George F. Kennan : an American life

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.” Writing 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.