Michael Burleigh
His Marvellous Medicine
George F Kennan: An American Life
By John Lewis Gaddis
Allen Lane/The Penguin Press 784pp £30 order from our bookshop
Contemporary American political biography is a remarkably distinguished genre, whether one thinks of presidential lives (David McCullough on Truman, Stephen Ambrose on Eisenhower and Robert Dallek on Kennedy and Johnson) or dual or group portraits, such as Kai Bird on the brothers Bundy, and Walter Isaacson and Evan Thomas on the foreign policy ‘Wise Men’ – including George Frost Kennan – who guided the US through the early Cold War. Scholars such as Richard Immerman have also done much to correct caricatures of Eisenhower’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles.
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