Nicholas Thompson

He was a poet, a singer and a voracious reader. He memorized works by Gogol and Chekhov and amused himself with Thackeray, Balzac and Plato. At seminary, he'd sneak his worldly texts in and read by candlelight, sometimes hiding the banned books in stacks of firewood. He intensively studied Esperanto when he thought it the likely language of the future. "He didn't just read books," said a friend. "He ate them."

He had a lovely voice and was often hired to… more

The history of the world came down to this. Ronald Reagan is standing in a room in Iceland with three men: Richard Perle, the young hawk; Paul Nitze, the old sage; George Shultz, the steady counsel. Mikhail Gorbachev is upstairs. "Everything could be decided right now," Gorbachev mutters as he paces.

The four Americans are discussing a massive arms-control deal, and right now it depends on minutiae. The two sides already have agreed to fantastic reductions in the nuclear weapons that… more

Sixty years ago this month, writing under the byline of X, George Kennan supposedly laid out America’s cold war foreign policy. Kennan’s essay is often said to be the most influential article in the history of this country’s foreign policy, but neither Harry Truman, nor any president after him, actually followed X’s recommendations. “Containment,” the word the essay introduced, was applied in a bellicose way that Kennan didn’t intend.

But while Truman dodged X’s advice, George W. Bush should follow… more

The latest book by John Lukacs, a preeminent historian of the mid-20th century, is a pocket biography of George Kennan, the diplomat and framer of much of America’s early Cold War policy. The subject is too obscure to make a bestseller, and Lukacs explicitly states that this is a character study and not a major biography. So, what gives? Perhaps there’s one simple answer: the Iraq war.

If a conflict ever were anathema to Kennan, it would be this one. He… more

"Do you see, as some of your critics do, a parallel between what's going on in Iraq now and Vietnam?" President George W. Bush was asked at a press conference earlier this month. The president, unsurprisingly, responded "No." "Because there's a duly-elected government; 12 million people voted," he said. "Obviously, there is sectarian violence, but this is, in many ways, religious in nature, and I don't see the parallels."

It is possible to quibble with the president's explanation. There was religious… more

Nicholas Thompson was most recently a senior editor at Legal Affairs Magazine and, before that, an editor at Washington Monthly. He is now a contributing editor at both publications and an editor at Wired. Mr. Thompson has written about politics, technology, and the law for The New York Times, The… more

I was terrified when the mailman showed up, straining under the weight of Yale professor John Lewis Gaddis's new book. The paper galleys clock in at four pounds and the title is imposingly simple: The Cold War. Likely the country's most esteemed historian of this particular topic, Gaddis has already churned out the following works: Origins of the Cold War, Rethinking Cold War History, and Inquiries into the History of the Cold War. What could be new and fresh in… more

Toward the end of her new book, Generation Debt: Why Now Is a Terrible Time to Be Young, 25-year-old author Anya Kamenetz, a columnist for the Village Voice, proffers a bit of advice for her peers. Activist students shouldn't focus their efforts on "free speech, the war in Iraq, AIDS, the drug war, and living wages." They should fight to reform America's credit card laws.

Young people often lead battles for social change -- think the civil rights… more

Conservative judicial scholars love the Founding Fathers, and they have created a legal theory called "originalism" in which the Founders' words essentially are carved in stone. If you're stuck with a complicated legal question, just think about what James Madison would do. "The Constitution means what the delegates of the Philadelphia Convention and of the state ratifying conventions understood it to mean; not what we judges think it should mean," Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said in a 2001 speech.… more

In the summer of 1943, George Kennan and Paul Nitze met on a train going from New York to Washington. Neither knew who the other was, nor was there any reason they should have. Kennan was a 39-year-old diplomat, just returned from Portugal. A Wall Street man four years Kennan's junior, Nitze was a second-level official at the Board of Economic Warfare. But Nitze found something compelling about Kennan and sat down across from the distinguished-looking gentleman in the dining… more