It’s Saturday and the 81-year-old Morrison is in a relaxed, informal mood, wearing a gray blouse and slacks and dark slippers, a purple bandanna tied over her gray corn rows, her laugh easy and husky with a pinch of “Can-you-believe-this?” You might mistake her for an ordinary neighbor ready for gardening until you see the pictures of her with James Baldwin, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Elie Wiesel among others, or learn that the low, wooden table by her chair was a prop from the film version of “Beloved,” her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

Morrison does not need to worry about recognition in her lifetime. Nobel judges have honored her, and so has Oprah Winfrey, whose book club picks have helped Morrison’s novels sell millions. A Toni Morrison Society organizes conferences about her work and sponsors a Toni Morrison Book Prize. She not only has written children’s stories, but has been the subject of one, Douglas Century’s “Toni Morrison.” Two presidential contenders, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, sought her support in 2008 and Obama will soon present her with a Presidential Medal of Freedom, the country’s highest civilian honor. Her play “Desdemona,” a collaboration with director Peter Sellars and the Malian singer-songwriter Rokia Traore, will be staged in London during the Summer Olympics.

The legend gets the glory; the real person works. Morrison has a new novel out, “Home,” a brief, poetic story of Frank Money, a traumatized Korean War veteran who returns to the states in the 1950s. Morrison has long used fiction as a private and alternative history, whether the Civil War (“Beloved”), the 1920s (“Jazz”) or colonial times (“A Mercy”). With “Home,” she wanted to add some truth — about war, about racism — to the standard ’50s narrative.

“I was really trying to take off that scab, or that veil, or whatever it is off the ’50s,” she says. “We’re told that it was good times, post-war, GI Bill, people had jobs and the television was full of happy stories and so on, and that’s it.”

Like “Beloved,” ”Song of Solomon” and other Morrison novels, the book is a journey and a reckoning. Using bus money given to him by a pastor, Money travels from the Pacific Northwest to Chicago to his dreaded hometown, Lotus, Ga., “the worst place in the world,” where nobody “knew anything or wanted to learn anything.” Warned from the start that the North is no less racist than the South, he encounters violence and segregation and the lawlessness of police. Once in Georgia, he is almost relieved. At least the pace is “human,” Money observes, there was “time to instruct one another, pray for one another, and chastise children in the pews of a hundred churches.”

Morrison, a native of Lorain, Ohio, never lived in Georgia. But for “Home” she drew upon stories from her father, a native of Cartersville, Ga., and from her memories of the South when she was an undergraduate at Howard University, based in Washington, D.C. She was on tour with fellow theater students in the early ’50s and was moved by how blacks took care of her and each other, a bond dramatized in “Home” and many of her works. She knew what to expect from the whites in the South, but the revelation was how “lovely and generous and capable” the blacks were.

“If we arrived at a town where the faculty had made arrangements to spend the night and either the place we thought was nice, wasn’t, or they didn’t want the students to stay there, one of them would go into a phone booth. They would check the yellow pages for a black church and then call up a minister and say, ‘We’re from Howard University and we’re a little chagrined because we don’t have a place to say,’” Morrison says. “And the pastor would say, ‘Call me back in 10 minutes.’ And in 10 or 15 minutes he had rounded up his parishioners to take us in. We would go into these houses. And the women, they just fed us, took care of us, put us on these sweet-smelling sheets and cooked, and wouldn’t take any money. We had to slip money under their pillows.

“And that happened everywhere. ‘Where do we eat in this town that has no places where blacks can eat?’ And somebody would say, ‘Here is a man who was a chef at the Waldorf Astoria, but he’s retired and he cooks sometimes for visitors.’ And you go to his house and get the best meal of your life. But that was within the community. There really was a community, there really was a neighborhood.”

Morrison has spent much of her life in the North. After graduating from Howard, she worked for years as an editor for Random House, then debuted as an author with “The Bluest Eye,” published in 1970. Her breakthrough came in 1977 with “Song of Solomon,” a Book-of-the-Month Club selection praised by New York Times critic John Leonard as a masterpiece akin to music. Her name reached ever higher. “Beloved” won the Pulitzer in 1988. The Nobel came five years later.

As she gets older, Morrison says, the world becomes more interesting and more distressing. She is appalled at some of the remarks about Obama and the speculation that he was not an American citizen. But nature, and its mysteries, she responds to more than ever — the water, mountains, her garden. She watches “Planet Earth” on the Discovery Channel and marvels how it took “millions of years” for humans to evolve from “that thingy down there at the bottom of the sea.”

Saying that her writing process was unchanged by the Nobel — after a “few mental tricks” cleared the fog of success from her mind — Morrison tries to challenge herself with every book. In “Home,” she has Frank Money speak directly to the author, admitting that he has not been honest about his story. For her next novel, she wants to write about a black intellectual, a break from the uneducated characters who usually appear in her work.

“When I’m not thinking about a novel, or not actually writing it, it’s not very good; the 21st century is not a very nice place. I need it (writing) to just stay steady, emotionally,” she says.

“When I finished ‘The Bluest Eye,’ … I was not pleased. I remember feeling sad. And then I thought, ‘Oh, you know, everybody’s talking about “sisterhood,’” I wanted to write about what women friends are really like. (The inspiration for “Sula,” her second novel). All of a sudden the whole world was a real interesting place. Everything in it was something I could use or discard. It had shape. The thing is — that’s how I live here.”

Home.

“I guess that’s home.”

Believers in Oliver Stone’s “JFK” and other conspiracy theorists who hoped that Caro, the most hard-working of historians, would finally nail Johnson will have to look elsewhere. In “The Passage of Power,” the fourth of five planned volumes on Johnson, Caro devotes more than 100 pages to the events immediately before, during and after Nov. 22, 1963. Nothing in his many years of research made him suspect Johnson.

“I never came across a single hint, in anything I did — in interviews or all the documents — that would lead you to make such a conclusion,” he says.

The Johnson books are an obsession, regardless of who you blame for the death of JFK. Caro has been writing about the late president for nearly 40 years and fans, as anxious in their own way as followers of “Harry Potter,” have waited a decade for the latest volume. “Passage of Power” begins in 1958, when Johnson is considering a presidential run; continues through his unhappy time as vice president; and ends in early 1964, weeks after he succeeds Kennedy.

Published this week, the new book is around 700 pages and the series totals more than 3,000; Caro has enough unused material in his filing cabinets to fill many more. Length has not deterred readers or critics. The first three volumes have sold more than 1 million copies. Caro has won two National Book Critics Circle awards, a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize, for “Master of the Senate.” More honors seem likely for “Passage of Power,” which The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani has praised for its “consummate artistry and ardor.”

But his influence reaches beyond sales and prizes. The author, who has never held or sought political office, has become a kind of wise man in Washington. According to Ron Suskind’s best-selling “Confidence Men,” Democratic senators read Caro’s books as they attempted to pass healthcare legislation in 2009 and Rep. Barney Frank consulted “Master of the Senate,” which covered Johnson’s dominating run as Senate majority leader, as he urged fellow Democrats to support new financial regulation. President Obama has met at the White House with Caro and has said that “The Power Broker,” Caro’s Pulitzer winner about municipal builder Robert Moses, influenced his own political thinking.

Caro said he hears often from members of Congress. He remembers being asked to visit by Sen. Edward Kennedy’s staff several years ago, when Republicans, then in the majority, were threatening to change long-established rules on debate and streamline the voting process. Some called it “the nuclear option,” and it was never enacted.

“I think everyone was reading ‘Master of the Senate,’” says former Kennedy aide Jim Flug, who helped arrange Caro’s visit and adds that the historian may have persuaded a couple of legislators to change their minds. “Whenever Bob comes to Washington — I remember a breakfast at the Library of Congress — all the events are always full up. You have people in Washington just listening to every word he says.”

Room for the new book already is being made in current political debate. Caro mentions a review in Newsweek by David Frum, a contributing editor for the magazine and former speechwriter for President George W. Bush. Frum greatly admired “Passage of Power” and called it a primer for how a president might lead. He then labeled it an “unspoken critique of President Obama.”

“Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift,” Frum writes. “But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president.”

Ridiculous, Caro responds. Any critique is not only unspoken, but “unwritten,” ”unthought.”

“I have a high opinion of Obama,” says Caro, praising the president for the healthcare bill and other legislation.

For Caro, lean and determined at age 76, a sign of achievement is when someone complains about his work. His success rate is high. Johnson aides and family members were angered by his early books on LBJ, especially the second volume, “Means of Ascent,” which presented Johnson as vicious and unprincipled as he won a highly questionable Senate race in 1948. But “Master of the Senate” was a redemptive book for both subject and biographer and Caro was welcomed, for the most part, by the Johnson camp. One of his toughest critics, former LBJ aide Jack Valenti, agreed to talk to him for future volumes. The Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum, in Austin, Texas, no longer restricted his access and even began selling his books.

“Passage of Power” offer new opportunities for discussion. Caro suggests in the book that Kennedy might have dropped Johnson in the 1964 election, even though Kennedy himself had said publicly he had no such plan. All agree that the vice president was an outsider in the administration — his opinions ignored, his outsized personality mocked — but the consensus among Kennedy aides and family members has been that the president never seriously considered finding a new running mate.

Caro wonders. He notes that everyone was equally sure Kennedy would not choose Johnson in 1960. Kennedy had picked him in part because Johnson could help ensure support in Texas and other Southern states, but by the fatal visit to Dallas in November 1963, Johnson’s influence had fallen enough that Kennedy made some key decisions about the trip in a meeting to which Johnson was not invited. At the same time, an investigation into the finances of Johnson aide Bobby Baker was leading to questions about Johnson himself. Life magazine was planning a long investigation. Congressional hearings had started the morning of Nov. 22.

Given Johnson’s lowered standing in Texas and the testimony in Washington, “the president’s assurances that he would be on the ticket might start to have a hollow ring indeed,” Caro writes.

Caro also questions a narrative dear to Kennedy admirers.

At the time of JFK’s assassination, a coalition of Republicans and Southern Democrats were blocking his legislative agenda, including a tax cut and a civil rights bill. Johnson got them passed, along with Medicare, education and other initiatives that Kennedy couldn’t get through.

Former Kennedy aides Ted Sorensen and Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. are among those who have said that those bills also would have gotten through had JFK lived. They reasoned that Kennedy, who won narrowly in 1960, would have been re-elected by a substantial margin and enjoyed larger majorities in Congress.

But Caro points out that the Senate committees were dominated by experienced and conservative Southerners with their own agenda. An especially hard case was Sen. Harry Byrd of Virginia, the deficit hawk and chair of the Senate Finance Committee. He had refused to act on the tax cut bill when Kennedy was in office, but, thanks to LBJ’s charm and flattery, eventually cleared it.

“There had been times before (in the 1930s) when (Franklin) Roosevelt had huge majorities in Congress, but after the Southern Democrats decide no more New Deal legislation is going through, no more New Deal legislation goes through,” Caro says, adding that obstruction lasted into the 1950s, until Johnson became majority leader.

“Only one guy got bills through — it was Lyndon Johnson.”

Caro was friendly with Sorensen, Kennedy’s devoted speech writer who died in 2010. They were neighbors on Manhattan’s Upper West Side and would meet often, the two sitting on opposite couches in Sorensen’s apartment, overlooking Central Park. Sometimes, they would discuss whether Kennedy could have gotten his legislation passed.

“I remember going over this again and again with Sorensen,” Caro says. “He wouldn’t agree with me.”

The historian says the book tells two stories: “The deep hatred” between Johnson and the Kennedys, especially Robert Kennedy, and what happens when JFK is dead and roles are overturned. Johnson, the unwanted vice president, is in charge.

“That’s why I call the book ‘Passage of Power.’ The title is what it is. You examine something in its moment of greatest crisis and you see what it has to do,” Caro says. “To watch Lyndon Johnson grab up the reins of power and get Kennedy’s legislation moving, how he keeps the people in the Kennedy administration from leaving and reassures the American people, is to see political genius in action.”

Caro has called Johnson a story of darkness and light, and clouds will gather in Volume V, which Caro expects to complete within the next few years. Among what happened during Johnson’s last decade: His landslide victory in 1964; his fateful decision in 1965 to commit ground troops to Vietnam; the rapid passage of historic bills, including on civil rights, education and immigration; Robert Kennedy’s brief run against Johnson for president in 1968; the assassinations of Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr.; Johnson’s announcement that he would not seek another term; his final years back in Texas and his death, in 1973.

The book, Caro says, will be long.

In an age of war, riots and assassinations, the Band lived out a dream of simpler times. They dressed plainly, played tightly and did not upstage each other. The tall, lanky Robbie Robertson was an expert blues-rock guitarist and the group’s best lyricist, his songs inspired in part by Bob Dylan and by his travels through the American South. The baby-faced Rick Danko was a fluid bassist and accomplished singer. The bearish Garth Hudson was an ingenious keyboardist of uncommon wit and emotion, while the sad-eyed Richard Manuel’s haunting falsetto on “Whispering Pines,” ”Tears of Rage” and others led drummer Levon Helm to call him the group’s lead singer.

But for many Band admirers, honors belonged to Helm, whose life spanned and helped tell the history of rock ‘n’ roll, whose voice called back to the earliest days of American song.

The short, scrappy Helm, who died Thursday at age 71, had a bold tenor once likened to a town crier calling a meeting to order. He not only sang “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” but inhabited it, becoming the Confederate Virgil Caine, “hungry, just barely alive”; his brother killed by the Yankees; the South itself in ruins. It was the kind of heartbreaking, complicated story and performance that had even Northerners rooting for the proud and desperate Virgil. Helm was also the musical leader on stage, and played drums loose-limbed and funky, shoulders hunched, head to the side when he sang.

In some ways, the Band was the closest this country ever came to the camaraderie and achievement of the Beatles. They were a quintessential American group, but only Helm came from the United States. The son of an Arkansas cotton farmer, Mark Lavon (he later changed it “Levon”), Helm was born in Elaine, Ark., in 1940. He grew up around music and witnessed rock’s early days, seeing Elvis Presley perform before he was famous. The Helm family enjoyed listening to the Grand Ole Opry and Helm saw his first live show at age 6 — bluegrass pioneer Bill Monroe. He would later say the experience “tattooed” his brain.

By age 9, Helm’s father had bought him a guitar and soon Levon was hanging out at a local station, KFFA, watching bluesman Sonny Boy Williamson host his radio show. As a teenager, he performed with his sister, Linda, and saw Presley, Johnny Cash, Carl Perkins and other founding rock stars in concert.

Watching Jerry Lee Lewis’ drummer inspired Helm to play drums, too. He sat in occasionally with Conway Twitty’s group and formed his own band, the Jungle Bush Beaters. When Hawkins came to town, looking for a drummer, Helms signed on, but only after promising his parents he would finish high school. Hawkins had a handful of hits, notably “Mary Lou” and “Forty Days,” but his musicians tired of Hawkins’ strict control and endless rehearsing and left in the early ’60s.

With Levon in charge, they recorded a few singles as the Hawks or “Levon and the Hawks.” They played gigs in virtually empty venues — most notably, they would allege, a show at the Dallas club run by Jack Ruby, the man who shot and killed President Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald. Their break came when they met Dylan, who was anxious to switch from folk to full-out rock and immediately clicked with the Hawks.

Playing behind Dylan around the United States and in Europe, they were unknown and unidentified. But their sound was so strong that critics and audience members wanted to learn more. Helm was along only part of the time. Frustrated by the boos from Dylan’s folk admirers, who accused their hero of selling out, he stayed home while Dylan and company played in Europe, with Mickey Jones and Bobby Gregg filling in on drums.

All were reunited in 1967. Dylan had quit the road after a reported motorcycle accident and settled in the small community of Woodstock in upstate New York, two years before the celebrated concerts made it an international attraction. For much of 1967, he and the Hawks — who would soon rename themselves the Band in part because people kept referring to Dylan’s backing musicians as “The Band” — recorded informally, for their own pleasure. While the Beatles and others were experimenting with backwards tape loops and psychedelic lyrics, Dylan and the Band were singing chain-gang songs, country standards, and ballads from Appalachia. Dylan, with Band members occasionally helping, also completed original numbers such as “I Shall be Released” and “Tears of Rage.” Before “The Basement Tapes” came out officially, in 1975, they were bootlegged endlessly and also covered by the Byrds, Manfred Mann and others. Many tracks remain unreleased.

That year in the country changed Dylan, changed the Band and changed the music. Dylan’s next album was the spare and mysterious “John Wesley Harding” and the Band soon followed with “Music From Big Pink.” They had always been virtuosos, but now they were archivists and alchemists who revived the roots of American music as the rock scene otherwise veered into psychedelic sound effects and endless jams. “Music From the Big Pink” and their second album, “The Band,” remain landmarks of the era and songs such as “The Weight” and “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” standard rock numbers. Before that, they backed Dylan on his sensational and controversial “electric” tours of 1965-66 and collaborated with him on the legendary “Basement Tapes.”

Critics still regard their eponymous second album, released in 1969, as their best. “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” was written by Robertson for Helm, and the record also featured the playful “Up On Cripple Creek,” the rascally “Rag Mama Rag” and other songs that anchored the group’s stage act. They were on the cover of Time magazine in early 1970 and Elton John’s hit “Levon” was named after the Band’s drummer. When they did pair up with Dylan, notably for a 1974 tour, they were no longer anonymous. Critic Greil Marcus devoted a chapter to them in his landmark book on American music and culture, “Mystery Train.”

Once they played in dives; now they were in stadiums. But attention weighed on them. The group, especially Manuel, struggled with drugs and alcohol. While Danko and Manuel shared songwriting credits in the early years, Robertson was essentially the lone writer for their last few albums. By the middle of the decade, Robertson especially was burned out and wanted to get off the road. They said farewell with a bang with the “Last Waltz” concert in 1976. Eric Clapton, Neil Young, Joni Mitchell and Dylan were among the stars who played at the show in San Francisco that was filmed by Martin Scorsese for a movie of the same name, released in 1978.

“The Last Waltz” is praised by many as the greatest of concert films, but it also helped lead to a bitter split between Robertson and Helm, formerly the best of friends. Robertson became close to Scorsese during the production and Helm believed the movie was structured to make Robertson the leader and advance his own movie career. They were estranged long after, despite efforts by Hawkins and others to intervene. While Helm would accuse Robertson of being on a star trip, Helm, ironically, was the more successful actor, with acclaimed roles in “Coal Miner’s Daughter,” ”The Right Stuff” and other films. And no one who watched “The Last Waltz” could forget Helm’s performance of “Dixie Down,” shot mostly in close-up, his face squeezed with emotion.

In his memoir, “This Wheel’s on Fire,” Helm said some hard feelings about Robertson also included his getting songwriting credits on Band songs that other members considered group efforts. Robertson would deny the allegations. On his Facebook page this week, he revealed that he had been devastated to learn of Helm’s illness and had visited him in the hospital.

“I sat with Levon for a good while, and thought of the incredible and beautiful times we had together,” wrote Robertson, who added that Helm was “very much like an older brother” to him.

Helm released several solo albums and toured with Ringo Starr’s “All-Starrs.” Without Robertson, the Band reunited in the 1980s, but never approached its previous success. Manuel hanged himself in 1986. Danko died in 1999, a day after his 56th birthday. The Band did play at a Dylan anniversary concert at Madison Square Garden in 1992 and Helm, Danko and Keith Richards collaborated on the rocker “Deuce and a Quarter.” Original members of The Band were inducted into the Rock ‘N’ Roll Hall of Fame in 1994.

To the end, Helm was a rock ‘n’ roller, as determined in his own way as Virgil Caine. Helm was diagnosed with throat cancer in 1998, his voice was shredded and he was badly in debt. He saw no choice but to get back on stage. In 2004, he began a series of free-wheeling late night shows in his barn in Woodstock that were patterned after medicine shows from his youth. Any night of the bi-weekly Midnight Rambles could feature Gillian Welch, Elvis Costello or his daughter Amy on vocals and violin. Meanwhile, he recorded “Dirt Farmer” in 2007, followed by “Electric Dirt” in 2009. Both albums won Grammys. He won another this year for “Ramble at the Ryman.”

An undisclosed medical procedure forced Helm to cancel a three Midnight Ramble concerts in February. By April, family members posted a note on Helm’s website saying “Levon is in the final stages of his battle with cancer.”

“(He) has loved nothing more than to play, to fill the room up with music, lay down the back beat, and make the people dance!” read the note from his daughter Amy, and wife Sandy. “He did it every time he took the stage…”

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Online:

http://www.levonhelm.com

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AP Writer Michael Hill contributed to this report from Albany, N.Y.

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Hillel Italie is a national writer for The Associated Press. Follow him at http://www.twitter.com/hitalie

Gaddis was widely acknowledged as the obvious choice to tell the story of Kennan’s life. A published author for more than 40 years, he has been called the dean of Cold War thinkers by Harvard historian Priscilla McMillan. Evan Thomas, whose book “The Wise Men” includes a chapter on Kennan, says Gaddis is a “master” who makes an “honest effort to cut through cant and ideology.” In 2005, Gaddis received a National Humanities Medal for “his incisive examination” of the epic conflict between the capitalist West and communist East.

But while Gaddis is an insider — a popular teacher at Yale University, winner of numerous awards, a guest at the White House — he’s an outsider to many colleagues in New Haven and elsewhere. He has kind words for Ronald Reagan and became close enough to George W. Bush to advise him on his second inaugural address and on his memoir “Decision Points,” which Gaddis includes in a class he teaches on biography. Henry Kissinger is a supporter of the “Studies in Grand Strategy” course Gaddis helps teach and wrote a highly favorable review of the Kennan book for The New York Times.

So while the Pulitzer board praised “George F. Kennan” as “an engaging portrait” of the quintessential Cold War diplomat and the times he lived in — and the National Book Critics Circle cited Gaddis’ “profound understanding of U.S. foreign policy in the 20th century” in awarding him its biography prize — Gaddis has been criticized for omitting or disregarding some of Kennan’s more liberal opinions. Eric Alterman of the liberal weekly The Nation labeled the book “Strategies of Disparagement.”

“It’s fair to say I am more conservative than most of the Yale faculty,” Gaddis observes during a recent interview at his Yale office, where pictures of him with Bush and Kissinger hang on the walls. “I’m used to it, but certainly it’s not always a popular position. Universities are rather intolerant places and there are orthodoxies within universities. Political correctness is not what it once was, but it does still exist.”

Kennan himself had differences with his biographer. Gaddis thought Reagan was a visionary who ended the Cold War and the nuclear arms race; Kennan worried the president would blow us all to Kingdom Come. Gaddis supported the Iraq war, Kennan opposed it. Kennan, a born brooder, wondered whether Gaddis was the right man.

“I think he got a little nervous at times because I was a little more to the right of him on the current political issues than he was,” Gaddis says. “I was more sympathetic to Ronald Reagan, for example, and later to George W. Bush, for sure. But we never got to the point where he said, ‘Because of your politics you are no longer qualified to write the biography.’ He never did, and never came close to it.”

And Kennan had a long time to second-guess his choice. Gaddis first met Kennan in the mid-1970s and felt enough of a rapport to send some pages from an upcoming book about the Cold War. They became friendly and agreed in the early ’80s that Gaddis write his story. Gaddis would be granted full access to Kennan, his family and friends and to Kennan’s papers. Kennan, in his 70s at the time, sought no editorial control. But he did ask that the book not be released until after his death.

Kennan lived to 101.

“Poor John Gaddis has seen his undertaking being put off for years while he waits for me to make way for it,” Kennan, who died in 2005, wrote in his diary.

Gaddis says his goal was to present his subject fully and fairly, with flaws and virtues accounted. Kennan had much to offer on each side. He was a tireless seeker of knowledge and a first-rate prose stylist who won two Pulitzer Prizes. His influence far outweighed his rank; Kennan was a member of the foreign service who never held a high-level position.

But as a member of the diplomatic corps in Moscow, his intimate knowledge of the Soviet present and the Russian past gave him near-prophetic powers. He anticipated that Marxism was just a phase in the country’s history. He was an architect of the Marshall Plan, which helped revive the economies of Western Europe after World War II and helped undermine Stalin’s belief that the West would turn against itself. He believed early on that that the Soviet Union and China would quarrel despite a shared belief in Communism.

Kennan was also the most human of visionaries. He had several extra-marital affairs. He was highly sensitive and impatient and once wrote in his diary that he dreaded “any occupation that implies any sort of association with, and adjustment to, other people.” His call in 1946-47 for “containment” of the Soviet Union was a victory for anti-Communists who doubted that the U.S. could remain on good terms with its World War II ally. Yet Kennan found himself to the left of Washington for decades after, whether on Vietnam or the nuclear arms race.

“He came up with the most influential post-World War II strategy and within a year of having done so began to repudiate it,” Gaddis says. “Kennan was one of those people who felt his ideas were not working unless he was personally putting them into effect.”

“George F. Kennan” has an ironic subtitle: “An American Life.” Kennan lived abroad for long periods of time and seemed out of place when he returned. He disdained American culture and had limited taste for electoral or office politics. His sensibility was not of a campaigner, but of an artist. He wrote poetry and played guitars. His great dream was not to become president, but write a biography of Chekhov.

“Your understanding of the subject of any biography is broadened and deepened and complicated by any act of biography,” Gaddis says. “I’ve always seen the word ‘critical’ as having both a positive and negative meaning. To be a critic is to praise and to complain. But I still came out of this book extremely impressed by George and with an increased admiration and respect for him.”

Over the past 40 years, the 71-year-old Gaddis had written several books on Cold War policy. But prior to “George Kennan,” he had never written about an individual life.

As he researched and wrote Kennan’s story, the historian decided to educate himself by offering a class in biography — not a lecture, but one centered on discussion.

During a recent class at Yale, the assigned book was Robert Caro’s “Means of Ascent,” the second and most controversial of Caro’s series on Lyndon Johnson. “Means of Ascent” portrayed a politician so boorish and unscrupulous that former LBJ aides accused Caro of trying to destroy Johnson’s reputation.

But Gaddis, a low-key instructor with an even, probing style, notes that the book is prefaced by Caro’s vivid portrait of one of Johnson’s noblest moments — the 1965 civil rights speech he gave as president, when he brought tears to the eyes of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and others by invoking the title of the protest movement’s anthem, “We Shall Overcome.”

So what kind of man was LBJ, Gaddis asks 20 undergraduates seated around a conference table? And what kind of system did he work in? Could the achievements of his presidency have been possible without the misdeeds of the Senate race years earlier? Is life ever without compromise? The students reach no conclusion, and Gaddis wasn’t expecting one. After the class, he explains that of all the lessons he’s taken in as a biographer, none is more important than leaving some questions unanswered.

“A really good biography does not have to resolve all issues,” Gaddis says. “It can leave contradictions there. It can just say these contradictions were there and were important and the subject of the biography never completely resolved them.” The subject of the biography himself was torn by contradictions. And this is certainly true of George Kennan.”

Some critics allege Gaddis turned against his subject. In The New York Review of Books, Frank Costigliola’s analysis was titled “Is This George Kennan?” He called the book “monumental and absorbing” but worried about the “perspective and balance,” noting Gaddis never mentioned that in 1968 Kennan endorsed an anti-war Democrat, Eugene McCarthy, for president.

“The biography suffers from this neglect,” Costigliola writes.

Gaddis acknowledges that he could have included Kennan’s support for McCarthy, but said he found it more important to write about Kennan’s televised Senate testimony in 1966, when he called the Vietnam commitment “unsound” and chastised the United States for acting like “an elephant frightened by a mouse.” The book, Gaddis emphasizes, does not fit any political category.

Conservatives think highly of Gaddis, and liberals disapprove, but he says he’s a registered independent who has voted for Democrats and Republicans, from Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bill Clinton in the 1990s to Ronald Reagan in 1984 and George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004. (He voted for Barack Obama in 2008, but remains undecided for this year).

During his seminar, Gaddis spoke warmly about the New Deal and the civil rights movement. In his books, he has expressed great skepticism about the Vietnam War, dismay at the “outright deception” of Kissinger and Richard Nixon and disappointments about the Iraq war. He says during his interview that it “was a great failing of the Bush administration” not to know more about the culture of Iraq before invading and for relying on bad intelligence.

“These were big mistakes,” he says.

Criticism of Bush actually helped lead to Gaddis’ meeting the president. In 2004, he published a brief book, “Surprise, Security, and the American Experience,” which defended the right to “preemptive war,” but also faulted the administration’s “shock and awe” military campaign. Condoleezza Rice, then national security advisor and an old acquaintance of Gaddis’, asked the historian to meet with her staff.

According to Rice’s memoir, “No Higher Honor,” Gaddis encouraged her to take a more diplomatic approach to the country’s allies. As Rice would acknowledge, “repair work” was needed. When they were done, she surprised Gaddis by bringing him to the Oval Office to meet the president.

“I was thinking it would be a photo op,” Gaddis says. “But he had read the book. He underlined it. He had taken notes on it. … We kind of hit it off at that point.”

Some of Gaddis’ former students have gone on to careers in Washington. Chris Michel became a White House speechwriter under Bush and later worked with Bush on “Decision Points.” Keith Urbahn was an aide to former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld who now runs Javelin Group LLC, a communications and book firm based in Washington.

Urbahn recalls taking Gaddis’ “Grand Strategy” class at the height of the Iraq war’s unpopularity: “He saw his role as raising larger questions that you had to grapple with. He cultivated a generation of students to think in terms of practical decision making. He didn’t have this air of knowing sophistication that I felt with a lot of other professors.”

“I don’t think of him as a conservative,” Michel adds. “But anyone who has nice things to say about George W. Bush is going to stand out among the Yale faculty.”

Gaddis was born in Cotulla, Texas in 1941. The community was small, and personal. During his biography class, the historian asked his students to imagine a man on a tractor, age 25, working in a Texas field in the 1920s. It’s hot, the land is flat and dusty. The man spots a Model-T pulling up and a young stranger getting out, dressed in a blue serge suit. He climbs through a barbed wire fence and approaches.

“Hi, I’m Lyndon Johnson and I’m the new high school teacher.”

“The hell you are,” is the reply.

Adds Gaddis: “The man on the tractor was my father.”

He credits teachers in high school with inspiring him to become a history major. Gaddis was an undergraduate at the University of Texas at Austin and remained there for his master’s and Ph.D. He specialized in the Cold War in part out of “ambition” and out of awareness that it was a relatively new field, a story just beginning to be told.

As an author, he established himself with his first book, “The United States and the Origins of the Cold War,” published in 1972. At the time, Cold War scholarship had been shaped by such New Left historians as William Appleman Williams, who had written that economic reasons, especially the need for markets overseas, were a principle force behind U.S. foreign policy. Gaddis countered that capitalism was just one part of a conflict that included domestic politics, Marxist ideology and the personalities of Stalin, Mao and other leaders.

“I found some of the New Left views valuable: the emphasis on the economic dimensions of foreign policy, and, flowing from that, their insistence that there’d been more continuity in it throughout the 20th century than older historians had perceived,” Gaddis says. “What I did not find convincing was their argument that the need to export drove the Americans into an aggressive foreign policy, and that had it not been for this, the Russians would have continued to be allies. The New Left’s greatest weakness was always its lack of interest in, or curiosity about, the USSR.”

Gaddis’ scholarship has been a story of revision. In the 1970s, historians had no access to Soviet or Chinese documents, and the world itself seemed deadlocked between rival superpowers. Within 20 years, the Cold War was over and the Soviet Union had broken up. Secrets once vital were now expendable; Gaddis and others could finally learn what Stalin and other Eastern bloc leaders were thinking.

In “We Now Know,” published in 1997, Gaddis revisits such Cold War topics as why North Korea invaded South Korea (Stalin encouraged it, assuming the United States would not respond), how frightened the Soviets might have been by the atom bomb (more than they let on) and the assumption that Stalin and others valued survival above all and never really thought Marxism would defeat and destroy capitalism.

“That was the prevailing wisdom, which I certainly bought into, that the ideological rhetoric of the Chinese, Russians and East Europeans was window dressing,” Gaddis says. “But as I began to go into the documents, I discovered that the language was the same in the secret meetings as it was in the public pronouncements. They really believed this stuff.”