The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis

With this book, a major element of American history was analyzed. The Cold War is rampant with American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Strategies of Containment outlines American policy from the end of World War II until present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Inquiries into the History of the Cold War, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History, The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past, Surprise, Security, and the American Experience, and The Cold War: A New History. Dr. Gaddis received his PhD from the University of Texas in 1968; he currently is on a leave of absence, but he is a professor at Yale . At the University, his focus is Cold War history. Gaddis is one of the few men who have actually done a complete biography of George Kennan, and Gaddis even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012.

Gaddis diligently researches many of the policies of the Cold War, beginning with George Kennan and his original policy of containment. He did not believe in making everyone similar to the United States, but instead believed that diplomacy should be handled as to what were vital American interests and what situations were not vital to American security. He believed to envision what was a threat to the United States, there should be a standard as to what exactly should be considered to the interests of the United States, and anything...

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...containment. By breaking down containment in this manner, historians and researchers alike can look at containment like never before. Instead of containment all being viewed as the same, Gaddis differentiates among many of the different presidents to prove the different types of containment and how each president believed their type of containment would be successful in handling the spread of communism. By beginning with Kennan, the original believer in containment and ending with Kissinger, who used a hybrid of many of the different approaches, the reader can fully understand the progress, both positive and negative. The book is an essential read for those who want to perform research on cold war policy in the United States, as well as political decisions on many of the Presidents throughout the cold war, as the book is full of sources, both primary and secondary.