What an amazing biography John Lewis Gaddis has written in his Pulitzer Prize winning George F. Kennan: An American Life. For the next 100 years this book that will be a resource for researchers about the Cold War and US Foreign Policy in the 20th Century.  It contains amazing insight built upon impeccable resources.

For all practical purposes, the Cold War shaped the second half of the 20th Century. And the person most responsible for shaping the undergirding philosophies of the American strategy to the Cold War was George Kennan. His “long telegram” from Moscow in the late 1940’s influenced every American leader for the next several decades. His anonymously authored “X Article” cemented the US consensus that the Soviet Union was a threat to be dealt with through a system of containment and harassment, but not an actual war.

You can’t study American foreign affairs in the 20th Century without studying George Kennan. As Gaddis writes about Kennan, he had a historians consciousness on the past which gave him a visionaries perspective on the future. I enjoyed how Gaddis would take aspects of Kennan’s life and use them as ways to give context to the readers understanding of the man. For instance, Regarding Kennan’s color blindness, Gaddis compares it to his view of the world. At the point in the narrative when Kennan is just about to send the long telegram, Gaddis describes how clothes were put on the bed for Kennan to wear that day, then he writes, “That was George Kennan on the evening of becoming famous. He saw what others saw, but in different colors.”

This is a great book, one that will stand the test of time. Gaddis had complete access to all of Kennan’s writings, journals, personal letters, etc. He interviewed Kennan and all of those close to him on numerous occasions. You simply can’t get better information or research than what Gaddis had at his disposal, and the book reflects that. It’s exhaustive — actually a bit too long for the average reader — and factual. The narrative style is engaging and interesting.

Bottom line, if you consider yourself an amateur historian…or somebody who is interested in the history of American foreign affairs…or somebody interested in the Soviet Union….or even somebody who just wants to better understand the Russian people, this is a must read book.

Buy it at Amazon by clicking the photo above and I’ll donate the commission to PathLight.