Nicholas Thompson is a senior editor at The New Yorker and the author of "The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold War."

Prior to The New Yorker, Mr. Thompson was a senior editor at Wired Magazine, Legal Affairs and an editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a contributing editor at Bloomberg Television, and a weekly contributor to CNN International.

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."

The Washington Times said it "may be the most important political biography in recent memory."