[Updated at 1:05 p.m.] Mariner Energy, owner of the production platform, said in a press release that no hydrocarbon spill has been reported after an initial flyover of the incident.

"Mariner has notified and is working with regulatory authorities in response to this incident," the statement said. "The cause is not known, and an investigation will be undertaken. During the last week of August 2010, production from this facility averaged approximately 9.2 million cubic feet of natural gas per day and 1,400 barrels of oil and condensate."

The company also said no injuries have been reported.

[Updated at 12:48 p.m.] David Reed, a paramedic on board the Rowan Gorilla II oil rig located 14 miles from the platform that exploded told submitted an iReport saying he saw all thirteen workers rescued from the water.

“We were up here in the radio room and all of sudden we saw a whole bunch of smoke coming from the platform," Reed said. "Shortly after all the radios started lighting up like a Christmas tree. They called any helicopters in the area, any boats in the area to respond, they were saying there were people in the water. There were multiple people in the water.”

See Reed's iReport of what he witnessed

WWL: Coast Guard reporting production platform incident

WDSU: Production platform explodes in Gulf

iReport: Did you see the explosion? Share images

[Updated at 12:32 p.m.] White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said Thursday that the federal government has "assets ready" to respond to any environmental problems resulting from the explosion of an oil platform off the coast of Louisiana.

[Updated at 12:31 p.m.] All thirteen people aboard a production platform that exploded in the Gulf are accounted for and safely on a commercial vessel according to initial information, the U.S. Coast Guard said in a statement.

"We continue to gather information as we respond with full force, and have oil spill response assets ready for immediate deployment should we receive any reports of pollution," the statement said.

[Updated at 11:53 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that 12 people from the production platform are in water immersion suits as they await rescue.

Colclough told CNN there are reports the production platform, which is for both oil and natural gas, is still on fire.

"We don't know what caused the rig to catch on fire," he told CNN, noting the incident is under investigation.

Asked about concerns regarding oil leaks or pollution, Colclough said "there are reports the rig was not actively producing any product, so we don't know if there's any risk of pollution."

Mariner Energy is a leading independent oil and gas exploration and production company in the Gulf of Mexico. About 85 percent of the company's production comes from offshore assets, with a growing share of that coming from deepwater developments.

The explosion comes nearly five months after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded April 20, killing 11 people and causing oil to gush into
the Gulf of Mexico, leading to one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history.

[Updated at 11:43 a.m.] U.S. Coast Guard Petty Officer Bill Colclough tells CNN that all 13 workers involved in the production platform explosion are accounted for, but one person is injured.

Coast Guard Choppers are on the way to the site 80 miles south of Vermilion Bay.

[Posted at 11:33 a.m.] An oil production platform has exploded 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana, with 12 people overboard and one missing, the Coast Guard said Thursday morning.

Rescue attempts are under way for at least 12 people, Coast Guard spokesman John Edwards told CNN. 13 people were on board the production platform total, Edwards said, noting 12 have been accounted for, but one person was missing.

The accident took place 80 miles off the coast of Louisiana on the Vermilion Oil production platform 380, which is owned by Houston-based Mariner Energy.

The Coast Guard has multiple helicopters, an airplane and several Coast Guard cutters en route. It's unknown if there are any injuries.

Single, childless women in their 20s are finding success in the city: They are outearning their male counterparts in the USA's biggest metropolitan ...

New York Times publishes allegations that PM's media adviser 'actively encouraged' unlawful practice while editor

The prime minister's media adviser, Andy Coulson, freely discussed the use of unlawful news-gathering techniques while editor of the News of the World and "actively encouraged" a named reporter to engage in the illegal interception of voicemail messages, according to allegations published by the New York Times.

Coulson, who resigned as editor of the News of the World in January 2007 after its royal correspondent was jailed for intercepting voicemail messages, has always insisted that he had no knowledge of illegal activity when he edited the paper or at any time as a journalist. He told a Commons select committee last year: "I have never had any involvement in it at all."

The New York Times website published a trail to a story due to appear in its Sunday magazine. It made detailed allegations likely to bring intense new pressure on Coulson and the Metropolitan police force, which stands accused of favouring Rupert Murdoch's newspaper group by cutting short its investigation, withholding crucial evidence from prosecutors and failing to inform victims of the newspaper's crimes against them. Coulson declined to comment on the allegations. The News of the World and Scotland Yard have denied all the charges.

Coulson resigned after the imprisonment of his royal reporter, Clive Goodman, and a private investigator, Glenn Mulcaire, for "hacking" into the voicemail messages of eight public figures. When the Guardian revealed last year that the scandal involved other journalists at the paper and numerous other victims, Coulson said he had nothing to add to earlier denials of involvement, and the Conservative leader stood by him. David Cameron said: "I believe in giving people a second chance."

The New York Times, which has had an investigative team at work on the story since March, is citing two former News of the World journalists who specifically claim that Coulson was directly aware of his reporters' use of illegal techniques.

An unnamed former editor is quoted as claiming that Coulson talked freely about illegal news-gathering techniques, including phone-hacking, and that he personally had been at "dozens, if not hundreds" of meetings with Coulson where the subject came up. "The editor added that when Coulson would ask where a story came from, editors would reply 'We've pulled the phone records' or 'I've listened to the phone messages'."

In addition, Sean Hoare, a former reporter who used to be a close friend of Coulson, is quoted as saying that when he worked with Coulson at the Sun, he personally played recordings of hacked voicemail messages for him and that later, when he worked for Coulson at the News of the World, he "continued to inform Coulson of his pursuits. Coulson 'actively encouraged me to do it', Hoare said".

Hoare, who was sacked from the paper at a time when he had drink and drug problems, says he personally listened to the voicemail messages of celebrities such as David and Victoria Beckham and that he has spoken out now because he believes it was unfair for Goodman to get all the blame.

Coulson told the Commons media committee last year that he had never even heard Mulcaire's name and that Goodman had been the only reporter involved: "I am absolutely sure that Clive's case was a very unfortunate rogue case."

The New York Times claims to have spoken to a dozen former News of the World reporters and editors who say that phone-hacking was "pervasive" in Coulson's newsroom. "Everyone knew," according to an unnamed senior reporter. "The office cat knew." Most former reporters are unnamed, but Sharon Marshall is named as having witnessed hacking when working under Coulson from 2002-04. "It was an industry-wide thing," she said.

The paper says that Coulson ran a highly competitive newsroom "with single-minded imperiousness". Former News of the World journalists claim that there was a "do whatever it takes" mentality and that reporters were told to "get the story, no matter what". "They described a frantic, sometimes degrading atmosphere in which some reporters openly pursued hacking or other improper tactics to satisfy demanding editors," according to the New York Times.

The paper gives a specific example of the involvement of an editorial executive: "Matt Driscoll, a former sports reporter, recalled chasing a story about the soccer star Rio Ferdinand. Ferdinand claimed he had inadvertently turned off his phone and missed a message alerting him to a drug test. Driscoll had hit a dead end, he said, when an editor showed up at his desk with the player's private phone records." Driscoll was later dismissed and awarded £800,000 by a tribunal, which found that he had been bullied by Coulson.

Bill Akass, managing editor of the News of the World, dismissed the New York Times claims as "unsubstantiated". He said: "We reject absolutely any suggestion or assertion that the activities of Clive Goodman and Glenn Mulcaire, at the time of their arrest, were part of a culture of wrongdoing at the News of the World and were specifically sanctioned or accepted at a senior level in the newspaper."

The New York Times goes on to quote unnamed sources from the Met suggesting that its inquiry into the phone hacking was hampered by a desire to avoid upsetting Britain's biggest selling newspaper: "Several investigators said in interviews that Scotland Yard was reluctant to conduct a wider inquiry in part because of its close relationship with the News of the World."

After a raid on Goodman's desk in August 2006, according to the New York Times, "several detectives said they began feeling internal pressure. One senior investigator said he was approached by someone from the department's press office, who was waving his arms in the air, saying 'wait a minute, let's talk about this'."

The investigator, who has since left Scotland Yard, added that the press officer stressed the department's "long-term relationship with News International". The investigator recalled furiously responding: "There's illegality here, and we'll pursue it like we do any other case." Scotland Yard says that operational decisions are made by police, not by press officers.

Former journalists told the New York Times that when Scotland Yard raided Goodman's desk, two senior journalists "stuffed reams of documents into trash bags and hauled them away". Police did not interview any other reporter or editor apart from Goodman. The material seized from Goodman and Mulcaire included paperwork which potentially implicated three named journalists. None was interviewed and, as the Guardian disclosed last year, the police failed to pass key paperwork to the Crown Prosecution Service.

The New York Times quotes an unnamed former senior prosecutor who was "stunned to discover later that the police had not shared everything. 'I would have said we need to see how far this goes' and 'whether we have a serious problem of criminality on this news desk', said the former prosecutor."

When the case came to court, police identified eight victims of the hacking. However, the New York Times claims that the officer responsible for the inquiry, the then assistant commissioner Andy Hayman, had been shown a "target list" of names and numbers taken from Mulcaire's home which ran to eight or 10 pages and which "read like a British society directory".

The Met told prosecutors that it would approach all known victims, but failed to do so. One who was approached, the then Respect MP George Galloway, told the New York Times that police warned him that his voicemail had been intercepted but refused to tell him who was responsible.

Scotland Yard denies cutting short its inquiry or being influenced by its relationship with the News of the World. The Press Complaints Commission was criticised after two inquiries into the affair failed to find evidence of wrongdoing other than that originally presented by police.

After revelations in the Guardian, the Commons media select committee held a second inquiry into the affair last year. Its report expressed concern "at the readiness of all of those involved – News International, the police and the PCC – to leave Mr Goodman as the sole scapegoat without carrying out a full investigation".

BuzzFeed, which tracks online topics that have gone viral, is offering a version of the analytical dashboard it uses to monitor the spread of Internet “memes” to any website, brand or publisher that wants to track the popularity of their content. To demonstrate the dashboard’s features, BuzzFeed — which is run by viral marketer and Huffington Post co-founder Jonah Peretti — has opened up its own internal version of the tool to show all its traffic statistics, including the performance of individual stories on the BuzzFeed site and where the traffic came from.

The dashboard tracks what the site calls “seed views” — representing readers who looked at the content on BuzzFeed’s site or on one of its partners’ websites — and “viral views,” which are readers who came from somewhere else, after finding the item on Twitter, Facebook, Digg or some other content-sharing network. While a recent story about the best anti-Glenn-Beck signs at a rally got about 16,000 views on BuzzFeed directly, it got almost five times that many “viral views” from other sources. The dashboard shows the story got over 19,000 pageviews via Huffington Post, more than 18,000 via Reddit, and over 10,000 from Facebook. It was shared 900 times on Facebook and drew more than 1,000 “likes” from readers there, as well as 2,800 clicks.

Peretti said in an email interview that BuzzFeed has been using the viral dashboard to build not just its own site and track the spread of its content, but to put together viral advertising campaigns for clients such as Viacom, GE, and Intel as part of the company’s marketing consulting business. “We decided that it was time to make a big move and make the viral dashboard public, so everyone can see the internal stats we use to grow the company,” the BuzzFeed founder said. The site will be making the dashboard available free of charge to anyone who wants to use it later this month, Peretti said, and sites can also apply for early beta access to the tool.

BuzzFeed’s new offering could find a receptive audience; more and more web publishers are looking to real-time analytical tools to track how their content is performing on a minute-by-minute basis, rather than (or in addition to) using existing tools that look at traffic statistics over a longer time period. Chartbeat, which provides a broader package of overall web traffic analytics for websites, recently raised a funding round of $3 million from Index Ventures and a group of other VCs. BuzzFeed itself raised an $8-million Series B round of financing earlier this year from RRE Ventures, along with Ron Conway’s SV Angel and Chris Dixon’s Founder Collective.

Here’s a presentation that Peretti did on how to make your content go viral by using what he calls the “Bored at Work” network.

Related content from GigaOM Pro (sub req’d): With Caffeine, Google Reveals the Challenges of Real-Time

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A discussion today on Twitter about the rising costs of conference space, even on campuses, which in many cases charge their own faculty and staff for use of facilities, got me thinking that we humanists should be thinking more creatively about where to hold our gatherings.

The Hilton is nice. But as THATCamp has shown, it’s not an essential (or maybe even desirable) ingredient for hosting a good conference or enabling productive scholarly communication. Just as urban artists find cheap, usable—even cool—studio space in warehouses and garages, we should find ourselves some alternatives to the traditional hotel ballrooms and campus auditoriums.

So, here’s the start of a list. On the one hand, there are some places in most cities that rent space at low cost. In this category, I’d put the YMCA, local churches and synagogues, local public schools, those big suburban wedding halls they advertise on late night cable, and KOA and other campgrounds (hat tip, Brian Croxall). On the other hand, there may be places that are willing donate space that is otherwise unused on weekends. What about asking a local business for use of its offices and providing them with documentation for tax purposes of the in-kind charitable donation? What about asking a local foundation for use of its offices in lieu of a monetary donation?

None of these places will make us feel as important as we do when checking in at the New York Hilton. But they’d all serve just as well for communicating ideas. Please add your ideas for alt-conference venues in comments. Let’s build a list.

Twitter has just announced the service’s official iPad app.

It’s free and comes with a slew of touch interface bells and whistles built right in. The app is intended to allow for seamless navigation between tweets, photos, web pages, videos and other media and updates. It’s also usable even for those who don’t have Twitter accounts.

Twitter for iPad [iTunes link] has a few new UI touches that you haven’t seen elsewhere. These features are custom-designed for the larger screen and touch capabilities of the iPad. It also caters to what the iPad was made for: media consumption rather than creation. Twitter’s Leland Rechis, a mobile UX designer, writes on the Twitter blog that the iPad is “a device that really lets content shine.”

The main interface is a series of panes that can expand and retract based on the kind of content the user wants to access. “Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like,” wites Rechis.

Media viewing is optimized for the iPad, as well. Videos play in-line with other content and can be loaded while you’re browsing through your timeline. You can pinch a video to view it fullscreen, too.

Finally, Twitter has really done some interesting things with touchscreen capabilities in this app. When you pinch a tweet, you’ll see details about the author and have a list of actions you can take, including reply and retweet. A two-finger pull-down gesture will show the entire conversation around a tweet.

It’s a creative way to approach multitouch app building, and we look forward to playing with it ourselves. We’re also really looking forward to what apps may come to other tablets in the future.

The iTunes release is rolling out right now; if you can’t get the latest version of the app right now, wait a bit and try again. And of course, let us know what you think of Twitter for iPad in the comments.

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Within the next several weeks, the New Yorker magazine will be publishing big pieces about a pair of digital icons located on the East and West coasts–an assessment of the turnaround at AOL by staff columnist Ken Auletta and a profile of Facebook Co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg by Huffington Post senior contributing editor Jose Antonio Vargas.

For the Zuckerberg piece, Vargas was given a lot of access by the social networking kingpin, including allowing rare interviews with Zuckerberg’s inner circle and also longtime girlfriend and fulltime med student Priscilla Chan.

And Auletta–whose big New Yorker takeout on Google (GOOG) turned into a book that is now being turned into a movie–will be assessing the turnaround efforts at AOL (AOL), which is now being led by former Google exec Tim Armstrong.

The Internet icon has seen troubled times in recent years, including a spin-off from Time Warner (TWX), which should make for interesting fodder for Auletta.

Also in the tech-topic kitty at the New Yorker, sources said: A profile of trouble-making Gawker Media impresario Nick Denton by Ben McGrath, which I am hoping will include his terrific tour of Chinese markets near where he lives in Manhattan’s SoHo.

Longtime CBS News broadcaster Dan Rather came to The Poynter Institute this week to talk about what it was like to cover some of the world's biggest stories throughout the past half-century.

I sat down with him to hear his thoughts on the state of the news industry and how to improve it. Rather shared his take on the untold stories in politics; the effectiveness of sites that fact-check the news; and the ways in which his experience with bloggers during the Killian documents controversy still shapes his view of them today.

Big businesses' negative impact on political news coverage

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		You can read a full transcript of the interview here. Rather: 'If we'd had spell check back then I'd still be in the newspaper business'

Rather, who is now anchor and managing editor of HDNet's "Dan Rather Reports," said too much of today's political coverage is reduced to horse-race reporting and public opinion polling. Such polls are valuable to the extent that they can provide a snapshot of a given moment, he said, but that moment changes.

The 78-year-old advocated for deeper investigative reporting that looks at the money involved in politics, and he suggested that journalists ask: "Who is giving what to whom, expecting to get what?"

'"The public is not well-served by political coverage as it is today," said Rather, who did not exclude himself from this criticism. "In many important ways, very big business is in bed with big government and whoever's in power in Washington, whether it be Republicans or Democrats ... and this seriously affects news coverage."

Too often, he said, political coverage is governed by the large corporate entities that own news organizations and that don't always have the public's best interest in mind.

"An independent, a truly independent and truly free press, a fiercely independent but necessary press," Rather said, "is the red beating heart of freedom and democracy, and it's absolutely essential to our system."

Political fact-checking sites need to expand reach

Rather said he doesn't think PolitiFact and other efforts to fact-check political news reach a wide enough audience, despite efforts to expand. Still, he applauds them.

"This is what every good newspaper, every television station, every network ought to be doing. But in so many cases -- it's not unanimous, there are some exceptions -- but by and large, this is not what they do," Rather said. "So often, particularly covering politics, enterprises that describe themselves as journalistic enterprises, and journalists who describe themselves as journalists, in fact just become transmission belts."

He said journalists can quickly become transcribers who simply write down what they hear without asking tough questions, partly out of fear that they'll seem unpatriotic.

Leading up to the Iraq war, most journalists blindly accepted the government's statements without checking to see if the information matched up with the facts, he said. (There were some exceptions, Rather said, such as McClatchy's Washington bureau, which didn't accept the Bush administration's claims that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.)

"What happened in the run-up to the Iraq war is that the administration of that time commanded the narrative, and the press bought that narrative," Rather said. "And this led to, by any reasonable objective analysis, a strategic blunder of historic proportions."

"Highly partisan, political" nature of the blogosphere

Rather has acknowledged that he never realized the power of bloggers until after he reported the infamous story about the Jerry B. Killian documents that criticized Bush's service in the Army National Guard. At the time, conservative bloggers questioned whether the documents were falsified and began a debate about it online. No one has yet to prove the authenticity of the documents.

Rather said the Killian controversy shows how the blogosphere lacks accountability and can be used for "highly partisan, political and ideological purposes." He stood by his belief that, despite what all the bloggers said at the time, the Killian story was true.

"It was true then, it's true now, and evidence of that is neither the president nor anyone close around him, so far as I know, (and I think I would know if they had), has ever denied the narrative of the story," Rather said. "I don't seek to go over this ground all over again, but I do think it's important to point out that the story was true, and for those who didn't like the story, for their partisan, political, or ideological reasons, that's the reason they had to attack it so fiercely and, as it turned out, so effectively, I'm sorry to say."

Need for new business models to replace old one

Despite the growing influence of online news, Rather said he still thinks we're in the early stages of the Internet's potential. He called for more original, shoe-leather reporting on the Internet and less aggregated content, particularly when it comes to international and investigative coverage.

The old business model for news is crumbling, he said, and the Internet has not yet risen in its place. He's said before that he wishes President Barack Obama would form a commission to help save journalism jobs and establish new business models.

"In the past when we've had these crises, for the automobile business, for the early stages of the microchip business, for the steel business and what have you, it's not that unusual for the president to call together the best minds and say we may or may not have the government intervene," Rather said. "I thought it would be a good idea for him to call together some of the brightest people in the country, including those in journalism but not confined to that, and say, let's see what we can do."

The idea has not gone anywhere, and Rather said he doesn't think it will anytime soon.

Social media is "increasingly important" in politics

Twitterers criticized Rather earlier this year for making what some believed to be a racially-charged comment about Obama's efforts to get health care legislation passed. Rather later responded to the buzz on Twitter, saying, "Much of what we tweet, or post, or chat away at under the guise of news, are distractions."

Rather told me he's since found that, in general, social networking sites can be an important tool for journalists.

"I think it's increasingly important in politics and in business and in personal relationships to have these so-called social media. And I think there'll be more of them, not fewer," he said. "Some of them will go by the wayside. Twitter is the big thing now. Who knows what's going to be post-Twitter."

Though Rather has both a Twitter and Facebook account for "Dan Rather Reports," he said he doesn't spend much time updating them because he'd rather be doing what he likes best -- being out in the field reporting.

People are increasingly sharing different types of information on Twitter. For example, Tweets point to web pages, photos, videos, hashtags, people, check-ins, and more. Exploring Tweets is a great way to discover new and interesting information. And with devices of all shapes and sizes connecting to the Internet, we’re constantly looking for new ways to make this easier. To date, we’ve created applications for a variety of mobile phones, giving you instant access to Tweets and great content when you’re on the go.

Today we are bringing Tweets to a device that really lets content shine - the iPad. Twitter for iPad takes advantage of the iPad’s fluid touch interface, letting you move lots of information around smoothly and quickly – without needing to open and close windows or click buttons. There are a few things we want to point out that make this app a really fast and fun way to read real-time content.

Panes: Tapping on a Tweet opens a pane to the right. Depending on the content in that Tweet, you’ll see a video or photo, or maybe a news story, or perhaps another Tweet. You can continue tapping on Tweets, opening new panes, and getting new content as long as you’d like to. And, it’s really easy to move between panes by swiping to the right or left.


Media: When you tap a video link or open a web page with an embedded video, you can play that video inline. And, let’s be honest, video is great but sometimes it can take some time to load. The panes in Twitter for iPad let you look through your timeline while a video is loading, and then you can just swipe back to the video when it’s ready to play. You can also pinch on a video to watch it fullscreen.

Gestures: You can pinch on a Tweet to quickly view details about the author and to take actions on a Tweet, such as reply or retweet. Put two fingers together and pull down on a Tweet to peek at the replies, showing the entire conversation leading to that Tweet.

Danielle Bean: What man through yonder window breaks? | Here’s a peek at the view from my living room window a couple of days ago. It’s Dan, with a hammer. In preparation for the coming winter, we have been replacing some of our windows with more energy efficient ones. And by “‘we” I mean Dan. Because I don’t do that kind …

This week: The country singer Marty Stuart plays live in the studio, and Ben Ratliff discusses Miles Davis's album "Bitches Brew" on its 40th anniversary.

Shhhh! Stop. Stay very, very still. Listen carefully. Prick up your ears and you might just catch it: a faint rustling in the bushes as it ducks and dives its way through the darkness of Padre Damián Street, scavenging. If you're really lucky, you might even hear its characteristic call breaking the still air in the dead of night, escaping from somewhere in the shadow of the Santiago Bernabéu:

The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War (by Nicholas Thompson)

Foreign policy hands generally aspire to be one of three people. The first is George Kennan, who managed to acquire the status of sage and prophet by writing the most prescient Foreign Affairs article ever written. Another is Dean Acheson, the mustachioed Secretary of State and architect of the post-World War II international order, whose picture Condoleezza Rice kept on her office wall. And the third is Paul Nitze, Acheson’s onetime deputy, who managed to work for every presidential administration from Roosevelt to Reagan—except Jimmy Carter’s—and who, more than any other single figure, set the tone of America’s approach to the Cold War, having authored or helped to author, by a ballpark estimate, one-third of the seminal manifestoes from the era.

Nitze’s grandson has written a dual biography of Kennan ('the dove') and Nitze ('the hawk'), which aims to illustrate how the United States achieved a rough continuity in its policies, despite vicious disagreements over what course to pursue, through the generation-long challenge of the Cold War. In doing so, he illuminates some of the challenges we face in the war on terrorism: if Cold War America could synthesize different ideologies and vanquish Soviet Russia, perhaps a similar mixing of ideologies can seriously diminish Islamist terrorism.

Thompson had unprecedented access to Nitze’s and Kennan’s personal archives, in part because of his family connections. This has allowed him to give us a far-reaching portrait of George Kennan the intellectual—a Slavic specialist who called himself “an eighteenth century man,” savaged himself regularly in unsparing diary entries, and seemed more comfortable in the Eastern Bloc or sailing the gray Norwegian fjords than in his own country. Morose, colorblind, and constitutionally conservative, the Kennan who appears here is a poster child for the theory that mild-to-clinical depression actually enhances one’s ability to analyze the world.

We meet him on a balcony in Moscow, staring down at throngs of Communists celebrating the joint American-Soviet victory over Hitler. Euphoria was in the air, along with hopes in Washington that the two countries might partner up to police the globe. But Kennan did not like euphoria. Having watched the Soviet Union oppress its citizens and squeeze its neighbors, he saw Stalin as a paranoid thug who would never give up control over the countries he occupied on the way to Berlin. Sure enough, he was correct: Roosevelt promised the American people that Stalin would hold free elections in those countries, but Stalin reneged, throwing the American foreign policy community into chaos and dispersing American illusions about fraternal harmony like a lot of steam. But what would replace them?

Like many passionate functionaries and analysts the world over, Kennan had been writing furious telegrams to a bureaucracy that seemed unlikely to notice, much less to respond. Now, suddenly, the State Department was at a loss: casting about for a new way to explain Stalin’s behavior, it asked Kennan to lay out his views in another memo. Kennan obliged, fighting a head cold and toothache to compose a 5,300-word opus, before collapsing from exhaustion.

The “long telegram,” which was written in February 1946, was an instantaneous hit. Among its virtues, it explained what the Soviets were trying to do—gain ever more power and exalt the Russian state under the banner of Marx and Lenin. It also contained the germ of what we should do—contain them until the Soviet Union collapsed. Kennan’s paper ended up on nearly every desk in Washington, including the president’s, and it catapulted the misanthropic “pterodactyl” to foreign policy celebrity. He was promoted to professor at the National War College, embarked on a speaking tour, and had his article refashioned into an anonymous piece (written under the pseudonym “X”) for Foreign Affairs, in turn rapidly popularized by magazines like Reader’s Digest and Life. Around the same time, Kennan was asked to become head of Policy Planning for Secretary of State George Marshall, and helped to design the Marshall Plan.

Here, about a quarter of the way through the book, Kennan’s career essentially peaks. For one thing, he was ill-suited to bureaucratic infighting. After a few sublime years as head of Policy Planning, he was outmaneuvered by Nitze—more on him in a moment—and spent the rest of his life half-pining for a hand in the action, only to make his superiors wince each time he returned to government, and dispose of him after various ham-fisted faux pas.

More important for our understanding of the Cold War, Kennan soon fell out of step with U.S. national security policy. In his soul a quintessential realist—he would soon come to hate and inform on hippies; he despised the American public; and (Thompson reveals) he held negative views of African Americans, Jews, and the civilizations of Latin America—Kennan was nearly as repulsed by Truman’s support-freedom-everywhere rhetoric as he was by Roosevelt’s talk of American-Soviet harmony. In his conception, “containment” should have relied on covert action and aggressive diplomacy to undermine the Soviets, rather than military opposition to all Communist countries as practiced by Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson. As Thompson notes, Kennan would not be in sync with American foreign policy again until the administration of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. (Ironically, Kennan also became a hero of the antiwar left, testifying before Congress against our involvement in Vietnam. He would soon write to oppose the nuclear arms race, environmental degradation, and the industrial revolution itself, explaining that “I am a strange mixture of a reactionary and a liberal.”)

Thompson's portrait of Kennan provides us with glimpses inside the dark recesses of this odd soul, who was convinced that external comportment would allow him to control his internal demons, and it also reveals much surprising new biographical information. (Including the memory of some kind of adulterous Nazi-era love affair.) It is quite remarkable to watch Kennan’s vision of America's Cold War policies crushed, and in Thompson's telling ultimately redeemed, by his book's other subject.

A bon vivant in high Mad Men style, Paul Nitze was a wealthy heir who “rarely applied himself” through youthful drinking sprees at Harvard social clubs, and then, as a white-shoe investment banker, across Europe with a "traveling circus" of inebriated buddies. Finally, at thirty, he was seized by the desire to do something relevant with his life. Helped along by the disapproval of his father, a University of Chicago professor, he tried Harvard graduate school, and then tried founding his own investment firm. Then, finally, he was sucked into government when his boss, the politically connected banker James Forrestal, got a call from Roosevelt asking him to become secretary of the Navy, and would he please bring along an assistant?

Nitze had his own conservative tendencies, and his own cultural baggage. Privileged establishmentarian though he was—by the end of his life, he or his family members founded not only the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, but also the Aspen Ski Company and the Aspen Institute; and his first wife, Phyllis Pratt, was a Standard Oil heiress—there were rough spots during his childhood. Walking from his home to John Dewey's Lab School on the South Side of Chicago, he was regularly beat up by members of a local gang, and forced to join a rival gang for protection. According to Nitze, this experience left him with a lasting belief in the value that force and deterrence play in guaranteeing peace—and the fatal consequences that could stem from the appearance of weakness. (His grad-school reading of Oswald Spengler, the shrill prophet of civilizational decline, may have also informed what would become the Nitze style of national security debate.) As Forrestal's deputy, and then as Kennan’s successor in the office of Policy Planning, he applied the fundamental lessons drawn from these experiences to foreign affairs, transforming into a fierce, lucid advocate of American military toughness in the face of Soviet aggression.

In order to accomplish this, Nitze developed two distinctive techniques that would become mainstays of American national security politics: the ultra-dire, apocalyptic national security threat memo, and the ultra-alarmist, apocalyptic national security lobbying committee. The first report of this type was NSC-68, a paint-stripping jeremiad in which Nitze argued that the United States must increase its military budget by as much as 250 percent, lest the Soviets gain an overwhelming advantage. Following the lessons first learned from the Hyde Park thugs, he warned that such an imbalance would be fatal, emboldening the Communists to strike first and engulf the West. Much to Kennan’s “disgust,” Nitze’s paper reframed the doctrine of containment, linking it directly to the need for a military race against the Soviets and the deployment of conventional arms against Communism everywhere. Nitze’s framework established the Cold War as a battle of will and numbers: Do we have as many warheads as the Soviets? Are we devoting a large enough percentage of GDP to defense? If not, is it a sign that we have lost the will to protect ourselves?

NSC-68 also benefited from a lobbying committee, the Committee on the Present Danger, an outside pressure group founded by a Nitze friend, which pushed for the adoption of NSC-68’s recommendations in order to “prevent a ‘Korea’” in Europe. Although its efforts were modest, it set a precedent for a much more influential series of groups that Nitze would support or create during the 1970s—such as the Coalition for a Democratic Majority and the second Committee on the Present Danger—which would serve as catalysts for both the neoconservative movement and the Reagan revolution.

And yet, perhaps owing to his detailed understanding of nuclear weapons, Nitze turned out to be something of a dove too. He agreed to serve as Nixon’s chief negotiator of the SALT I arms control treaty, negotiated the treaty banning ballistic missile defenses, and, after a brief hiatus brought on by his hatred of Jimmy Carter, followed up in the Reagan administration by making the breakthrough offer that eliminated all intermediate-range nuclear missiles and ultimately led to the end of the Cold War. Having twisted Kennan’s preferred containment policy into something that Kennan considered monstrous, Nitze’s obsession with the “correlation of forces” ended up actually maintaining the everyday military balance with the Soviets, until the conflict ended almost precisely as Kennan had predicted—enabling the Soviet empire’s peaceful collapse from its own internal contradictions. As Thompson persuasively sees it, the two clashing visions of American policy, which seemed so at odds for many years, ultimately complemented each other and brought our long conflict to a happy conclusion.

The author’s personal tie to Nitze certainly shows through from time to time—we learn plenty of intimate family details: Nitze used to insist that he could mix a martini in perfect proportions by listening to the sound of the shaker—but the results of this extra-scholarly connection are usually beneficial to the reader. Indeed, Thompson reveals that Nitze’s assault on the Carter administration’s arms control efforts was “without a doubt” informed by Carter’s unwillingness to offer Nitze a job. But it is also hard to escape the feeling that Thompson had to tread softly in some instances where a more removed biographer might not, such as the episode in which a youthful Nitze, out on a date in New England, killed a pedestrian with his car. A similar event engendered psychological probing in recent books about Laura Bush, but Thompson only mentions that Nitze settled the case—because he thought a jury would resent him for seeming like a careless upper-class Tom-and-Daisy type—then pivots awkwardly to explain that “Nitze kept his cool and acted wisely.”

On the whole, though, the book’s historical sweep and efficient prose give it an almost cinematic feel. And some of the material Thompson has unearthed gives off the atmosphere of a gritty spy novel. We are taken on a tangent to learn that Henry Kissinger may have threatened the life of a bureaucratic rival, Admiral Elmo Zumwalt, and sent security agents to tail Zumwalt’s wife and daughter; that the CIA official who leaked information about the infamous “Team B” exercise to the press was found floating in the Chesapeake Bay with weights on his legs, shot in the back of the head, and declared a suicide (the extended tale is even more bizarre); that Warren Christopher helped George Kennan spy on antiwar radicals for the FBI. Joseph Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, becomes a virtual third protagonist in the biography, contacting Kennan in order to defect from the Soviet Union and striking up a lifelong friendship that triggers multiple KGB attempts to lure Kennan into a trap.

But what is the relevance of these two men today, as we settle in for yet another generational struggle against a totalitarian political phenomenon? Certainly, one can discern echoes of Nitze and Kennan in the disagreements between supporters of the Bush doctrine and those who argue the battle against militant Islam has become far too militarized. This philosophical clash seemed to play itself out in the 2008 election, when America elected a man who would jettison the National Security Strategy that relied on American military dominance, opting for one that emphasizes global engagement. And yet in practice, there has actually been great continuity between the national security policies of the Bush and Obama administrations. The methods employed against terrorist cells worldwide remain nearly identical; the Iraq war is proceeding as it probably would have under a third term of President Bush; and, despite contentious debate, it seems clear that we will maintain a larger and long-term presence in Afghanistan, most likely downsized to a politically palatable point on the sliding scale between counterinsurgency and counterterrorism. There are certainly more dramatic clashes over policy to come—and perhaps this time the results truly will be catastrophic. Still, it is possible to take some solace in the view that, despite the many departures and disagreements, the pressures of an unstable world, and the complexity of foreign policy thinking, we may see an unwitting and successful collaboration between the hawks and the doves. The struggle against our new foe could turn out as well as the struggle against our old one.

Barron YoungSmith is an assistant editor at The New Republic.