By the time he wrote this, in early October, Annelise and the children had arrived, by much the same route that George had taken. “I have really enjoyed having the family here,” he wrote Jeanette. “They couldn’t be sweeter, and we have a lovely home life in the little apartment which we inhabited seven years ago.” Grace and Joan were adapting to the life of diplomatic children in Moscow, playing regularly in the Spaso House garden, the closest equivalent to an American backyard. Both girls were learning Russian, and Grace was attending a Soviet school, where she was treated well by her teachers despite the ideological requirements they had to follow. The Kennans visited one day when gifts from America were being handed out. The teachers gave party-line speeches, but George noticed that while these were going on, “little hands were reaching out” attempting to open the packages. These were locked up after the ceremony, and the children never saw them again.
Grace pleased George, one day that fall, by praising him as a father: “I replied that I wasn’t gay enough to make a really good Daddy.” Joan at that point chimed in: “Oh Daddy, that’s all right. With a little forcing, it would do. And if you wouldn’t work in that office all the time.” There were evenings, Joan recalled, when “my father told me wonderful stories that he made up himself, each installment being invented on the spot—they were so good that I wish he had written them down.” He also read from Grimm’s Fairy Tales: “It was one of my father’s lesser known gifts, reading aloud.” Diplomacy made its demands, though: her parents went out a lot, and “my mother would come in and say good night to me before they left.”14
“George has put on weight since we came,” Annelise reported to Jeanette, “so it looks as if it agrees with him!” But he was working hard, there were plenty of things to “upset a nervous tummy,” and they all missed the farm, as well as the warmth and fresh food of Portugal. Annelise had no formal job in Moscow but spent much of her time introducing Foreign Service wives at other embassies: a whiz at languages, she also acted as their interpreter. That role could be tedious, but there were compensations. “Churchill is here,” she wrote Jeanette in October, “and the big shots are busy and the smaller ones wish they were in on it.” The Kennans fell somewhere in between. British ambassador Archibald Clark Kerr did not invite them to the dinner he gave for the prime minister, which Stalin attended, but they were allowed in afterward to gawk at the great men. “We waited for hours…. [A]t least I can tell my grandchildren that I have seen some of the people who [have] made history.”15
The American diplomatic community was still small and closely knit. Dorothy Hessman, who became Kennan’s secretary in Moscow and remained with him for almost two decades, recalled little consciousness of rank: “Everybody came to all the parties, and we had a good time together.” There was even an embassy orchestra in which George played the guitar and the double bass: it called itself “The Kremlin Krows” until Soviet officials grumbled about the name, after which it became “The Purged Pigeons.” The American dacha was still in use, there was swimming in the river that ran nearby, and in the winter even a tame form of skiing in the low hills outside of Moscow. “[W]e all saw each other too much,” Patricia Davies remembered. “We didn’t have any choice.” There were feuds and rivalries, “but by and large, people seemed to get along pretty well.” “It was something like a cruise ship,” her husband, John Paton Davies, added, “a rather macabre cruise ship.”16
Parties, under such circumstances, could become legendary. With Harriman out of town in November 1944, it fell to George and Annelise to organize a Thanksgiving dinner and dance at Spaso House for, as she put it, “the lonely souls in town.” One was Lillian Hellman, the stridently left-wing playwright who with Roosevelt’s support—but to the alarm of the FBI—had recently shown up in Moscow, ill after a harrowing two-week air trip across Siberia. Worried about her health, George arranged accommodations at Spaso, and she had recovered sufficiently by Thanksgiving to join the festivities. That evening Hellman fell dramatically and decisively in love with the embassy third secretary, John Melby. “Whatever might have happened that first night was postponed,” their biographer has written, because Annelise insisted that Melby come back downstairs and dance with her. “But the next morning, at breakfast, they found the magic still held.” The affair, a famous Cold War romance, would continue off and on for the next three decades.17
A few days before Christmas that year, two American journalists in Moscow, William Lawrence of The New York Times and John Hersey of Time, decided that they would like to have the holiday dinner with, as Hersey wrote his wife, the “Kennons.” But “we couldn’t think of any reason in the world why they should want us.” So why not invite them to dine at the Metropole? “But then we decided that they’d want to have Christmas with their girls and we’d better not do that. We dropped the whole Kennon idea—until about five that afternoon. Then, without any prompting except what she must have gotten by mental telepathy, Mrs. Kennon called me first, and then Bill, and invited us to Christmas dinner! Both of us practically sang into the phone when we accepted.”18
“There is no telling how long I’ll remain here,” George had written Jeanette that fall. “Presumably at least until both wars are over. But one never knows…. A single wrong word—a single mistake—can only too easily ruin a person’s usefulness in any atmosphere as delicate as this, and among people so hyper-sensitive.” Harriman, however, was “a truly exceptional man, of great courage and competence. I genuinely admire him and have learned a good deal, working for him.” George’s own job was important, “[t]o the extent that Russia’s relations with the United States are important…. That might mean anything, depending on how you look at it.”19
III.
“Our new minister has arrived so Ave’s thrilled,” Harriman’s daughter Kathleen, who served as his official hostess in Moscow, wrote on July 3, 1944. “The new counselor speaks in Russian perfectly freely,” an aide reported to Molotov a few days later, “quite willingly entering conversation, although in his manner he seems at first reserved and dry.” By then Kennan had already spent hours talking with his new boss: as Harriman’s aide Robert Meiklejohn noted, “[t]he Ambassador put him to work at once.” The topic was probably Poland, for Kennan followed up with the first of many memoranda on that subject.20
History had shown, he wrote, that Germany and Russia tolerated a strong and independent Poland only when they themselves were weak. “Otherwise, Poland inevitably becomes a pawn in their century-old rivalry.” With the Red Army nearing Warsaw, independence looked extremely unlikely. The alternative would not necessarily be communism, but it would involve “extensive control of foreign affairs, military matters, public opinion, and economic relations with the outside world.” As a consequence, the United States should be very careful not to promise the Poles “a prosperous and happy future under Russian influence. Prosperity and happiness have always been, like warm summer days, fleeting exceptions in the cruel climate of Eastern Europe.”21
“All interesting,” Harriman commented, “especially last para[graph].” It was indeed, because Great Britain had gone to war in 1939 on Poland’s behalf, and Roosevelt and Churchill had publicly pledged, two years later in the Atlantic Charter, to restore “sovereign rights and self-government… to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.” Stalin, however, had paved the way for the German invasion of Poland with the Nazi-Soviet Pact, and the Red Army had occupied the eastern third of the country shortly thereafter. Hitler’s attack in 1941 placed the Soviet Union nominally on the side of the Polish government-in-exile in London, but the relationship remained wary because Stalin was determined to keep the territorial gains the U.S.S.R. had made, as Germany’s ally, at Poland’s expense.22