George kennan biography

Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his personal papers, John Lewis Gaddis, former Wilson Center fellow and Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University, will discuss his latest book, George F. Kennan: An American Life , which delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind.

In the late s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the "Long Telegram" and the "X Article," which outlined the strategy of containment that would define U.S. 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 Kennan's long life and vast influence is revealed by one of today's most important Cold War scholars.

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 Kennan's death.

We see Kennan's 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 revealing view of how this greatest of Cold War strategists came to doubt his strategy and always doubted himself.

The Honorable Jane Harman, Director, President and CEO of the Woodrow Wilson Center

American diplomat, political scientist, and historian (–)

"George Kennan" redirects here. For the explorer, see George Kennan (explorer).

George Frost Kennan (February 16, – March 17, ) was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".

During the late s, his writings confirmed the Truman Doctrine and inspired the U.S. foreign policy of containing the USSR. His "Long Telegram" from Moscow in and the subsequent article "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" argued that the Soviet regime was inherently expansionist and that its influence had to be "contained" in areas of vital strategic importance to the United States. These texts provided justification for the Truman administration's new anti-Soviet policy. Kennan played a major role in the development of definitive Cold

"Magisterial."—Anatol Lieven, Financial Times

"[A] lively, thoughtful and provocative biography. . . . Costigliola’s book shows convincingly the interconnections between all of Kennan’s thinking, through different phases of his life and through changing international circumstances."—Harold James, Times Literary Supplement

"As diplomat, historian and public intellectual, George Kennan was arguably the most interesting American of his time. In this magnificent biography, Professor Costigliola presents the man in full: gifted, prophetic, prickly, prejudiced, patriotic, alienated from modernity and steadfast in his devotion to principle. A remarkable biography of a remarkable individual."—Andrew Bacevich, The Spectator

"A compelling synthesis of Kennan as elitist, committed Russophile and Germanophile, ambivalent romantic, tortured soul, and policy sage."—Ivan Krastev and Leonard Benardo, New Statesman

"Absorbing, skillfully wrought. . . . Consistently fascinating."—Fredrik Logevall, Foreign Affairs

"Compelling. . . . [An] emphatic and sympathetic biography."—Geoffrey Roberts, Irish Times

"Like other Kennan biographies, Costigliola focuses on his professional life and legacy. But the author is also adept at showing how Kennan’s personality shaped his professional life. Costigliola has given us a rich, insightful, and powerful portrait of this legendary American."—Terry W. Hartle, Christian Science Monitor

"Informative, clear-eyed, and compelling."—Glenn C. Altschuler, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"The fullest portrait of Kennan yet available."—Patrick Iber, New Republic

"A major biography. . . . A masterly account of a key and influential figure in the perennial debate over the means and ends of US foreign policy in the postwar era and beyond. We remain deeply in Costigliola’s debt for a superbly enlightened contribution."—J. E. Spence, International Affairs

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Biography of George F. Kennan written by John Lewis Gaddis

George F. Kennan: An American Life is a nonfiction book about U.S. diplomat George F. Kennan by John Lewis Gaddis that won the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

describes this as "an engaging portrait of a globetrotting diplomat whose complicated life was interwoven with the Cold War and America’s emergence as the world’s dominant power". In The New York Times in November , Henry Kissinger said, the book "bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants". In April and after the Pulitzer prize was announced, Jonathan Haslam of The Guardian presented its review as a discussion of a "Pulitzer-winning life of an opponent of McCarthy and George Bush".Fred Kaplan's review in The New York Times described the book as "an epic work—probing, engrossing, occasionally revelatory—but also a well-timed one".

According to a review in The Economist, the circumstances of the biography were that Gaddis began conducting interviews and accumulating papers from Kennan in with the expectation that a posthumous biography would be published. Kennan was 78 at the time, but he did not die until , which changed the context in which the book was published due to contemporaneous concerns about "economic misery and questions about the future of American dominance in international affairs". Kennan granted access on the condition that the publication be posthumous.

Gideon Rachman of The Financial Times describes Kennan as "a rare example of a diplomat who changed history through the power of his ideas and the clarity of his writing". Kissinger reminds us that "the highest positio