Beware Biographers
Jackson Lears: Kennan and Containment, 24 May 2012
George Kennan: An American Life
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin, 784 pp., £30, December 2011,978 1 59420 312 1 Show More
by John Lewis Gaddis.
Penguin, 784 pp., £30, December 2011,
Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War
by Frank Costigliola.
Princeton, 533 pp., £24.95, January 2012,978 0 691 12129 1 Show More
by Frank Costigliola.
Princeton, 533 pp., £24.95, January 2012,
“... a willingness to use military force, up to and including nuclear weapons. Not for nothing did C. Wright Mills coin the term ‘crackpot realists’ to describe the masterminds of the nuclear arms race. And the elasticity of the phrase ‘national interest’ compounds the difficulty: could it be used to justify Nixon and Kissinger’s carpet-bombing of North ... ”