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

once served a prince of the Church and still bore his insignia—while mosquitoes buzzed around my pillow.” Outside the night breeze flitted aimlessly among the cloisters: the wind “of exiled royalty, of the hopelessly rich, of the tortured intellectuals,” of people like himself who had wandered in, amid “unhappy antiques, crowded together, like creatures in a zoo.” Kennan’s host, the next morning by the swimming pool, was also curious about the Russians: “I don’t see why we don’t go right over there and drop the bomb on those fellows. What are we waiting for?”
    Four forest fires were visible on the road back into Mexico City, a frequent occurrence because the mountains were badly eroded. Water tables were sinking at an alarming rate. Population pressures were overtaking improvements in agriculture, industrial productivity, and public health. Mexico would remain inhospitable to earthly hope, which was why the Virgin of Guadalupe shrine, a brief stop on the way to the airport, moved Kennan deeply. There were of course hustlers outside the cathedral, and there was oppressive ostentation within. But who could doubt the need for “ some moral law, even an imperfect one”? And how did this Mexican display of faith and corruption differ from Ilya Repin’s unforgettable painting of a religious procession outside a Russian village in an earlier century?
    After several short stops in Central America, Kennan flew on to Caracas, a city that defied even his descriptive powers. So he instead wrote its history: how the Spanish had located it at a comfortable elevation inland, connected to its port by a wagon track; how the British had replaced this with a narrow-gauge railroad; how the Americans had arrived to pump oil out and to pump wealth back in; how the city was now so expensive that this particular American wanted to hide in his hotel, fearing “the financial consequences of any contact with the shops or the taxi drivers.” All the evils apparent at home from imposing a new technology on an unprepared people were magnified a hundredfold in Venezuela. One day the “morphine” would be withdrawn, and “a terrible awakening” would follow.
    Perhaps because the culture was Portuguese and hence familiar, Kennan liked Rio de Janeiro better. The Brazilians had inherited a gentleness “for which one can only bear them respect and affection.” It was striking on the beaches, which displayed every shade of color, “a vast panorama of racial tolerance and maturity which could stand as a model for other peoples.” Still, it was depressing to sense “the gulf between the rich and the poor, the desperation with which people seek to leap over that gulf, and the lack of imagination they show in the enjoyment of their new emoluments when the leap has been successfully completed.” His reputation, by now, had caught up with him: Rio was plastered with “To Death With Kennan” signs, put up by local communists, and he had been accorded four mock funerals. Only in São Paulo, though, where the security was exasperatingly thorough, did he began to feel “like a hunted beast, and to ask myself whether it was really possible that I was as sinister as all this.”
    There were further stops in Montevideo, Buenos Aires, and Lima—the Argentine president, Juan Perón, somehow mistook Kennan for the head of the CIA—but the trip by this time was tiring him out, teaching him little, and making him homesick. He was impressed by a demonstration, in Panama, of how the canal locks worked and, upon arrival in Miami, by the “relaxed, unemotional but utterly objective and self-respecting attitude” with which a railroad ticket clerk explained to a trainee how to change a reservation: “I went out onto the station platform with a sense of deep gratitude and of happy acceptance of this American world, marked as it is by the mediocrity of all that is exalted, and the excellence of all that which is without pretense.” 18
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