George F. Kennan, John Lewis Gaddis
George F. Kennan, John Lewis Gaddis
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George F. Kennan
An American Life

Author: John Lewis Gaddis

Narrator: Malcolm Hilgartner

Unabridged: 31 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 01/10/2012


Synopsis

Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives, an eminent scholar of the Cold War delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind. In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the Long Telegram and the X Article, which set forward the strategy of containment that would define US policy toward the Soviet Union for the next four decades. This achievement alone would qualify him as the most influential American diplomat of the Cold War era. But he was also an architect of the Marshall Plan, a prizewinning historian, and would become one of the most outspoken critics of American diplomacy, politics, and culture during the last half of the twentieth century. Now the full scope of Kennans long life and vast influence is revealed by one of todays most important Cold War scholars. Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis began this magisterial history almost 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 Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennans death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its centurylong sweep. We see Kennans insecurity as a Midwesterner among elites at Princeton, his budding dissatisfaction with authority and the status quo, his struggles with depression, his gift for satire, and his sharp insights on the policies and people he encountered. Kennan turned these sharp analytical gifts upon himself, even to the point of regularly recording dreams. The result is a remarkably revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.This is a landmark work of history and biography that reveals the vast influence and rich inner landscape of a life that both mirrored and shaped the century it spanned.

About John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. His books include The Cold War: A New History, George F. Kennan: An American Life, and We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Micah on January 13, 2021

"George F. Kennan: An American Life" by John Lewis Gaddis, is everything one could ever want from a biography. Incredibly detailed, and thoughtfully written. It feels much of the time as if Kennan himself is speaking directly to you. This is a stellar book about an incredibly complex man, and an oft......more

Goodreads review by Richard on January 29, 2012

It's a pity, as with so many modern biographers who seek to be definitive, that Gaddis could not have done the short version for those of us with a job and a life. Having said that, I was engrossed from beginning to end, and couldn't bear to skip even one of the 700 pages, despite the book consuming......more

Goodreads review by Alexw on July 19, 2018

This exhaustive 700 page biography was made possible by the author having access to the journals that Kennan kept during his 101 year old life. Kennan was brilliant, won 2 Pulitzers and his input helped shape the Marshall Plan that Europe received after World War 2 to get over that devastation, Cold......more

Goodreads review by Fred on December 26, 2012

Kennan's major claim to fame is to have anticipated by several years the American response to post-war Soviet expansionism, and to have given that response an intelligent and articulate high-brow exposition. On any given foreign policy issue, however, he was no more likely than chance to be correct,......more

Goodreads review by Brian on March 25, 2017

Extremely thorough biography of George Kennan, the intellectual architect of containment. Oddly enough, the book left me disliking Kennan more and less convinced of the importance of his role in establishing U.S. Cold War strategy. He got the big picture right in his famous "Long Telegram" and Mr. X......more