From the S&S archives:
Kennan is silent on Russian move; will stay in State Dept.

BONN, Oct. 6 — George F. Kennan, whose recall as the U.S. ambassador has been requested by Soviet Russia, said today that he plans to continue serving in the State Department..

He said he has no intention of returning to private life, which he left to take the Moscow appointment last spring.

Kennan refused to answer any questions at a brief press conference here concerning the Soviet request for his recall or on matters, concerning Russia and the Iron Curtain in general.

One of these questions was whether, while remaining outside Russia, he would analyze and report to the State Department on events going on inside the Soviet Union such as the Soviet Communist Party Congress now in progress.

"I am here to await the arrival of my family from Russia. What I do after that depends on my orders. from the U.S. Government," Kennan said.

Kennan said his wife and two children, Christopher, 7, and Wendy Antonia, who was born last May in Bonn, were to leave Moscow Thursday — "if there are no hitches" — for Berlin in the U.S. Embassy's Air Force C47 plane.

The Ambassador said he would go from Bonn to Berlin to meet them if it was convenient. The Kennans will remain in Bonn after that for several days while they sort out family affairs and await instructions from the State Department.

Kennan, the foremost American State Department expert on Russia, left the Department to write and lecture when he was called back to become Ambassador last spring. He said, however, today that he did not expect to return to his private studies in the near future.

Kennan, in declining to say anything more about his recent experiences in Russia, referred reporters to the Soviet note asking for his recall and Secretary of State Dean Acheson's reply. "I am not in a position to add anything," he said.

The Russians termed Kennan "persona non grata" on the basis of an interview he gave Sept. 19 in Berlin while he was en route to London.

The ambassador told reporters that diplomats of free countries in Moscow must live in an "ice-cold" atmosphere isolated completely from the Soviet peoples.

He added that the enforced isolation he had found in Moscow was almost as bad as that he experienced as an interned diplomat in Germany early in World War II.