1941–
The post-revisionist historian who, after the Soviet archives opened, argued Stalin bore primary responsibility for the Cold War
It took Stalin, responding predictably to his own authoritarian, paranoid, and narcissistic predisposition, to lock the chain of causation into place.
An American Cold War historian whose 1972 first book, The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, founded the post-revisionist school by arguing that neither superpower bore sole responsibility. After the Soviet archives opened in the 1990s, his 1997 We Now Know reversed course: using newly available documents, Gaddis contended that Stalin's personality and decisions were the decisive cause of the Cold War, a shift widely seen as a return to the orthodox interpretation. He won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for his authorized biography of George F. Kennan, and as Yale's Robert A. Lovett Professor was hailed by The New York Times as 'the dean of Cold War historians.' His intellectual arc from post-revisionism back toward orthodoxy is itself a map of how Cold War history has been rewritten as evidence has emerged.
Activities and affiliations
Career Timeline
- 1963B.A., University of Texas at Austin
- 1968Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin
- 1969–1997Professor, Ohio University (Distinguished Professor 1983)
- 1972Published The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941–1947: founded post-revisionist school
- 1987Founded the Contemporary History Institute, Ohio University
- 1991Helped establish the Cold War International History Project, Wilson Center
- 1997–현재Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History, Yale University
- 2012Pulitzer Prize for Biography for George F. Kennan: An American Life
Related historical events
Policy-Facing Grand Strategist and the Bush Connection
After the Cold War ended, Gaddis did not stay inside the world of Cold War scholarship but entered American policy debate directly. In 1991 he helped found the Woodrow Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project and served on its advisory board, giving institutional support to the practice of multinational teams of researchers reading the archives of many countries together.
After the attacks of 11 September 2001, Gaddis's public statements took on a clearly political character. In articles such as "A Grand Strategy of Transformation" in Foreign Policy in 2002 and "Grand Strategy in the Second Term" in Foreign Affairs in 2005, he pushed the discussion of grand strategy into policy prescription. At the time of the invasion of Iraq he argued that "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.", and during the occupation of Iraq he asserted that Bush had established America "as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001." The historian James Chace saw him as supporting an "informal imperial policy abroad", and Gaddis himself regarded preventive war as a constructive element of the American tradition and argued that there was no meaningful difference between preventive and pre-emptive war. He was on terms to pass advice to Bush's speechwriters and was described as an "open admirer" of the 43rd president. After leaving office, Bush took up painting at Gaddis's suggestion.
This closeness to policy fuelled debate about his standing within the profession. Gaddis had been the leading figure of post-revisionism, which drew on the release of Western government documents, American and British among them, through the 1970s to move beyond orthodoxy and revisionism; but with his focus on Stalin's character and role and his leaning towards an American perspective, he is now widely regarded as an orthodox historian rather than a post-revisionist. In the 1990s he debated publicly with the revisionist historian Bruce Cumings, who criticised him as moralistic and lacking objectivity. Of his 2005 book The Cold War, Tony Judt summed it up 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," and David S. Painter called it a "carefully crafted defense of US policy and policymakers" that was "not comprehensive." Gaddis's later work thus shows that the writing of Cold War history changes not only with the growth of the evidence but also with the historian's own political choices.