John Lewis Gaddis

John Lewis Gaddis - The Cold War Historian
Blaming Stalin and the Soviets for the Cold War
Part 1: Life of John Lewis Gaddis
John Lewis Gaddis was born in 1941 and thus grew up and came of age during the Cold War, which he would go on to write about as a historian to great acclaim. Gaddis was raised in Texas and received his education at the University of Texas at Austin, where he obtained a Bachelor’s in 1963, a Master’s in 1965, and a Doctorate in 1968 at the age of 27. He taught at Indiana University, Ohio University, founded the Contemporary History Institute, and became a Visiting Professor of Strategy at Naval War College in the mid-70s. He was also a Visiting Professor at Oxford, Princeton, and Helsinki. By 1997, Gaddis had accepted the position of Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, a position he still holds to this day.
In 1997 Gaddis married theater director Toni Dorfman. He divorced from his first wife, Barbara Sue Jackson, whom he married in 1965. He has two children: John Michael and David Matthew.[footnoteRef:2] [2: Encyclopedia, “John Lewis Gaddis,” https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/gaddis-john-lewis-1941]
Growing up in Texas, Gaddis had a front row seat to some of the most dramatic events of the 20th century. The assassination of JFK happened in his home state the same year Gaddis earned his Bachelor’s. He saw firsthand the effects of the Cold War and lived through the standoff with the Soviets over missiles in Cuba. He lived through the tempest that was Vietnam and saw directly how ordinary people were being impacted by the events of the Cold War. It was this interest in his own people and his own time that led him to dedicate his life to studying contemporary history and in particular the Cold War.
At Yale he became known as the “dean of the Cold War” among his students.[footnoteRef:3] One of the reasons he attracted so many students was his approach to the topic: he avoided the trap of political polarization that other professors fell victim to. Instead he chose to view the Cold War the way a contrarian investor views the equities market: he sought out value where others saw waste. To Gaddis, the Cold War could best be understood as “The Long Peace”—a period of time that resembled a peace movement en force than a war among nations.[footnoteRef:4] [3: Mark Alden Branch, “Days of Duck and Cover,” Yale Alumni Magazine, 2000. http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_03/gaddis.html] [4: Anders Stephanson, "Rethinking Cold War History." Review of International Studies 24, no. 1 (1998), 119.]
Gaddis adopted a diplomatic approach to diplomatic history and was drawn to it primarily because these were events that he himself had witnessed all his life. He wanted to understand deeply his own place and people and time, and thus he immersed himself in the world of Cold War history, approaching without bias or prejudice but rather as one with no loyalties to any side.[footnoteRef:5] He rose above the propaganda of the times to see the wizards in both the East and the West, pulling the levers of policy and making the public dance in response. [5: National Endowment for the Humanities. “John Lewis Gaddis.” https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/john-lewis-gaddis]
It has meant a great deal for Gaddis to be named the Robert A. Lovett Professor at Yale. Now that he is able to access important Soviet, Chinese and American documents that could not be accessed decades earlier, he relishes the opportunity of showing the Cold War to students with fresh eyes and through new lenses.[footnoteRef:6] [6: National Endowment for the Humanities. “John Lewis Gaddis.” https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/john-lewis-gaddis]
Part 2: Why I Chose This Historian
I chose this historian because of my own interest in the Cold War, when the threat of nuclear war was so high. The fact that Gaddis has been called the Dean of the Cold War piqued my interest in him and made me want to learn more. I like the idea that tackles the subject with fresh eyes and new understanding, always incorporating new documents and evidence into his thinking and allowing the facts to shape his outlook rather than his outlook to shape his perception of the facts.
Part 3: Notable Works, Writing Career, and Awards
One of the most famous of Gaddis’ works is his biography of George F. Kennan, the American diplomat best known for advocating the policy of containment. Under the pseudonym Mr. X, Kennan wrote “The Sources of Soviet Containment” for the July 1947 edition of Foreign Affairs. The article described why the US should see Soviet Communism as the greatest threat and the nation’s biggest diplomatic challenge—ironic, considering that the US and the Soviets had been allies throughout WW2 and that the US had opposed the only country in Europe activity fighting against the spread of Soviet Communism.[footnoteRef:7] Kennan had been notoriously shy of opening up to anyone—yet he gave Gaddis access to some of the most important primary sources of the Cold War era.[footnoteRef:8] For his biography of Kennan, Gaddis won the Pulitzer Prize, one of the most prestigious awards for writing one can achieve. [7: Robert Paxton, Anatomy of Fascism (New York: Vintage, 2012), 3-5.] [8: Fred Kaplan, “America’s Cold War Sage and His Discontents,” NYTimes, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/books/george-f-kennan-by-john-lewis-gaddis-review.html]
Other important works by Gaddis include The Cold War: A New History, which provides a post-revisionist approach to a topic largely viewed through polarizing lenses; and We Know Now: Rethinking Cold War History, which follows a similar trajectory and incorporates a great deal of new information previously unseen by the world thanks to access to previously sealed documents, granted to Gaddis by nations around the world.
Gaddis is also known for receiving the National Humanities Medal, presented to him by President George W. Bush. This award is very prestigious and is given only to individuals who have helped to deepen the nation’s understanding of the humanities in an unparalleled way. Gaddis was awarded the Medal for his numerous works and for his focus on the intersection between contemporary events and history.[footnoteRef:9] [9: National Endowment for the Humanities. “John Lewis Gaddis.” https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/john-lewis-gaddis]
Part 4: Type of Historian and Gaddis’s Impact
Gaddis is a post-revisionist Cold War historian. Traditional or orthodox Cold War historians essentially repeat the standard, mainstream narratives of the Cold War, typically embracing the points of view of the propagandists and serving as echo chambers of one another, offering nothing new in the way of insight but viewing the Cold War in the terms of good guys (Americans) and bad guys (Soviets). The traditional Cold War historian sees America as fighting the good fight throughout the Cold War, determined to bring democracy, freedom and capitalism to a world thirsty for it and afraid of the iron fist of the Soviets.
Revisionist Cold War historians are the opposite: they rewrite history from a deeply contrarian perspective, challenging mainstream narratives and interpreting history from their own alternative perspective, often flipping the script so that the good guys of the orthodox approach are seen as bad guys in the revisionist approach. Gabriel Kolko is an example of a revisionist Cold War historian, who views the Cold War as largely the fault of the US for pushing its socio-economic principles upon a world unwilling to accept them.[footnoteRef:10] [10: Alpha History, “Cold War Historiography,” https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/cold-war-historiography/]
Post-revisionist Cold War historians like Gaddis synthesize the two: they blame neither Soviets nor Americans for the Cold War but rather view it as an inevitable historical outcome that had to come about as a result of the socio-economic, cultural, political, and militaristic forces rising up at the time. The Cold War could no more have been prevented than a locomotive bearing down at full speed on a stalled car on the tracks 50 yards out. Gaddis does not seek to place blame for the Cold War on anyone. He does not view it in moralistic terms the way Kolko does or in heroic terms like the traditional Cold War historians. He sees it almost as though through innocent eyes that refuse to judge either side. He sees it like a child accepting the world as is, seeking only understanding of the wondrous details that make up the colorful whole.
Gaddis has had a profound impact on other historians, such as Geir Lundestad, who sees Gaddis as more or less the founder of post-revisionist Cold War history. Lundestad states quite explicitly: “No historian has influenced interpretations of the Cold War more than has John Lewis Gaddis.”[footnoteRef:11] Lundestad credits Gaddis with single-handedly starting the school of post-revisionism with his 1972 work The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947. It was in that work that he primarily focused on the interactions of the superpowers instead of on assigning blame (though he did place a degree of guilt on Stalin in the final pages of the book.[footnoteRef:12] Nonetheless, it was this approach that won over Lundestad and others: it was like a breath of fresh air—a realization that history could be written without judgment, without verdict, without sentencing. [11: Geir Lundestad, "The Cold War According to John Gaddis." Cold War History 6, no. 4 (2006), 535.] [12: Geir Lundestad, "The Cold War According to John Gaddis." Cold War History 6, no. 4 (2006), 535.]
Part 5: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History
Gaddis’ book We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History was largely created due to the opening of several government archives: the Soviet archives in 1992, the Eastern European archives, and the historical archives from China. Gaddis now found an opportunity to reassess everything he knew about the Cold War in the light of a trove of new documents hitherto unforeseen by any historian on the face of the earth.
What is interesting about this work is that by examining the newly revealed documents from the Cold War Gaddis begins to adopt more of a traditional Cold War historian perspective. In the book he shows how the primary sources from these archives do make it clear that Stalin and the Soviet Union should be blamed for the Cold War. His intuition, revealed at the end of his 1972 book, is confirmed finally more than two decades later, in this work. He adopts the traditionalist stance that Stalin and his authoritarian government with its Communist ideology and totalitarian practices was truly to blame for the Cold War.
Gaddis believes, for instance, that Stalin’s personality and the Communist ideology caused and developed the Cold War. As Gaddis notes, and as Hitler predicted, WW2 split the world in two so that it was the US and the Soviet Union, now opposed to one another, economically and ideologically. The paranoia of the Cold War that gripped millions around the world was rooted, Gaddis explains, in the personality of Stalin: “Stalin’s choices…transformed the government he ran and even the country he ruled, during the 1930s, into a gargantuan extension of his own pathologically suspicious personality.”[footnoteRef:13] Stalin used terror and coercion to purge dissent. The Gulag Archipelago, experienced personally by Solzhenitsyn after he dared to criticize Stalin’s decisions during WW2, was a prime example of Stalin’s totalitarianism. It was this totalitarianism that Stalin and the Soviets were spreading, like a cancer, around the world through their ideological emissaries, according to Gaddis.[footnoteRef:14] [13: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 9.] [14: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 40.]
Indeed, that cancer had spread to China and was embraced by Mao, who implemented his terroristic actions against his own people. The Great Famine, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution: millions of Chinese died under the totalitarian heal of Mao. China had become infected with the brutal spirit of Stalinism, Gaddis explains.[footnoteRef:15] Stalin wanted world revolution. He wanted the world to be remade in his image the way Mao wanted China reshaped in his. Stalin and Mao were more closely united that Gaddis originally believed back in 1972. Mao invited influence from Stalin—and he received it.[footnoteRef:16] Stalin was a romantic revolutionary and as long as Stalin was the leader of the Soviet Union, the Cold War was inevitable. Stalin made the Cold War inevitable and thus Gaddis places the blame for the Cold War squarely on Stalin: “He alone pursued personal security by depriving everyone else of it: no Western leader relied on terror to the extent that he did.”[footnoteRef:17] Stalin was the virus that risked infecting the rest of world with a desire for violent revolution—that is the conclusion Gaddis reaches in this book. He asserts, moreover, that by 1947 it was the conclusion of the West as well: they knew that Stalin would not cooperate to build a new world order.[footnoteRef:18] [15: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 67-70.] [16: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 162.] [17: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 25.] [18: John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (Oxford University Press, 1997), 26.]
Bibliography
Alpha History, “Cold War Historiography.” https://alphahistory.com/coldwar/cold-war-historiography/
Branch, Mark Alden. “Days of Duck and Cover,” Yale Alumni Magazine, 2000. http://archives.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/00_03/gaddis.html
Encyclopedia. “John Lewis Gaddis,” 2020. https://www.encyclopedia.com/arts/educational-magazines/gaddis-john-lewis-1941
Gaddis, John Lewis. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. Oxford University Press, 1997.
Kaplan, Fred. “America’s Cold War Sage and His Discontents,” NYTimes, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/23/books/george-f-kennan-by-john-lewis-gaddis-review.html
Lundestad, Geir. "The Cold War According to John Gaddis." Cold War History 6, no. 4 (2006): 535-542.
National Endowment for the Humanities. “John Lewis Gaddis,” 2005. https://www.neh.gov/about/awards/national-humanities-medals/john-lewis-gaddis
Paxton, Robert. Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Vintage, 2012.
Stephanson, Anders. "Rethinking Cold War History." Review of International Studies 24, no. 1 (1998): 119-124.