With this book an important element of American history has been analyzed. The Cold War is pervasive in American foreign policy and influential in shaping the modern world. Containment Strategies outlines American policy from the end of World War II to the present day. Gaddis outlines the policies of Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, including policies influenced by others such as George Kennan, John Dulles, and Henry Kissinger. The author, John Lewis Gaddis, has written many books on the Cold War and is an avid researcher in the field. Some of his other works include: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1941-1947, The Long Peace: Investigations of the History of the Cold War, Now We Know: Rethinking the History of the Cold War, The Landscape of History: How Historians they trace the past, surprise, security and the American experience and the Cold War: a new history. Dr. Gaddis received his PhD from the University of Texas in 1968; he is currently on leave, but is a professor at Yale. At the University, his focus is Cold War history. Gaddis is one of the few men who have actually written a comprehensive biography of George Kennan, and Gaddis even won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012. Gaddis diligently researches many of the Cold War policies, starting with George Kennan and his original containment policy . He did not believe in making everyone like the United States, but instead believed that diplomacy should be handled based on what American interests were vital and what situations were not vital to American security. He believed he imagined what a threat to the United States was, that there should be a standard for what exactly should be considered in the United States' interest, and anything… mid-paper… containment. By breaking down containment in this way, historians and researchers can look at containment like never before. Rather than treating all containment as the same, Gaddis distinguishes between many of the different presidents to demonstrate the different types of containment and how each president believed their own type of containment would be successful in managing the spread of communism. Beginning with Kennan, the first advocate of containment, and ending with Kissinger, who used a hybrid of many different approaches, the reader can fully understand the progress, both positive and negative. The book is essential reading for those who wish to research Cold War politics in the United States, as well as the policy decisions of many presidents during the Cold War, as the book is filled with sources, both primary and secondary..