Part I
ONE
Childhood: 1904–1921
“THE GREATEST TRAGEDY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE,” GEORGE F. KENNAN told me when we first talked of this biography, “is that we do not all die at the same time as those we love.” It might seem odd to begin a life by invoking death, but in this instance it was appropriate, for the tragedy Kennan saw in death was not the oblivion it brings but the separations it causes: the way it rends relationships without which there can be no life. And death severed the most important relationship in young George’s life just as it began.
Throughout much of his childhood George believed that his mother, Florence James Kennan, had died giving birth to him in Milwaukee on February 16, 1904. She had not. The death occurred on April 19, and the cause was peritonitis from a ruptured appendix, a mishandled but completely separate medical problem. The effect, though, was much the same: the rending of a relationship so brief that it could not even exist in memory. “Whether she nursed him or not, I don’t know,” George’s sister Jeanette recalled eight decades later, “but I suspect she did. What a tragedy.” Florence died at home, painfully and protractedly. The older children were brought in to kiss their mother goodbye, while baby George, held by an aunt in the next room but hearing everything, was “so quiet.”1
In his memoirs, written when he was in his sixties, Kennan acknowledged having been “deeply affected, and in a certain sense scarred for life,” by his mother’s death.2 But he was not then prepared to reveal where the evidence lay, in the realm of visions and dreams:
March 1931. A young diplomat at a Swiss winter resort suddenly finds himself dancing with tears in his eyes, not because the girl he’s with isn’t the one he wants, but because, as he notes bitterly in his diary, he misses someone else: “You had better go out into the open air and realize that Mother is far away and that no one is ever going to understand you and that it is not even very important whether anyone ever does.”3
February 1942. An older Foreign Service officer, married now and a father, writes an unsent letter to his children from internment in Nazi Germany, wondering whether they would remember him were he not to return: “I myself grew up without a mother; and there are so many times that I have wished I had known what she was like—that I could have had at least one conversation with her.”4
January 1959. A middle-aged historian, retired temporarily from diplomacy, dreams for the first time of meeting his mother. “She showed no recognition of me; she was plainly preoccupied with something else; but she accepted with politeness and with an enigmatic smile my own instantaneous gesture of recognition and joy and tenderness. She was, for the moment, the main thing in my existence; I was not the main thing in hers.”5
July 1984. An aging brother, now eighty, writes his surviving sisters on the day he learns that their eldest has died: “I think of what desperation our mother must have felt as she faced death with the realization that she was being torn away relentlessly from four small children and abandoning them to a wildly uncertain future. And I think, of course, of the crushing blow this must have been to our poor father—who, God knows, had enough blows in this life without this crowning one.”6
June 1999. A distinguished elder statesman, at ninety-five failing physically but fully in command mentally, suddenly sheds tears as he recalls Anton Chekhov’s haunting story “The Steppe,” about a boy of nine traveling with a group of peasants across a vast Russian landscape. The boy misses his mother, “understanding neither where he was going nor why,” trying to grasp the meaning of stars at night, only to find that they “oppress your spirits with their silence,” hinting at “that solitariness awaiting us all in the grave, and life’s essence seems to be despair and horror.”7
How to weigh the pain of loss when it occurs so early in life that one lacks the words, even the concepts, to know what is happening? When one accepts such pain at first as the normal condition of human existence, only to learn—yet another loss—that it is not? George Kennan provided an answer of sort in his memoirs: “We are, toward the end of our lives, such different people, so far removed from the childhood figures with whom our identity links us, that the bond to those figures, like that of nations to their obscure prehistoric origins, is almost irrelevant.”8 But a biographer can, perhaps, be pardoned for not believing everything that the subject of his biography says.
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