George F. Kennan : an American life

by John Lewis Gaddis

  The need for roots was much on his mind that fall. Plans to purchase part of the island in Kristiansand had fallen through, probably fortunately in the light of the war. Now, though, George had another idea, even if Jeanette thought it “mad”: he wanted to buy a farm somewhere in the United States: “I have thought this over very carefully and know what I am doing.” After a series of rapid promotions, he was at last relatively well off. American farms were less expensive than Berlin houses, and after all how many other people made $8,000 a year? He had lived for too long with no home at all. He had seen too many places “where every form of existence except that of the small land-holder has been pretty thoroughly shattered.” Wisconsin looked like the best bet: it was where the Kennans had lived longer than anywhere else. So might Jeanette and Gene sound out the owner of their grandfather’s old farm near Packwaukee?52

  IX.

  “Dined at the Hoyos’ to meet an American couple, the George Kennans,” Marie Vassiltchikov, a young White Russian living in Berlin who kept a remarkable diary, noted on May 26, 1941. “He has highly intelligent eyes but does not speak freely, but then the situation is of course ambiguous, as the Germans are still allies of Soviet Russia.” Kennan faulted himself and his Berlin colleagues, years later, for not having foreseen the abrupt end of that alliance less than a month later. Enough indications of trouble had accumulated, however, for the embassy to warn the State Department, which in turn tried to alert the Kremlin. None of this had any effect, and on June 22 the invasion began. Two days later Kennan sent Loy Henderson, now back in Washington, his views on this major turning point in the war.

  He could see the advantage of extending material aid to the Soviet Union “whenever called for by our own self-interest.” But there should be no attempts to identify politically or ideologically with the Russian war effort, because to do so would also associate the United States with

  the Russian destruction of the Baltic states, with the attack against Finnish independence, with the partitioning of Poland and Rumania, with the crushing of religion throughout Eastern Europe, and with the domestic policy of a regime which is widely feared and detested throughout this part of the world and the methods of which are far from democratic. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that in every border country concerned, from Scandinavia—including Norway and Sweden—to the Black Sea, Russia is generally more feared than Germany.

  The Soviet Union was in the war because it had collaborated with Hitler, thereby playing “a lone hand in a dangerous game.” It must now take the consequences alone. Sharing no principles with the Western democracies, it had “no claim on Western sympathies.”53

  It was a typical Kennan memorandum, relentlessly clear-sighted in its assessment of European realities, yet wholly impractical in its neglect of domestic political necessities in Washington and London. For how were Roosevelt and the new British prime minister, Winston Churchill, to persuade their democracies to aid the Soviet war effort without identifying politically and ideologically with it? On this point Kennan’s nemesis Joseph E. Davies provided more useful advice, insisting in the face of State and War Department skepticism that the Russians would survive the Nazi onslaught, while offering to lead a publicity campaign to convince an equally doubtful American public that the U.S.S.R. would be a worthy ally. FDR listened to Davies, encouraged his efforts, and—given the circumstances—was right to do so.54

  Kennan’s attention remained focused on German-dominated Europe, where by the fall of 1941 the disaster confronting Jews was becoming obvious. “We didn’t know about the gas chambers,” he recalled. But “we had no optimistic feelings about the fate of the Jewish community. We thought they were in for it.” One striking indication of this, George wrote Annelise in October, was the new requirement that the Jews wear yellow stars:

  That is a fantastically barbaric thing. I shall never forget the faces of people in the subway with the great yellow star sewed onto their overcoats, standing, not daring to sit down or to brush against anybody, staring straight ahead of them with eyes like terrified beasts—nor the sight of little children running around with those badges sewn on them.

  Most Germans, he sensed, were “shocked and troubled by the measure.” Perhaps as a result, “the remaining Jews are being deported in large batches, and very few more stars are to be seen.”55

  “We went to great lengths in the embassy in Berlin,” Kennan remembered, “to try to rescue the Jewish children and get them out.” The staff had difficulty, however, getting accurate information about the number of children from their parents and from the Jewish community. “[T]hey would falsify their statistics, they wouldn’t come clean about things.” Perhaps, Kennan later acknowledged, that was how the Jews had survived for centuries in Europe: “Wherever they met authority they had to try to get around it. But all I can say is that we were jolly well fed up with them.”56

  Kennan sensed, during the final months of 1941, “that things were now out of control—not only out of our control (we, after all, in our poor overworked embassy, had never at any time had any influence on the course of events), but out of everyone’s control.” As the Germans advanced into Russia—following the direction and the timing of Napoleon’s invasion in 1812—relations with the United States, “never better than frigid at any time since the beginning of the war,” continued to deteriorate. “No one knew how the end would come. But many of us sensed it to be near.” 57

  With this in mind, Kennan sent a ten-page letter to the State Department on November 20, summing up what his three years in Czechoslovakia and Germany had taught him. It was, in a way, his own “swan song” dispatch. He began with calendar and climate: winter operations in Russia were now inevitable, and that in itself was a defeat for Hitler. “It means that none of the original aims of the Russian campaign has yet been achieved.” Despite all their “gushing” about a “New Order,” the best the Germans could hope for was a stalemate in the east while attempting to keep an increasingly restive Europe under control. Anything worse could be much worse,

  for Germany still has much to gain but very little that it can afford to lose. The German people themselves are abnormally sensitive to the movements of the barometer of their military fortune. Its general upward climb has come to be taken as a matter of course; but the slightest jog in the other direction sends waves of panic and foreboding running through the country.

  Compounding the problem was the fact that Southern and Eastern Europe were “full of desperate little adventurists” who were holding their own people in check with repeated admonitions that the Germans were bound to win the war. If the impression ever took hold in those countries that the tide was running in the other direction, “there is going to be a scurrying for cover such as the world has rarely witnessed.”

  Even if none of this happened and the Germans achieved their objectives, what would they do next? Could they really restore order and peace in Europe? Their exploitation of conquered countries was “consuming the goose that lays the golden egg.” They could not “go on indefinitely borrowing and re-borrowing the capital of their countries.” Only abnormal war conditions allowed such a system, and these would not continue indefinitely. Any attempt to get back to normal “would split it wide open.”

  In the meantime, rationing was ineffective, black markets were thriving, and people in the occupied territories were working only as hard as they had to. Within Germany, civilian administration was chaotic, while the Nazi leadership was riddled with intrigues as the jockeying began to succeed Hitler: “The life of a single man, after all, is a weak reed on which to pin the difference between great personal power and violent death.” Only the army seemed stable, which was why the elements opposed to Hitler were gathering there.

  Hitler himself did not seem alarmed by any of this: to the contrary, he appeared ready to authorize a new wave of terror, designed to sweep away the slightest manifestations of independence. Either the gods were “making mad a man whom they would destroy,” or Germa
ny’s future, and that of Europe, “is destined to be more gruesome than any of us have ever conceived.... Everything or nothing. Either we win or we pull the whole house down.”58

  X.

  Kennan acknowledged, in retrospect, that “perhaps those of us who served in Moscow were not quick enough to understand the whole Nazi phenomenon, because we couldn’t imagine that there could be any regime as nasty as the one with which we were confronted.” There is something to this when it comes to the period before Kennan was sent to Czechoslovakia and Germany. He had, after all, found the latter state to be a “great garden” when he traveled through it in the spring of 1936, after two and a half years in the Soviet Union. What he saw in Prague in 1938–39, however, dispelled whatever illusions he may have had about the Nazi regime. His analyses of it from then on were at least as critical as his earlier assessments of its counterpart in Moscow. He certainly believed that Germany posed a greater threat than the U.S.S.R. to the balance of power in Europe, and hence to the security interests of the United States. And through Annelise’s family, he had a personal stake in resisting the Nazis: “I was married to a woman whose father was tortured and nearly killed in Norway by these people.”59

  He was by no means anti-German. He relished the language, respected the culture, and recognized repeatedly that not all Germans shared the brutality of their leaders. He dealt with Germans professionally and met them socially: that was part of his job. He wrote, and years later published, sympathetic sketches of German women forced to survive by granting or selling sex.60 He acknowledged acts of mercy on the part of the German troops that had just invaded France. He was fully aware that the German army—Hitler’s principal weapon of destruction—also harbored such resistance as there was to him. He also saw, however, the selective morality of that organization, not least in the fact that it could treat Jews and Czechs no differently from Sudeten Germans, but then with equal ease hand the former over to the Gestapo. He caught the compulsive efficiency of Germans in small things like mending clothes or cutting book pages, but also their gross inefficiency in managing their own country as well as an occupied continent. And he understood that there would have been a “German problem” even if Hitler had never appeared on the scene: the Germans “were never a problem for the rest of Europe until the country was united.”61 Kennan’s views on Germany, in short, were as complex as the Germans themselves.

  The same was not true of his attitude toward Jews. He had a few Jewish or partly Jewish acquaintances, among them Frieda Por, Anna Freud, and Johnnie von Herwarth. He did more than he acknowledged in his memoirs to rescue Jews: he got Por out of Austria in 1938; he and Annelise did the same for the Jewish friend who took refuge in their apartment in Prague on the day the Germans took over; he worked hard while in Berlin to arrange the exodus of Jewish children. He knew little, however, of Jewish culture. He found Jews as a class exasperating: hence his anger at the parents of Jewish children in Berlin. And like most members of their own generation and the many that preceded it, the Kennans often made references—“fat Jews,” for example—that would today seem anti-Semitic. Even worse was Annelise’s comment—no doubt George shared this view—that while she felt sorry for the Jews on March 15, 1939, she felt “not half as sorry as for the Czechs.”62

  Biographers have an obligation, however, to place their subjects within the period in which they lived: it is unfair to condemn them for not knowing what no one at the time could have known. What could the Kennans have anticipated, for example, about the respective fates of Czechs and Jews on March 15, 1939? That the Czechs had lost their independence was clear. That the Jews would have a hard time at the hands of the Germans was also obvious: the violence of Kristallnacht four months earlier left no doubt about that. But that over the next six years Hitler would seek to kill all the European Jews—and would succeed in murdering six million of them—was not at all apparent on the day he invaded Czechoslovakia, even to himself. As his most thorough biographer has pointed out, the Holocaust did not get under way until late 1941, and even then “there was as yet no coordinated, comprehensive program of total genocide.”63

  The problem with the future is that it isn’t as clear as the past. That’s why the writing of history generally—and the writing of biography particularly—requires empathy, which is not the same as sympathy. It asks a very simple question: What exactly would I, knowing what they knew then, have done differently?

  EIGHT

  The United States at War: 1941–1944

  “THUS FAR BERLIN HAS BEEN AS SAFE AS HIGHLAND PARK,” GEORGE wrote Jeanette on October 29, 1941. He was not sure how long that situation would last, but he wasn’t worried. “The only real chance of my suffering any difficulties (and those would be more of a comic than a tragic nature) would be in the event that we were to enter the war, in which case I should probably be interned by the Germans for a number of weeks, if not months.”1

  He was the first American embassy official to hear the news, by shortwave radio on Sunday evening, December 7, that the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. Four days of “excruciating uncertainty” followed, with the German government cutting off cable and telephone links. By Wednesday none remained. Embassy staffers began burning codes and classified files, so thoroughly that ashes drifted over the neighborhood, raising fears for the safety of adjoining buildings. On Thursday the eleventh, sound trucks and a crowd began to gather outside as Hitler prepared to speak in the Reichstag. An inoperative telephone abruptly rang, with word that a car would take the chargé d’affaires, Leland Morris, to a meeting with Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop. Kennan entertained the Foreign Office escort while Morris got ready: “A stiffer conversation has never transpired.” At the Wilhelmstrasse, Ribbentrop kept Morris standing, subjected him to a tirade, and then handed him Germany’s declaration of war on the United States.

  The Foreign Office was as unsure as the Americans of what would happen next. Two more days of limbo followed, with the staff free to work and move about the city. Then, on Saturday the thirteenth, orders came to have everyone ready to leave Berlin the next morning. Embassy personnel would share a special train with remaining American journalists in the city. It fell to Kennan to organize the departure, working with an SS Hauptsturmführer, Valentin Patzak, who would be the Americans’ keeper for the next five months. On Sunday all assembled at the embassy, “only to find the building, inside and out, already guarded by members of the Gestapo, and ourselves their prisoners.”

  The group knew nothing of their destination until menus appeared, in the otherwise threadbare dining car, labeled “Berlin—Bad Nauheim.” The latter was a spa north of Frankfurt, where the young Franklin D. Roosevelt had stayed several times with his family. The Americans would be lodged in Jeschke’s Grand Hotel, a once-elite establishment closed since the European war had broken out, but now hurriedly reopened. Furniture was in storage, pipes had burst, staff had scattered, and the manager had gotten twenty-four hours’ notice that he would be housing more than a hundred Americans indefinitely. Morris, nominally Kennan’s superior, left him in charge: “I personally bore the immediate responsibility for disciplinary control of this motley group of hungry, cold, and worried prisoners, as well as for every aspect of their liaison with their German captors. Their cares, their quarrels, their jealousies, their complaints, filled every moment of my waking day.”2

  I.

  Years later Kennan would complain that historians—and some of his early biographers—had failed to acknowledge his organizational skills: they gave the impression “that I was a totally impractical dreamer, and could never do anything that was worthwhile in an administrative or practical sense.” He had a point. He had, after all, almost single-handedly set up the American embassy in Moscow in 1934. He ran the Berlin embassy between 1939 and 1941, which by the end of that period was providing diplomatic representation for most of German-occupied Europe. And in 1947–49 Kennan would create the first Policy Planning Staff in the Department of State:
that organization would never again be as effective as it was under his direction.3

  None of these tasks, however, were as difficult as Bad Nauheim. The internees included Foreign Service officers, Army and Navy attachés, journalists and radio correspondents, several wives, a few children, five dogs, one cat, and three canaries. Logistics were a constant worry, the group having encumbered itself with forty tons of baggage, in some 1,250 pieces. They had no way of knowing how long they would be there, and no means of communicating with families and friends in the United States. They were totally dependent on the Germans, who were in turn constrained only by the knowledge that their own diplomats were interned—under much better conditions—at the White Sulphur Springs resort in West Virginia. The Grand Hotel offered greater comfort than that allowed prisoners of war or concentration camp inmates, to be sure. But the food was rationed and mostly unpalatable, the rooms were cold, and recreational facilities were limited. “The boredom, the lack of space, the distance from home and family, and the inevitable friction between people” were bound to cause strains, the principal historian of the internment has written. With Morris having declined the responsibility, “Kennan provided the direction, coordination, structure, and rule enforcement for the entire community.”4

  Collaboration with the Germans sounded objectionable in principle, but there was nothing to be gained in practice, Kennan believed, by refusing cooperation with Hauptsturmführer Patzak to make the internment run as smoothly as possible. Withholding it would invite punishment, forcing the Americans to treat their interned Germans similarly and delaying everyone’s repatriation. Honesty required openness about what the Swiss—the intermediaries between the Americans and the Germans—were doing to get the group home. Information was unreliable, however, and even scraps could set off rumors, giving rise to false hopes and subsequent disappointment. So Kennan at times imposed censorship, in one instance even confiscating an issue of the internees’ newspaper, the Bad Nauheim Pudding—named for a grimly ubiquitous dessert.5