Eric Alterman has this to say about George Kennan and John Gaddis:
Had Kennan not lived so long, Gaddis might have done a fair job as his biographer. But as Kennan, despite remaining an old-fashioned conservative in the tradition of Walter Lippmann and Hans Morgenthau, moved further and further to the dovish/diplomatic wing of foreign policy debate, his biographer rushed headlong in the opposite direction. Kennan, for instance, strongly opposed Bush’s Iraq adventure, while Gaddis sounded like Dick Cheney on steroids during this period. Cautioning Democrats not to take issue with intellectual currents underlying Bush’s foreign policy, Gaddis argued: “The world now must be made safe for democracy, and this is no longer just an idealistic issue; it’s an issue of our own safety,” later adding, “A global commitment to remove remaining tyrants could complete a process Americans began 232 years ago.”
The result, sadly, is a biography, George F. Kennan: An American Life, in which the author not only sides emotionally and intellectually with his subject’s adversaries but, in many instances, does not even try to do justice to his subject’s arguments.
It must be significant that Kennan agreed to Gaddis as his biographer before Gaddis wrote The Long Peace – before that, I suppose it was not clear how different were their respective directions.
7 comments
March 15, 2012 at 9:03 am
sleepyirv
Frank Costigliola’s review, worth reading in its entirety.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/dec/08/is-this-george-kennan/?pagination=false
March 15, 2012 at 10:21 am
eric
Yes, it is. Thanks for that.
March 16, 2012 at 8:09 am
Anderson
Yah, I was rather surprised by the puff-piece Louis Menand published on Gaddis’s book. It seemed inconceivable that Gaddis could write a fair biography of Kennan.
March 16, 2012 at 8:35 am
eric
Perhaps no more surprising than the piece Updike wrote on Shlaes. Possibly the New Yorker needs a more politico-economically focused modern US historian to review books.
March 16, 2012 at 10:52 am
sleepyirv
I dunno, the Gaddis biography is a detailed, well-written, and the best researched book possible on Kennan and its poorest arguments are on issues people who read biographies of Cold Wars figures don’t particularly care about. I can understand why critics would love it, especially if they go into the book ignorant about Keenan’s final fight against W.
Shales book, on the other hand, is pure whackadoodle.
March 16, 2012 at 1:35 pm
Anderson
“Perhaps no more surprising than the piece Updike wrote on Shlaes.”
That was one of the top-10 “WTF?” moments in New Yorker history. If you’d made a list of 500 Americans competent to review that book, Updike wouldn’t have made the cut.
March 19, 2012 at 10:08 am
Ralph Hitchens
Well, I’m a bit puzzled. Updike was not an economist but 1) neither is Amity Shlaes, apparently, as she wholly ignores the stubborn econometric facts which contradict her wandering thesis, and 2) Updike lived through the Depression as a young boy, and the mini-memoir with which he concludes his review captures the essence of the experience at least as well as Shlaes. I thought it was a generous review of a pretty bad book.
And, I admit to liking Kissinger’s review of Gaddis’s book.