John Lewis Gaddis’s official biography of George F. Kennan—historian, lover of Russian culture, State Department Soviet specialist, and, most notably, author of the containment doctrine, a creation he came to deeply resent—is not simply remarkable because it was so long in the making; nor only because it presents Cold War history from a totally new perspective (namely, that of an American who, by virtue of his career in the Foreign Service, was in self-inflicted exile, and often felt more a friend to those abroad than to his own countrymen)…. Read More