George Kennan died a very different man than the one whom John Lewis Gaddis portrays in his biography

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....