So, there are some serious things going on right now, right?

1. France’s government has just fallen.
2. South Korea’s president is being impeached.
3. Syrian rebels have overtaken Aleppo, and I don’t know who we should root for.
4. The fighting in Ukraine is getting worse and worse.
5. Germany’s government is on life support.
6. Israel and Hezbollah have signed a ceasefire agreement that says that they don’t have to cease their fire.
7. And Gaza? Don’t even ask.

And all that is in addition to every thing that is going on here with the transition to Trump.

Sometimes, you have to think about other things.

Sometimes, you have to read a book. And today I finished one. Daughter of the Cold War by George Kennan’s daughter, Grace. I didn’t think I knew enough about Kennan. I knew he wrote an “anonymous” published letter (signed by “X”) which authored the concept of “containment” for the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries, and because of that became quite famous. I knew that he had been the U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union and to Yugoslavia. I know that he spent years at Princeton. And I knew he lived to be over 100. But those are only tidbits.

I thought that reading a memoir might tell me a bit more about Kennan. I was certainly more interested in him than in her. I thought I would get a unique point of view. And I did. But it was very different from what I expected.

In the first place, the memoir isn’t really about her father, and that is in large part because Grace’s contact with her parents was consistently off and on. Even when she and her somewhat younger sister were very young, their parents pretty well ignored them. They sent them to live with their grandparents in Norway, with more distant relatives in the U.S. Midwest. They boarded Grace at National Cathedral School when she was 10 or 11. They sent her sister to boarding school in Switzerland. Often even when George wasn’t being assigned by the Foreign Service to faraway outposts, he and his wife often chose to leave their children (eventually four) in equally faraway places. They just did not seem to be caring parents. They didn’t attend school events, didn’t come to Grace’s wedding, or come to meet their grandchildren when they were born.

Secondly, while George Kennan looked to the world as the most diplomatic of diplomats, with a demeanor calm in the most tense situations, Grace reports something different, that he was moody, and rigid, and demanding, and selfish, and often emotionally out of control. The Kennans were also continually worried about money, and acted accordingly. None of this did I know.

Finally, and I should have known this, his time as Ambassador to the Soviet Union, right after the end of World War II, only lasted six months. Yes, it should have lasted longer, but on a trip from Moscow elsewhere in Europe, Mr. Diplomat Kennan responded to a question from a journalist that he thought was off the record, but turned out to be very much on the record. He was asked how he liked living in Moscow, in the Soviet Union. And Kennan, thinking of all of the restrictions placed on where he could go and who he could associate with in Moscow, responded that it was fairly similar to being in a prison. The immediate result of this was that Moscow quickly said to Kennan not to bother trying to come back, because they don’t want him in the country. With this, his wife had, I think it was three days, to pack up everything, including the children, and come back home.

As to exactly what Kennan did in his decades at Princeton is not clear. He wrote several books. Did he also teach? I just don’t know.

Grace herself had a terrific childhood if you measure it by the places she got to see, the people she met, and the languages she learned. But it was a terrible childhood if you measure it by parental affection and support, by having a stable homelife, and by staying in one place long enough to make friends.

She was married twice, first to a McClatchy of the newspaper family, which got her involved with San Francisco society and very close to the Kennedys, especially Bobby. She had three McClatchy children (one now head of the company) and plodded along with a life she never expected, until she learned from an acquaintance that her husband was gay (as now are two of her children), something that explained his aversion to sex. She had a second marriage to a man who felt he was in an open marriage, even if she wasn’t.  And she had an extended affair with  a Russian film producer, who just happened to have a wife on the other side of the world, and young children. Her emotional reactions to men she found appealing were not very praiseworthy, to say the least.

She went from one job to another until she was in her late 50s, when she and another woman started a consulting business  for those who needed assistance navigating Soviet bureaucracy, a gamble at first, but then something that got her into all sorts of activities, forst in the USSR, and then in Russia.  Later for four years she ran a women’s empowerment NGO in Kiev. The chapters about these years were extremely interesting.

Her book is very well written and readable. Her life, so different from mine, has been interesting, to be sure, even if often distressed or uncomfortable.

I believe Grace is still alive at 92, living in New York. I am happy I read the book. Learned quite a bit. Icsee there is a video of her talking about the book on the Wilson Center website. I will watch it.