PEN American Center
The PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award
For a distinguished book of nonfiction published in 2005 or 2006
To
James Carroll
For House of War (Houghton Mifflin)
It is an honor and a great pleasure to present the first PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith award to James Carroll for his book House of War. Our mandate has been to choose a work that possesses “notable literary merit and critical perspective” and illuminates “important contemporary issues.” This is what Mr. Carroll has given us – with his important and, we believe, enduring book about the role of one of our most powerful institutions – the Pentagon – during the fifty historic years of the Cold War. In doing so, he has put to rest a half-century of myths about the period and the institution. He has presented the people in his story – from the villains to the heroes – with insight and sympathy, never separating those men from the parts they played nor from the sweep of the history they helped to shape. Nor does he separate that history from his own personal history – the story of an evolving awareness of the immensely complicated and often damning relationship between our military-industrial complex and the foreign policy it drove. House of War is in the best American – or should we say Galbraithian? – tradition of honorable, muckraking scholarship and narrative passion, made memorable by the warm, critical, and never hidden heart of a man who loves his country enough to demand the best from it.
Presented in New York
May 21, 2007
Judges
Jane Kramer, Jeffrey Madrick, and David Nasaw