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 Ruthenia, 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