Fredrik Logevall

Fredrik Logevall is a Swedish-American historian and the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of History at Harvard University. He was born in Sweden and educated at the University of British Columbia and Yale University. His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America's Vietnam (2012) traced the origins of the American war in Vietnam back to the final years of French colonial rule, from the late 1940s through the pivotal 1954 defeat at Dien Bien Phu. It won the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for History and the Pulitzer Prize Board described it as the definitive account of a war born from imperial hubris. Logevall is also the author of Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation of War in Vietnam (1999) and JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (2020), the first of a projected two-volume biography of Kennedy.