John Lewis Gaddis

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. Perhaps his most famous work is 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, but 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 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.