amounted to extraterritoriality, with jurisdiction over everyone of their nationality in Czechoslovakia. They were building no customs houses or passport control facilities along the new borders. Their businessmen were avoiding long-term deals with Czech counterparts. The army was under pressure to yield to German control. And the authorities in Slovakia and Ruthe-nia, which made up the eastern half of the country, had been completely won over by the Germans. “They are making awful fools of themselves; dressing up in magnificent fascist uniforms, flying to and fro in airplanes, ... and dreaming dreams of the future grandeur of the Slovak or Ukrainian nations.”14

  Germany’s racial policies also threatened the status quo. If left alone, Kennan reported in February 1939, Czechoslovakia would treat its
Jews relatively humanely: there was not, in itself, “the basis for a really serious and widespread anti-Semitic movement.” Yet German demands were already forcing Jews out of government, university, and other professional positions, and there were calls for more radical measures to eliminate Jewish influence. Because the Czechs on their own would be reluctant to go that far, meeting those requirements “might very well necessitate readjustment in the Prague government.”15

  The final blow to the truncated Czechoslovak state came early in March when the Slovaks, with German approval, demanded complete independence. Hitler then executed long-standing plans to occupy all remaining Czech territory. Kennan got the word at four-thirty on the morning of the fifteenth. “Determined that the German army should not have the satisfaction of giving the American Legation a harried appearance, I shaved meticulously before going to the office.” He and the staff spent the morning burning their records on the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, which was helping Jews escape from Central Europe, lest the Nazis seize them. Meanwhile, ashen-faced applicants for asylum were lining up outside, but there was no authority to grant it, and there would have been few facilities for providing it. “Their faces were twitching and their lips trembling when I sent them away.”

  “People were caught like mice in a trap,” Annelise wrote to Jeanette a few days later. “The Jews are panic-stricken. Our Consulate is swarmed with them. We have heard about many suicides already. I feel sor[r]y for them, but not half as sorry as for the Czechs.” One Jewish acquaintance, who George knew had worked with the Americans for many years, showed up at the apartment. “We couldn’t possibly keep him.” The legation was about to be withdrawn, in which case American diplomatic privileges would probably be revoked, and “[h]e’d only have been in worse shape for having been found in our place.” Besides, there were ten thousand others: “I told him that I could not give him asylum, but that as long as he was not demanded by the authorities he was welcome to stay there and to make himself at home.”