I will probably never be vastly admired; I shall never achieve much personal dignity; my wife, if I ever have one, will doubtless be in no sense ideal and will generally be spoken of as an impossible person. Far from becoming wealthy, I will probably… lose what money I have…. Worse than all of these things—for me: I will doubtless cause considerable pain to all persons who love me but are themselves not able to understand what I am doing (Father for instance).
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.”24
III.
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!”25
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.26 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.”27
The last American ambassador to Russia, David R. Francis, had left that country in November 1918, a year after Vladimir Ilich Lenin had seized power. The last Russian ambassador to the United States, Boris Bakhmeteff, represented the Provisional Government that Lenin had overthrown: he finally resigned in 1923, leaving the embassy on Sixteenth Street dark. By that time Woodrow Wilson’s last secretary of state, Bainbridge Colby, had announced the policy of the U.S. government toward the new regime in Moscow: that it was not possible to maintain diplomatic relations with a government “based upon the negation of every principle… upon which it is possible to base harmonious and trustful relations, whether of nations or of individuals.”28
Nevertheless, American contacts with the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics flourished. Despite the revolutionary aspirations of the first state in history to be run by a communist party, the United States sent desperately needed famine relief in 1921–22, and prominent businessmen—among them Henry Ford and the young W. Averell Harriman—quickly found opportunities for trade and investment. By 1930 the Soviet Union imported more from the United States than from any other country: the staunchly Republican senator William Borah described it as “the greatest undeveloped market in the world.”29
The absence of diplomatic relations, therefore, became increasingly difficult to justify. Within the State Department there was deep hostility toward the Soviet Union and the international communist movement; but there was also the sense that nonrecognition could not last indefinitely, and that there ought to be experts in place when that policy shift took place. Russian studies became a priority, and in 1927 Robert F. Kelley, the new and energetic chief of the Division of Eastern European Affairs, began recruiting Foreign Service officers from its “unclassified” ranks for that purpose. This was the program Dawson recommended to Kennan, and it was one of the things that persuaded him—the breakup with Eleanor was surely another—to rescind his resignation. A career-minded guardian angel had again appeared on the scene, and as Kennan would say in his memoirs, “I have always been grateful.”30
IV.
Officers selected for the program were first sent to perform consular duties in the region in which they were to specialize: only after a probationary period would they begin the promised postgraduate study. Kennan’s assignment was Tallinn, in Estonia, one of the three Baltic republics that had broken away from the Russian empire after its demise. As had been the case the previous year, though, he was temporarily diverted, this time to Berlin, a city Kennan had visited briefly in the summer of 1926 after passing the Foreign Service examinations. If his diary entries are any indication, his mood had brightened somewhat: “I walk to work in the morning,” he wrote soon after arriving, “and delight in the Berlin of the young day.”31
There was, to be sure, the tedium of passports, visas, and accounts, but there were also receptions to attend and interesting people to watch: Berlin, the largest and liveliest city in Germany, was no backwater post. At one such event the German foreign secretary Gustav Stresemann held forth, “swaying his portly figure back and forth as he talks… One wonders at the secrets of Europe which must lie within that broad, shaven head.” Should a man with such responsibilities laugh and joke? More pitiful were the Russian émigrés. “Alive they are,” but “they move like lost phantoms in a world which is, and always will be, a distorted and gilded memory of the past.” Meanwhile, at the communist theater, capitalists strutted around in top hats, brutal soldiers martyred proletarians, musicians played the “Internationale,” and individuals offstage provided the mighty voice of the oppressed masses. It was all “doctrinaire tommy-rot,” but under it “one feels the heat of a brightly burning flame.”32