Jordan Michael Smith: Kennan’s Opposite ... Gaddis Wrote the Book on Containment’s Architect But Didn’t Follow It

Jordan Michael Smith, a contributing writer at Salon, has written for the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe.

The premier Cold War historian first met the premier Cold War diplomat in 1974. Then a very junior professor at Ohio University, John Lewis Gaddis asked the already iconic George Frost Kennan if he could interview the former policy planner and ambassador to the USSR for an article he was writing for Foreign Affairs. It was only a brief interview, says Gaddis, and they met "only a couple of other times" before Kennan agreed to let Gaddis become his authorized biographer in 1981. Finally released in November after 30 years of work, George F. Kennan: An American Life is a triumph of scholarship and narrative. It is the best book yet written on the most important American foreign-policy thinker-practitioner of the 20th century.

The book was widely anticipated. Not only was it three decades in the making, but Gaddis has emerged in recent years as one of America’s most prominent historians of world affairs. He teaches a popular course on grand strategy at Yale and writes frequently for the press. He received the National Humanities Medal in 2005 and was a confidant of President George W. Bush. And Gaddis long ago established himself as the foremost chronicler of Kennan: he not only wrote the definitive book on Kennan’s strategy of containment, he penned a series of provocative articles attempting to apply Kennan’s thinking to America’s post-9/11 strategic environment. Kennan was always horrified at misappropriations of his ideas by other policymakers and scholars—he did not foresee that his official biographer would be one of the culprits.

The relationship began on common philosophical ground. It might seem strange that Kennan, in 1981 one of the world’s most respected foreign-policy thinkers, permitted someone he barely knew to have exclusive access to his much sought-after personal diaries and files. But though he was not yet close to Kennan, Gaddis had already launched a mini-revolution in the scholarly understanding of the Cold War. Born in a small town in southern Texas in 1941, Gaddis earned his doctorate from the University of Texas and had his dissertation published in 1972 as The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. Relying on just-released documents, the book transformed the traditional narrative of the Cold War and won several awards, becoming for more than two decades the standard source on the early years of the conflict. "It was an instant success in a way that any Ph.D. might dream about," his friend Paul Kennedy, himself among the top historians working in the United States, later gushed.

Early scholars of the Cold War such as Herbert Feis and Arthur Schlesinger Jr. maintained that the conflict resulted from the Soviet Union’s intention to spread Communism across the globe and America’s corresponding determination to halt that effort. Later came revisionist historians—William A. Williams and Walter LaFeber senior among them—who argued that the Cold War was really the fault of the United States, which wanted to expand markets overseas.

The United States and the Origins of the Cold War

was the definitive text of "post-revisionism," which held that economic considerations were being overblown by the revisionists. Instead of the U.S. being pushed primarily by commercial motivations, Gaddis wrote, "many other factors—domestic politics, bureaucratic inertia, quirks of personality, perceptions, accurate or inaccurate, of Soviet intentions—also affected the actions of Washington officials." The book struck a balance between the myth of American innocence that the first generation of historians had peddled and the equally unbalanced take of the revisionists. It was a middle ground that emphasized the narrow internal and external constraints early Cold War statesman operated within. It was also written and published at the height of the Vietnam War, when a nuanced perspective on American foreign policy seemed impossible to find.

In avoiding the poles of triumphalism and self-flagellation, by playing close attention to the evidence and empathizing with policymakers, Gaddis recalled the perspective of George Kennan...