Nicholas Thompson

Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at Wired Magazine and the author of "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War," which Henry Holt will publish on September 15, 2009. Prior to Wired, Mr. Thompson was a senior editor at Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He has written about politics, technology, and the law for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, Slate, Foreign Policy, The New Republic, The New York Observer, and many other publications. He is a panelists on CNN Connects with Becky Anderson and a regular guest on CNN's American Morning and NBC's Today Show. He has also appeared as a commentator on Fox News, MSNBC, CNBC, ABCs Live with Regis and Kelly and World News Tonight, CBS's Early Show and Evening News, and National Public Radio. Paul Nitze's grandson, he has worked for the past four years on this book. A New York Times profile says, "The book is brimming with fascinating revelations about the men and the harrowing events they steered through." A New York Times book review calls it "Thoroughly engrossing ... Thompson succeeds admirably in blending biography and intellectual history, painting colorful portraits of complicated men who embodied conflicting strains of American thinking about foreign policy." And the Washington Post writes: "In The Hawk and the Dove, Nicholas Thompson, an editor at Wired magazine, skillfully contrasts Nitze and Kennan. Thompson, who is Nitze's grandson, brings a judicial impartiality to the fierce disputes that raged between the two men. Thompson has enjoyed full access to his grandfather's archival documents, but perhaps his most impressive accomplishment is to have mined Kennan's extensive diaries for new insights. In this important and astute new study, Nitze emerges as a driven patriot and Kennan as a darkly conflicted and prophetic one."