Category: Cold War Era
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George F. Kennan: An American Life (2011) by John Lewis Gaddis
According to no less an authority than Henry Kissinger: “George Kennan came as close to authoring the diplomatic doctrine of his era as any diplomat in our history.” John Lewis Gaddis’ Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of the great twentieth century statesman is absolutely brilliant, start to finish. Weighing in at nearly 700 pages, no aspect of…
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The Chairman: John J. McCloy & The Making of the American Establishment (1992) by Kai Bird
They don’t make them like John J. McCloy any more, influential men who serve presidents of both parties on issues of enormous national importance. Kai Bird tells McCloy’s amazing life story in this lengthy single volume biography first published in 1992. McCloy came from rather humble beginnings. His insurance executive father died when he was…
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Master of the Senate: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2002) by Robert Caro
The third volume in Robert Caro’s monumental “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” “Master of the Senate” focuses in on Johnson’s storied tenure in the Senate from 1949 to 1960. Overall, Caro is less critical of Johnson than in previous volumes. He writes in awe of Johnson’s improbably fast and remarkably high ascent within the cloistered…
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Witness (1952) by Whittaker Chambers
“Witness,” Whittaker Chambers’s classic autobiography, was first published in 1952 in the midst of the Red Scare known as McCarthyism. It dropped like a fifty-gallon drum of gasoline onto a bonfire. Chambers was a former Communist operative turned state’s witness. He was raised in a fractured family living in near poverty on Long Island. After…
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The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (2012) by Robert Caro
The latest in Robert Caro’s monumental biography of Lyndon Johnson, “The Passage to Power” opens with LBJ’s perplexing performance in the 1960 Democratic presidential nomination. Perplexing because of Johnson’s uncharacteristic political naiveté and his complete failure to size up his competition. In short, Johnson purposively kept out of the race until just weeks before the…
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The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York (1974) by Robert Caro
Arguably one of the greatest biographies written in the twentieth century, Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York” is an epic piece of historiography on municipal government and urban planning. At roughly 1,200 pages in length, it is not, needless to say, for everyone. Born into a well-to-do, socially…
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The Imperial Presidency (1973) by Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. is one of the more celebrated American historians of the twentieth century, having won two Pulitzer Prizes while teaching at Harvard for many decades. He also had meaningful and relevant stints in government, first as an intelligence officer in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and then as a…
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Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire (1993) by David Remnick
In the summer of 1994 I departed for a semester study abroad program at Moscow State University. It was barely three years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and it would prove to be a wild, often unforgettable experience. A few months before I left, David Remnick’s “Lenin’s Tomb: The Last Days of the…
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Salazar: The Dictator Who Refused to Die (2020) by Tom Gallagher
Portrait of a Pessimist Dictator Antonio Salazar was born the fifth and last child to devout peasant parents in the coastal city of Vimieiro in 1889, a time when roughly eighty percent of Portuguese were illiterate. The future dictator was a brilliant scholar and a sincere Catholic who believed the teachings of the church were…
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