John Lewis Gaddis (born April 2, 1941) is an American Cold War historian, political scientist, and writer.

[4] Gaddis attended the University of Texas at Austin, receiving his BA in 1963, MA in 1965, and PhD in 1968,[5][6] the latter under the direction of Robert Divine.

[11][12] He sits on the advisory committee of the Wilson Center's Cold War International History Project,[13] which he helped establish in 1991.

[18] We Now Know (1997) presented an analysis of the Cold War through the Cuban Missile Crisis that incorporated new archival evidence from the Soviet bloc.

[26] Gaddis is known for arguing that Soviet leader Joseph Stalin's personality and role in history constituted one of the most important causes of the Cold War.

Within the field of U.S. diplomatic history, he was originally most associated with the concept of post-revisionism, the idea of moving past the revisionist and orthodox interpretations of the origins of the Cold War to embrace what were (in the 1970s) interpretations based upon the then-growing availability of government documents from the United States, Great Britain and other western government archives.

[citation needed] Due to his growing focus on Stalin and leanings toward US nationalism, Gaddis is now widely seen as more orthodox than post-revisionist.

"[30] During the United States occupation of Iraq, Gaddis asserted that Bush had established America "as a more powerful and purposeful actor within the international system than it had been on September 11, 2001."