Until the late 1990s, John Lewis Gaddis enjoyed a reputation among his fellow historians for careful—even exquisitely careful—evenhandedness. His early books—1972’s The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, which grew out of his doctoral dissertation, and 1982’s Strategies of Containment—had struck what appeared to be a virtuous balance between the kind of boosterism that tended to absolve the United States of all responsibility for the onset of the Cold War and the rising New Left revisionism that pinned the whole regrettable affair on the capitalists. By 1997, the year he started teaching at Yale University, the New York Times called Gaddis “the respected dean of cold war historians.”

But around that same time, some of his fellow academics began to feel that Gaddis risked becoming an embarrassment. In his 1997 book We Now Know, which drew on materials released from Communist archives after the Soviet Union’s fall, Gaddis argued that Stalin’s ascendancy had made the Cold War inevitable—even at that late date a not entirely welcome view among his peers. Then, in 2005, he published a one-volume history of the Cold War in which he came across as, well, pleased that the United States and its allies had ultimately prevailed. This was going too far. Still more troublingly, Gaddis had become associated with a program at Yale devoted to educating future masters of the universe about geopolitics. Surely the whole thing was ethically questionable at best—and at worst, somewhat neoconservative. This last suspicion was only aggravated when Gaddis wrote articles and a short book that were generally supportive of the Bush administration’s response to 9/11 and when he became an occasional visitor in those days to the Oval Office.