Feb 23: Book Discussion with John Lewis Gaddis, Author of George F. Kennan: An American Life

On Thursday, February 23, 2012, Roosevelt House will host a book discussion with John Lewis Gaddis, author of George F. Kennan: An American Life and  Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University. Mr. Gaddis will be interviewed by Jonathan Rosenberg, Professor of History, Hunter College

Reception  6:00 pm; Program  6:30 pm

Reservations required.  To RSVP, please click here. 

About the Book:

In the late 1940s, George Kennan wrote two documents, the "Long Telegram" and the "X Article," which set forward 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.

Drawing on extensive interviews with George Kennan and exclusive access to his archives,Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis delivers a revelatory biography of its troubled mastermind. So frank and detailed were these materials that Kennan and Gaddis agreed that the book would not appear until after Kennan's death. It was well worth the wait: the journals give this book a breathtaking candor and intimacy that match its century-long sweep.

About the author: 

John Lewis Gaddis is Robert A. Lovett Professor of History and Director of the Brady-Johnson Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University, where he teaches courses on Cold War history, grand strategy, biography, and historical methods.  Educated at the University of Texas in Austin, he has also taught at Ohio University, the United States Naval War College, the University of Helsinki, Princeton University, and Oxford University.  His most recent books include The Landscape of History:  How Historians Map the Past (2002), Surprise, Security, and the American Experience (2004), The Cold War:  A New History (2005), a new edition of Strategies of Containment:  A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy (2005), and George F. Kennan:  An American Life (2011).  Professor Gaddis has received two awards for undergraduate teaching at Yale, and was a 2005 recipient of the National Humanities Medal.

About the moderator: 

Jonathan Rosenberg teaches U.S. history at Hunter College and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. His research focuses on the history of the United States in a global context. His current project, From the New World: International Politics and Classical Music in Twentieth-Century America, examines how classical musicians, composers, and performing organizations in the United States understood and responded to international developments from the First World War to the Cold War. Rosenberg is the author of How Far the Promised Land?: World Affairs and the American Civil Rights Movement from the First World War to Vietnam (Princeton University Press, 2006). He is the co-author of Kennedy, Johnson, and the Quest for Justice: The Civil Rights Tapes (W.W. Norton, 2003); and he co-edited Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (Oxford University Press, 1999). In addition to contributing articles and reviews to a variety of scholarly publications, Rosenberg has written for The Christian Science Monitor, The Wilson Quarterly, and The Washington Post.