Gaddis writes that the "relationship could not have been better. But neither Gaddis nor Kennan anticipated the date of his death would be 2005, when Kennan was 101. Gaddis, who was born in Cotulla and earned his doctorate at the University of Texas, started working on the biography in 1981, when Kennan agreed to cooperate, with the presumption that the book would be published a few years after his death.
No one is better suited to writing about Kennan than Gaddis, a Yale University expert on the Cold War and the author of numerous historical analyses of the postwar conflict with the Soviets. Through his voluminous writings, he crafted the post-World War II policy of Soviet containment, laying the "intellectual foundations for an American grand strategy" that could be used against the Soviet Union, "without resort to war or appeasement," as John Lewis Gaddis writes in his new biography, "George F. Kennan, a Princeton University graduate who grew up in Milwaukee, Wisc., and became the most influential Russian expert of the 20th century. And that helped attract one of the most brilliant, baffling and prescient diplomats in U.S. Some might argue that we're still bumbling.īut in the mid-1920s, Congress passed the Rogers Act, establishing a professional Foreign Service with standards for admissions, salary and promotion. Until 1924, the United States bumbled along in foreign policy.
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