George F. Kennan : an American life Read online

  I.

  Sisters, most immediately, filled the void. Jeanette, only two years older than George, remembered holding, comforting, and occasionally disciplining him. Despite the proximity in their ages, she became as much substitute mother as sibling throughout his childhood and adolescence, and for the rest of her life would remain the member of his Milwaukee family to whom he was closest: “I could talk more with Jeanette than almost anyone in the world.” Constance, who was six when her mother died, found her baby brother quick to learn in eliciting sympathy. Sitting on a blanket, he would topple over, bump his head on the floor, and pretend to cry. “We three sisters would all descend upon him and love him, comfort him. That was all he wanted, poor little thing.” It did not take long, though, for identity to begin to emerge and for the cuddling to become constraining. George’s senior sister Frances, eight at the time of his birth, remembered that as he grew older, “he didn’t care for that at all. If we would try to put our arms around him he would push us away.”9

  George and Jeanette shared a room on the third floor of what he later described as their “dark, strange household.” Located just north of downtown Milwaukee on a strip of land between Lake Michigan and the Milwaukee River, 935 Cambridge Avenue was built in just the wrong way, with the living room windows facing the house next door, while the blank side obscured an open lawn. There were, however, a cook, a maid, and for young George a nurse, hired to take care of him for several months after his mother’s death. This made an impression: “A woman in a nurse’s uniform has for me a dangerous attraction,” he admitted many years later. “I’m sure that this comes from the fact that the first mother I had was probably this nurse with the white uniform.”10

  George and Jeanette would wake early in the morning, she remembered, “as children are apt to do. We would run down in our bare feet into my father’s room. He had a bed that had a footboard, and [we] used to get on the footboard and then somersault over into his arms. And then he would put his arms around both of us and cuddle us down and sing Civil War songs.” The maid would come downstairs and rap at the door: “ ‘Are the children there?’ ‘No,’ my father would say, ‘I haven’t seen any children.’ [He] loved babies. And of course, this baby George was very special.”11

  Father was Kossuth Kent Kennan, a prominent but not wealthy Milwaukee tax attorney who had been fifty-two years old at the time of George’s birth and his wife’s death. Mourning was no new experience for him. His first wife, Nellie McGregor Pierpont Kennan, had died in childbirth in 1889 along with a baby daughter, after only four years of marriage.12 But Florence and Kent had four healthy children after theirs, which took place in 1895. Saddled, following her death, with the unexpected responsibility of managing a young family alone, Kent tried to maintain a semblance of stability, but there was always sadness surrounding it. Jeanette recalled him staying home in the mornings to supervise George’s bath and returning early in the afternoon. “I also remember my father’s tenderness—his taking us on his lap when we were little and reading to us—‘The Pied Piper of Hamlin’ I particularly remember. And ‘The Little Match Girl.’ Oh, dear! He’d cry too. The tears would come into his eyes.”13

  Kent had to provide financial as well as emotional support, however, which meant entrusting his children, most of the day, to nurses and maids while he was at the office. “They were a problem,” Constance pointed out, “because if they liked children they weren’t such good housekeepers, and if they were good housekeepers, they didn’t care so much for the children.” So Kent’s second cousin Grace Wells, a young kindergarten teacher from Massachusetts, moved to Milwaukee and took up residence as a second mother for the Kennan children—the first George knew apart from his nurses. “She was really only with us for three years, but it seemed like a long long time because we were so happy. And of course she adored George—he was her baby. We all adored Cousin Grace.”14

  But this, too, was not a stable situation, for in 1908 Kent announced his intention to remarry, and Cousin Grace had to go. Jeanette never forgot getting the news. She and her sisters burst into tears, ran upstairs, and found Grace weeping also. For George, it meant losing yet another mother. Louise Wheeler, who grew up in Michigan, had been a preceptress in Latin and Greek at Ripon College, Kent’s alma mater, where they had met. “When they were first married,” Jeanette speculated, “they must have been a little romantic about each other, although we never thought they were in the later years—and when they wanted to say something that they didn’t want us children to hear, they ’d say it in Latin or Greek.” The children resented Louise for supplanting Cousin Grace: she was, behind her back, “the kangaroo from Kalamazoo.”15

  “We felt that she wasn’t always very nice to our father,” George later explained. “We doubted, I think, how much she really loved him.” Jeanette saw a different problem, which was that “my stepmother never really understood little boys. She wasn’t at all an earthy person. She couldn’t understand, for instance, why little boys would want to eat so much. How they could be so ravenous.... She was a very nervous woman, and any little thing that [George] did that was awkward—you could see her wince.”16

  Four years after the marriage, Louise unexpectedly became pregnant: her husband was then sixty-one. So in 1913 George found himself with a half-brother, also named Kent, who took most of his stepmother’s time and diverted the attention of his older sisters. George “took a back seat,” Jeanette remembered. “All of us loved the baby, [but] I don’t know whether George loved him as much as the three sisters did.” The younger Kent later acknowledged that George “did not feel at ease with my mother. He said to me that he’d never had a mother. I think she tried, she did the best she could to understand him, but I don’t think he felt she was getting through to him.”17

  George’s father found it difficult to provide consolation. He was, Frances pointed out, “a very sensitive man, but the fact that he was sensitive made him awkward. I never did get close to my father in any way at all.” Emotional but distrusting emotion, Kent senior prided himself on having learned early in life “to do a thing which ought to be done, when it ought to be done and as it ought to be done, whether I felt like doing it or not.” Such stoicism was little comfort to a son from whom his father concealed his softer side. “When we went abroad the first time,” Jeanette explained, “we were on the ship just before we sailed, and they played the ‘Star Spangled Banner,’ and ‘All ashore that are going ashore.’ My father put his arm around me and I started to cry. He said: ‘I always do, too.’ ” But “as George got a little older, he didn’t put on that side for him. He thought it wasn’t manly.”18

  “It was a very straight-laced family,” the younger Kent remembered. “No movies or card-playing on Sunday, never a swear word. For example, ‘darn’ was considered too strong to use, and ‘damn’ was completely out. Once when I was taking French in high school I said ‘Mon Dieu’ and my father scolded me for it.” Jeanette was even reprimanded for discussing the birth of puppies at the dinner table. The children were brought up in the Presbyterian Church, and their father made a point of reading the Bible all the way through several times. The girls learned to play the piano, but only for the purpose of accompanying hymns on Sunday evening.

  Even here George was left out, for although his half-brother was also taught piano at an early age, that instrument was not thought appropriate for George, who proceeded to learn it on his own. He was, to his disgust, dispatched to dancing school, an indignity to which he responded with “sullen rages and sit-down strikes.” Musical talent was there, though, and it showed up at unexpected moments, as during the summer task of picking strawberries with Jeanette. “George would harmonize with me, knowing what I was going to sing, because it was so obvious. But it wouldn’t have been obvious to anybody who didn’t have a great deal of music in him.”19

  The Kennans were also literary. His father had collected a large library, from which George read extensively: “I had nothing else to do.” Wri
ting and speaking were also important, Kent junior remembered: “When I would write letters home, I would sometimes get misspellings corrected in the letters I received back.” Jeanette recalled “the speech in our house [as] very, very correct.” While still little, she and George would have supper together at five o’clock, and “we carried on some wonderful conversations. We liked big words, and so when we’d find a new big word, we’d use it.” One was “reputation.” They weren’t sure what it meant, “but we brought it into every sentence, while we ate our cream of wheat with maple sugar on it.”20

  Still, something was missing in family life on Cambridge Avenue. When the children were older and allowed at the dinner table, George and his siblings would flee at the first opportunity, preferring the company of books to that of grown-ups. “It’s unusual for a family, I think, to disperse like that,” Jeanette pointed out. “But we just never played games together, or sat around. I don’t recall any real merriment when we were just ourselves.” George recalled “daydreams so intense and satisfying that hours could pass in oblivion of immediate surroundings.” His intensity became a family legend when an aunt, traveling with the brooding boy, felt obliged to tell him: “Stop thinking for a little while!”21

  Jeanette would later reflect on how little home life George had. He lost his mother without ever getting to know her. He loved Cousin Grace but lost her too. He gained a stepmother, but never regarded her as a real mother. His father, George himself later admitted, “was so much older, and I still remained so shy that I seldom really talked with him.” How much did all of this matter? “I sometimes wondered,” George recalled in his old age, “whether all the grown-ups were not really deceiving me, and whether one day they would not come out and say: ‘You little goose. Did you really think that we cared anything about you?’ ”22

  II.

  They never did, of course. Many children fear rejection, most of the time it doesn’t happen, and it certainly did not to young George. Despite the losses with which he grew up, he was hardly bereft of adults who cared. Milwaukee and its environs were full of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends to whom the Kennan children could look for sympathy and support. “Everybody felt so sorry for [us],” Jeanette recalled, that at Christmas “we were showered with things.”23 And next door there were even surrogate parents.

  Edward and Ida Frost were wealthy and well educated, owned a large house at 945 Cambridge Avenue, and lacked children of their own. The middle name Florence had picked for her son reflected the Frosts’ friendship: he was George Frost Kennan. After her death, Constance remembered, “they had us over there and would read aloud to us. They were just second parents to us, always.” “They were so close to our family,” George added, “that we called them Uncle Edward and Aunt Ida.” No fence separated the two houses, so the Kennan children always had a large yard available for baseball games and other activities. The Frosts even installed a special telephone line so that the families could keep track of one another. They remained, in young Kent’s memory, “very strong, charming people, more outgoing and convivial than either my father or my mother.”24

  So too was Florence’s family, the Jameses, with whom George spent a great deal of time. “They were socially elite, which the Kennans weren’t,” Jeanette observed. Their wealth came from the insurance business: Florence’s father and brother both served as presidents of the Northwestern National Life Insurance Company. “They were not at all like my father’s family,” George commented. “They had none of the intellectual ability that my father obviously had. They were tough, handsome, but not intellectual.”25

  There was uneasiness between the Kennans and the Jameses. George’s father made a point of recording, long after Florence’s death, that her mother had not looked favorably on his attentions toward her daughter and had even sent Florence off to Europe in an unsuccessful effort to head off the marriage. The Jameses “set great store by charm,” Frances explained. “I don’t think Papa fulfilled it.” And then there was the matter of finances. “Kent Kennan is a very good lawyer,” Florence’s brother Alfred was said to have observed, but “[he] is a very poor businessman.”26

  The Jameses paid for the house on Cambridge Avenue into which Florence and Kent moved after their marriage, and Florence’s bequest to her children included a second house in the James family compound on Lake Nagawicka, some thirty miles west of Milwaukee. It was, George remembered, “where the doors and windows of life were opened.” The Kennan and James children spent joyous summers there, swimming, boating, fishing, riding ponies, playing in haystacks, staging amateur theatricals, watching fireworks go off over the lake on the Fourth of July. Short nights provided other impressions: the wind rippling the trees, the waves lapping gently against the shore, the hooting of owls, the croaking of frogs, the droning of insects—and then off in the distance, growing nearer, then fading away, the rumble, rush, and lonely whistle of the great trains on the mainline of the Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, just north of the lake, hurtling through the darkness, on the way to crossing a continent.27

  The trains at Nagawicka were not the only connection to a wider world. Just a short walk from Cambridge Avenue were McKinley and Juneau parks, which looked out over Lake Michigan. For a boy who loved boats, the oceans that lay beyond were not difficult to imagine. Lake steamers lined the docks along the Milwaukee River, even as bicycles, electric streetcars, and automobiles were crowding horses off the streets. Milwaukee had about 300,000 inhabitants at the time of George’s birth, three to four times the number when his father had settled there in 1875. A large percentage were recent immigrants: there were German, Irish, Scandinavian, Polish, Italian, Hungarian, Slovakian, Serbian, Croatian, Slovenian, and Russian Jewish neighborhoods. Foreign languages were spoken and read throughout the city. It even had a Social Democratic Party that, drawing heavily on the immigrant vote, elected a socialist mayor in 1910, the first in the United States.28

  Nor was there anything provincial about George’s family. The Jameses traveled widely, were knowledgeable about art, and supported it locally. George’s aunt on his father’s side had married a Frankfurt German, Paul Mausolff, who impressed his nephew with his goatee, his pince-nez, and his knowledge of languages. And George’s father’s first name honored Louis Kossuth, the failed Hungarian revolutionary who had been touring the United States at the time of Kent’s birth in 1851. Kent knew Europe well, having spent two years there during the early 1880s recruiting immigrants for the Wisconsin Central Railroad, and spoke German, French, and Danish. He had then worked as a mining engineer in the western United States and in central Mexico. Appointed tax commissioner for the state of Wisconsin in 1897, Kossuth Kent Kennan made himself an internationally recognized expert on income tax law and in 1910 published a widely circulated book on that subject. Two years later he took his family back to Europe, where he studied the German tax system while his children learned the language.29

  And then there was the other George Kennan, who had no middle name but whose life in many other ways prefigured that of George Frost Kennan. Born in Norwalk, Ohio, in 1845, fifty-nine years to the day before his namesake, this Kennan was a cousin of George’s grandfather, Thomas Lathrop Kennan. His first trip abroad had come in 1865, when he accompanied the Russian-American Telegraph Expedition to Siberia in a spectacular but unsuccessful effort to link Europe with North America via Alaska and the Bering Strait—the effort fell through when the Atlantic cable began operating the following year. Subsequent journeys to Russia followed, and by the 1890s the first George Kennan had become the most prominent American expert on that country.

  Through his books, articles, and speaking tours, this Kennan did more than anyone else to shape the image of Siberia—and to a considerable extent that of tsarist Russia itself—as a prison of peoples. He delivered more than eight hundred lectures on the regime’s persecution of Jews and dissidents between 1889 and 1898, reaching roughly a million people. When the Russo-Japanese War bega
n in 1904, six days before George Frost Kennan’s birth, President Theodore Roosevelt turned to the elder Kennan as one of his chief Russian advisers.30 Four decades later the younger Kennan held hopes—mostly unfulfilled—that another Roosevelt would similarly listen to him.

  The parallels, George Frost Kennan reflected in his memoirs, went well beyond sharing the same name and being born on the same day:

  Both of us devoted large portions of our adult life to Russia and her problems. We were both expelled from Russia by the Russian governments of our day, at comparable periods in our careers. Both of us founded organizations to assist refugees from Russian despotism. Both wrote and lectured profusely. Both played the guitar. Both owned and loved particular sailboats of similar construction. Both eventually became members of the National Institute of Arts and Letters. Both had occasion to plead at one time or another for greater understanding in America for Japan and her geopolitical problems vis-à-vis the Asian mainland.

  With no mother and a distant father, it was only natural for young George to identify with this famous relative, who had no surviving children of his own. “He used to send me, on each of our common birthdays, something—one of his books on a couple of occasions—which he signed for me.”31

  “[Y]ou have a son who bears my name,” George Kennan wrote to Kossuth Kent Kennan in December 1912. “It would be a great satisfaction to me if I could feel that certain things which have personal or historical interest and which have been closely associated with my work could be transferred to him when he becomes old enough to understand them and take an interest in them.” Kent’s son was “still very young, and I don’t know him at all, but I have confidence in his parentage, and in the training that you and your wife will give him. . . . If I live to be as old as your father, I may see your boy grown to manhood, but life is more or less uncertain after 65.”32