George F. Kennan: An American Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

siege: the only life-threatening situation he encountered as secretary of state came in a part of the world his planners had largely ignored. Kennan may have had that episode in mind when he warned the war college students a few months later that, with half the earth’s wealth but only 6 percent of its population, the United States faced enemies willing “to tear us limb from limb figuratively, or perhaps even physically.” He was less dire in his December 1949 lecture, but he did—unusually—go out of his way to link the civil rights struggle at home with the credibility of American efforts to cooperate with “colored peoples in other parts of the globe.” So he was ready, at the beginning of 1950, not just to remedy his own inattention to problems of race, class, and inequality but to see them for himself. 17
    Feeling slightly guilty for abandoning his family, Kennan left Washington on February 18, taking advantage of the opportunity this time to avoid the discomforts of air travel and to indulge his love of trains. With a change in St. Louis, it was possible then to take a sleeping car all the way to Mexico City. The three-day journey allowed time to write:
    about passing in the night within a few miles of the Pennsylvania farm, where “the old drake would be standing, motionless, on the concrete water trough in the barnyard, ... contemptuous of the cold, of the men who had neglected him, of the other birds and beasts who basked in the warmth of human favor—contemptuous even of the possibility for happiness in general, human or animal.”
    about the fellow passenger who, having inspected his luggage labels, could not help asking: “Say, are you the fellow who . . . ?” Confused associations followed, “too close to reality to be wholly denied, too far from it to be flatly admitted.” ab
    out St. Louis, which like many American cities had grown too fast to clean up after itself. “The new is there before the old is gone. What in one era is functional and elegant and fashionable survives into the following era as grotesque decay.”
    about the canned music in the lounge car on the train to Texas: what of the person “who doesn’t like The Rustic Wedding or Rose Marie or Ave Maria , or who has heard them too often, or who doesn’t like music at all through loud speakers, or who doesn’t like music?”
    about trying to write while crossing northern Mexico trapped by an Indiana voice, which boomed, with “unquenchable loquaciousness,” through the cars: “What-cha carryin’ that ink around fur?”
    Nevertheless, the trip was a welcome respite. With a steam engine helping, the diesel ascended a mountain pass, wound its way down the other side, and brought the train on time into Mexico City on the evening of the twenty-first. The American embassy, where Kennan stayed, was preparing for its Washington’s birthday reception the next day.
    The event, held on the veranda, required routine skills: clutching drinks in the left hand to keep the right one dry for shaking others; looking for places to stash empty glasses so they wouldn’t get stepped on; being patient with the wife of a senior colleague who wanted to know about the Russians: “They’re all slaves aren’t they? Why don’t we do something about it?” Outside there were magnificent monuments, handsome boulevards, and frenetic traffic, but in the adjoining neighborhoods people were “living, eating, and begging on slimy sidewalks.” Bearing little relation to its surroundings, the city was an “ostentatious, anxious demonstration of wealth by an ever-changing nouveau riche ,” boiling up “like foam to the surface of a society that calls itself revolutionary.”
    A weekend in Cuernavaca placed Kennan in a simulated Moorish palace owned by American friends, where the ceiling, wall paneling, furniture, and art—all imported from Europe—were not simulated. “I lay sleepless, through the long night, under the huge crimson draperies which had