George F. Kennan an American life J. L. Gaddis

Three decades in the making, the definitive, authorized biography of one of Cold War America's most prominent and most troubled grand strategists In the late 1940s, a bright but relatively obscure American diplomat named George Kennan wrote two documents, the "long telegram" and the "X" article, which set out the strategic vision that would define United States policy toward the Soviet Union until that country's collapse four and a half decades later. It would propel Kennan to dizzying heights of fame and influence. It would also bring him lasting bitterness and regret. George Kennan's was a life of contradictions. The most influential American diplomat of the early Cold War era, later a prizewinning historian, Kennan would become an outspoken critic of American diplomacy, politics, and culture. A man of great outward dignity and self-confidence, he wrestled throughout his life with passionate emotions, and with severe, almost paralyzing, self-doubt. John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history thirty years ago, interviewing Kennan frequently and gaining complete access to his voluminous diaries and other personal papers. So frank and detailed were these materials that both agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan's death. The result is a biography whose candor and intimacy match its century-long sweep. We see Kennan's insecurity as a midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with the Foreign Service, his despair about his own country even as he was making himself the shrewdest American expert on the Soviet Union, his struggles with depression, his sharp sense of humor, his extraordinary insights on the policies and people he encountered, rendered in some of the most evocative writing of his era. Remarkably, Kennan regularly turned his analytical prowess upon himself, even to the point of recording dreams. Gaddis's biography is an astonishingly revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists rejected the strategy that made his name, and came close to rejecting himself. A profound work of history and biography, George F. Kennan illuminates, with equal brilliance, the rich inner landscape of a life and the grand outer landscape of an age.