John Lewis Gaddis labored as George F. Kennan’s authorized biographer for more than 30 years. And that was while Kennan, who died at age 101 in 2005, was still living. Appearing last week at the Wilson Center to discuss George F. Kennan: An American Life, Gaddis marveled: “I was Kennan’s Boswell longer than Boswell was Johnson’s Boswell.”

Gaddis spent another six years finishing what became a 784-page tome. In his review for The Wilson Quarterly, Martin Walker called it “as near a definitive biography as we are likely to get of one of the most singular and significant Americans of his century.”

Gaddis, a former Wilson Center fellow who is Robert A. Lovett Professor of Military and Naval History at Yale, focused in his talk on the surprising impact of classic works of literature and scholarship on the prolific Kennan’s ideas. Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), for example, figures in Kennan’s famous

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In the modest lakeside community of Mathis, Texas, cattle and cotton rule. It’s a small, poor, largely Hispanic town in the flatlands about 30 miles from Corpus Christi. Yet at Mathis High School, with a student body of just over 500, local teenagers are learning to think big. Thanks to Superintendent of Schools Maria Rodriguez-Casas, they are taking classes in Chinese, mingling with Chinese exchange students, and traveling far from their small community.   

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In his piece for the current issue of The Wilson Quarterly, my colleague Zahid Hussain masterfully evokes the volatility and lawlessness of Pakistan’s tribal belt. As he suggests, bringing some semblance of stability to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas is essential for the future of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the United States. 

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In our new issue, Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen tells the peculiar story of America’s unlikely romance with Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher who famously proclaimed the death of God. Nietzsche (1844-1900) did not live long enough to bask in the American spotlight, notes Ratner-

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“We’re becoming a nation of homebodies,” demographer William H. Frey wrote for the Brookings Institution’s blog last November, “and not by choice.” Frey was reacting to new Census data indicating that 11.6 percent of Americans moved in 2011, the lowest rate since statistics were first collected in 1948.

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In “Man as Machine," in the current issue of the WQ, contributing editor Max Byrd describes the French fascination with lifelike mechanical toys during and after the Enlightenment. Below he answers a few questions about his article.

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Four years ago, even the staunchest of pessimists might have been dismayed if they could have somehow learned that in 2012 the world economy would still be feeling the effects of recession. While the current economic downturn is the subject of a great deal of glum commentary, it has also, as demonstrated by this issue of the WQ, sparked much lively debate.

“Lessons of the Great Depression,” our cover cluster of articles, features a range of contrasting views on that calamity of the 1930s and the causes of our own current economic distress. Robert J. Samuelson finds in the Depression-era gold standard a parallel to the contemporary welfare state—a straitjacket that exacerbates economic ills. Louis Hyman answers with a historically based argument that stagnating wages and growing economic inequality are the root cause of our current distress and the source of the “debt bomb” that exploded in 2007 and 2008. Robert Z. Aliber contends that today’s “Mini-Depression” could have been avoided altogether if bank regulators and the Federal Reserve had acted to defuse that bomb, which was plainly visible amid the excesses of the last decade.

Elsewhere in the issue, journalist Zahid Hussain, the current Pakistan scholar here at the Wilson Center, offers an unusually well-informed report on Pakistan’s impoverished, little-studied tribal areas, whose status, he says, is crucial not only to his own country’s future but to

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With my (terrific) internship at The Wilson Quarterly behind me, I am about to set off for a semester of research and cultural and linguistic immersion in Tunisia, joining thousands of other young Americans who are traveling to the Middle East and North Africa for similar reasons.

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Christopher Hitchens, relentless provocateur and coruscating wit, died yesterday at age 62 of complications from cancer, with which he had waged a very public battle. His writing graced the pages of The Wilson Quarterly on a handful of occasions over the last two decades. Hitchens being Hitchens, none of these pieces lacks verve or insight.

In 1991, for example, Hitchens reviewed an anthology of articles from The Nation—where he was a columnist from 1982 to 2002—that had been collected into a book (The Nation, 1865-1990). In what would have been an apt description of himself, he wrote, “Most reformist journalists believe in liberty and in human reason, in letting the truth speak, but they also have a mission or policy which directs how that truth shall be used to fight injustices.”

Hitchens’s interests and agendas were many and varied. In 2005, he reviewed a book on Thomas Jefferson, about whom Hitchens himself wrote a biography. Five years earlier he mulled a biography of his beloved George Orwell, who managed to “get the chief issues of the 20th century right.” These were “fascism and Nazism, Stalinism, and imperialism,” all of which Hitchens opposed in one form or another. Over the years his pen strayed to other topics in the WQ: Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March, the Spanish Civil War, the Balkans, political vitriol in Washington.  

In his review of the Nation anthology, Hitchens mentioned &

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Dear Readers,

THE BETTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE: Why Violence Has Declined. By Steven Pinker. Viking. 802 pp. $40

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