Despite its problems of perspective and balance, Gaddis’s George F. Kennan remains a monumental and absorbing book. His prose is elegant and lively. Though Kennan will likely attract other biographers, none will be able to match the research on display here ... He is often perceptive, sensitive, and reflective ... The biography, however, devotes only one paragraph to recounting the substance of Kennan’s...early and influential endorsement of Senator Eugene McCarthy in the 1968 Democratic presidential primaries on grounds of McCarthy’s opposition to the war. The biography suffers from this neglect ... Though he captures much of the man’s complexity, Gaddis’s depiction of Kennan is ultimately clipped and flattened.
... magisterial ... bids fair to be as close to the final word as possible on one of the most important, complex, moving, challenging and exasperating American public servants ... We can be grateful to John Lewis Gaddis for bringing Kennan back to us, thoughtful, human, self-centered, contradictory, inspirational — a permanent spur as consciences are wont to be. Masterfully researched, exhaustively documented, Gaddis’s moving work gives us a figure with whom, however one might differ on details, it was a privilege to be a contemporary ... Gaddis had the acumen to follow Kennan’s tortured quest and to convince us that Kennan had indeed reached his mountaintop.
... well worth the wait ... works brilliantly as a piece of intellectual history, and as a biography of a fascinating and complex man. Fortunately, both Gaddis and Kennan write beautifully. Long quotations from Kennan’s work light up the book ... Gaddis has the intellectual confidence to disagree with his hero’s judgments ... Indeed it is one of the strengths of his book that while the author is a huge admirer of Kennan, he does not attempt to disguise or excuse his failings.
... in its documentary thoroughness and lucidity about his enigmatic, fragile personality must stand as the definitive portrait ... doubly significant and a new essential in any reading, recreational or scholarly, in the history of American foreign policy.
... turns out to be not only an epic work —probing, engrossing, occasionally revelatory — but also a well-timed one. It appears just as its subject has been nearly forgotten and long enough after the 20th century has passed to appreciate his towering significance ... The book may not match the sweeping elegance of Edmund Morris’s series on Theodore Roosevelt or Robert Caro’s on Lyndon Johnson (or, for that matter, Kennan’s own 1967 memoir). But Mr. Gaddis is a fine enough writer; the story flows breezily; and several scenes are vivid, even gripping — most notably the accounts of Kennan’s private meetings with Franklin Roosevelt and, much later, his embrace from Mikhail S. Gorbachev ... Alas, Mr. Gaddis’s masterly telling of how, in this sense, Kennan became Kennan suggests that we may have seen the last of his kind.
Embracing and explaining the paradoxes that made Kennan has been Gaddis's uneasy task. The accomplished, Pulitzer-winning result tells us a good deal about postwar America.
Gaddis goes far beyond the simplified generalizations of newspaper obituaries to picture Kennan as a complicated and contradictory genius who could awe people one day and exasperate them the next ... Gaddis also takes pains to point out Kennan's flaws, to depict him as thoughtful, austere and melancholy ... Gaddis quotes a lot of Kennan's unofficial writing, and even the throwaway lines seem to shine ... Gaddis' biography may offer more George F. Kennan than most general readers care to consume. But this single man played a huge role in the history of the last half of the 20th century. He deserves a weighty biography.
... timely and authoritative ... Gaddis captures why Kennan’s dispatches deserved to be immortalized ... Here is where one can at least gently criticize Gaddis’s book, the sort of tome that is invariably called 'magisterial' and in this case for the most part is. Gaddis subtitles his book — an authorized biography nearly 30 years in the making — 'An American Life,' and goes on at great length about Kennan’s critiques of the country of his birth. But Gaddis makes a far less convincing case that Kennan was anywhere near the student of the United States that he was of Russia.
... a chronicle that makes the most of its abundant sources and proves worthy of its subject. Mr. Gaddis captures the full range of Kennan's life and career and reveals the complicated inner personality behind the public mask ... It is one of the few weaknesses of Mr. Gaddis's biography that he deals with Kennan's output in this later period too brusquely ... Mr. Gaddis's admiration for Kennan is obvious, but it does not stop him from portraying his subject's flaws ... a major achievement. One senses that Kennan himself, at his best a bold truth-teller, would have been pleased.
While Gaddis is less interested in the cultural impact of Kennan as just outlined, he is a lively writer who places Kennan in a distinct social and cultural context, not solely a world of bureaucrats, social policy, and diplomatic meetings. Indeed, the first chapters of the book position Kennan as an American figure similar to F. Scott Fitzgerald ... Gaddis's biography itself is a long one, and it's unlikely that it will be surpassed any time soon ... the greatest achievement of George F. Kennan to my mind is not its comprehensiveness or literary finesse, but its respect for a certain intellectual and political type that seems to have been lost, or at least marginalized, with the end of the Cold War. In our age of rampant campaign donor appointments and foreign policy debacles in Iraq and Afghanistan, Gaddis's book serves as a crucial reminder of the value and importance of deep thought and old-fashioned commitment over the course of a long career ... Kennan reads like a character in a John le Carré novel, but his life was all too real. We owe Gaddis a great deal for bringing him in from the cold.
Adroitly managed (if occasionally barnacled with extraneous facts), Gaddis’s work is a major contribution to Kennan’s legacy and the history of American foreign policy.
Gaddis has had unique access to official papers, Kennan's own publications and documents, the diary that he kept throughout his life and his correspondence, especially to his sister. This access will be especially revealing for those interested in discovering more about the period from 1944 to 1952, which saw victory in World War II, the development of the atomic bomb, the adoption of containment, the beginning of the Cold War and the adoption of the Truman Doctrine ... Gaddis also provides intriguing accounts of Kennan's work with the Marshall Plan ... f equal interest are his later life at Princeton's School of Advanced Studies and his relations with subsequent Presidents ... A well-rounded treatment of the life of a man who made significant contributions to his country and the world at large.
