约翰·刘易斯·加迪斯

约翰·刘易斯·加迪斯（英语：John Lewis Gaddis，1941年4月2日—），美国政治学家、历史学家及作家，出生于德州科图拉。因长年研究冷战和大战略，而被纽约时报誉为“冷战史泰斗”。他是耶鲁大学军事和海军历史的罗伯特·A·洛维特讲座教授。他写的20世纪美国政治家乔治·凯南的官方传记，获得2012年普利策传记文学奖。

John Lewis Gaddis (born April 2, 1941) is an American Cold War historian, political scientist, and writer. He is the Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale University. He is best known for his work on the Cold War and grand strategy, and he has been hailed as the "Dean of Cold War Historians" by The New York Times. Gaddis is also the official biographer of the prominent 20th-century American diplomat and historian George F. Kennan. George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011), his biography of Kennan, won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Biography

Gaddis attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving his B.A. in 1963, M.A. in 1965, and Ph.D. 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 1975–1977 academic years, Gaddis was a visiting professor of Strategy at the Naval War College. In the 1992–1993 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 2000–2001 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. 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".

Scholarship

Gaddis is a well-known historian for his writing about the Cold War. Perhaps his most famous work is Strategies of Containment (1982; rev. 2005), which analyzes the theory and practice of containment that was employed against the Soviet Union by Cold War American presidents. His 1983 distillation of post-revisionist scholarship also guided Cold War research.

We Now Know (1997) presented an analysis of the Cold War through the Cuban Missile Crisis that incorporated new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc. It is one of the first attempts to write the Cold War's history after it ended.

The Cold War (2005) is an examination of the history and effects of the Cold War in a more removed context, 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," and David S. Painter writing that it was a "carefully crafted defense of US policy and policymakers" that was "not comprehensive."

Gaddis's 2011 biography of George Kennan garnered multiple prizes, including a Pulitzer.

John Nagl described Gaddis's 2018 book On Grand Strategy as "a book that should be read by every American leader or would-be leader".