John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis
Born	1941 Cotulla, Texas
Residence	United States
Citizenship	United States
Nationality	United States
Fields	Foreign relations of the United States
Institutions	Ohio University Yale University Naval War College University of Oxford Princeton University
Alma mater	University of Texas, Austin
Doctoral advisor	Robert A. Divine

John Lewis Gaddis (born 1941) is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the seminal 20th-century American statesman George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Biography

Gaddis was born in Cotulla, Texas, in 1941. He attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving his BA in 1963, MA in 1965, and PhD in 1968, the latter under the direction of Robert Divine. Gaddis then taught briefly at Indiana University Southeast, before joining Ohio University in 1969. At Ohio, he founded and directed the Contemporary History Institute, and was named a distinguished professor in 1983.

In the 1975–77 academic years, Gaddis was a Visiting Professor of Strategy at the Naval War College. In the 1992–93 academic year, he was the Harmsworth Visiting Professor of American History at Oxford. He has also held visiting positions at Princeton University and the University of Helsinki. He served as president of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations in 1992.

In 1997, he moved to Yale University to become the Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History. In the 2000–01 academic year, Gaddis was the George Eastman Professor at Oxford, the second scholar (after Robin Winks) to have the honor of being both Eastman and Harmsworth professor. In 2005, he received the National Humanities Medal. He sits on the advisory committee of the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project, which he helped establish in 1991.

Gaddis is also known for his close relationship with the late George Kennan and his wife, whom Gaddis described as "my companions". He was also fairly close to President George W. Bush, making suggestions to his speech writers, and has been described as an "overt admirer" of the 43rd President. After leaving office, Bush took up painting as a hobby at Gaddis's recommendation.

Scholarship

Gaddis is probably the best known historian writing in English about the Cold War. His most famous work is perhaps the highly influential Strategies of Containment (1982; rev. 2005), which analyzes in detail the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents, and his 1983 distillation of post-revisionist scholarship similarly became a major channel for guiding subsequent Cold War research.

We Now Know (1997), an analysis of the Cold War through to the Cuban Missile Crisis that incorporated new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc, was likewise predicted as "likely to set the parameters for a whole new generation of scholarship", while also praised as "the first coherent and sustained attempt to write the Cold War's history since it ended."

The Cold War (2005), praised by John Ikenberry as a "beautifully written panoramic view of the Cold War, full of illuminations and shrewd judgments," was described as an examination of the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context than had been previously possible, and won Gaddis the 2006 Harry S. Truman Book Prize. Critics were rather less impressed, with Tony Judt summarising the book as "a history of America's cold war: as seen from America, as experienced in America, and told in a way most agreeable to many American readers."

His 2011 biography of George Kennan garnered multiple prizes, including a Pulitzer.

Gaddis is known for arguing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and role in history constituted one of the most important causes of the Cold War. Within the field of U.S. diplomatic history, he is most associated with the concept of post-revisionism, the idea of moving past the revisionist and orthodox interpretations of the origins of the Cold War to embrace what were (in the 1970s) interpretations based upon the then-growing availability of government documents from the United States, Great Britain and other western government archives.

Awards and distinctions

Former U.S. President George W. Bush and first lady Laura Bush stand with 2005 National Humanities Medal recipient John Lewis Gaddis on November 10, 2005 in the Oval Office at the White House.

• 2012 – Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography 
• 2012 – American History Book Prize 
• 2011 – National Book Critics Circle Award, Biography 
• 2006 – Harry S. Truman Book Award 
• 2005 – National Humanities Medal 
• 2003 – Yale Phi Beta Kappa DeVane Medalist for undergraduate teaching 
• 2000 – Eastman Professor at the University of Oxford 
• 1996 – Fulbright Scholar to Poland 
• 1995 – Fellowship of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 
• 1995 – Wilson Center Fellowship 
• 1993 – Whitney H. Shepardson Fellowship 
• 1992 – Harmsworth Professor of American History at the University of Oxford 
• 1992 – Presidency of the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations 
• 1986 – Guggenheim Fellowship 
• 1983 – Distinguished Professor of Ohio University 
• 1980 – Fulbright Scholar to Finland 
• 1973 – Bancroft Prize 
• 1973 – National Historical Society Prize 
• 1973 – Stuart L. Bernath Prize 

Selected publications

Books

• US edition
  UK edition

Articles and chapters

See also

• Containment
• Historiography of the Cold War

External links

• Appearances on C-SPAN