Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World


Book Description

A comprehensive review of the foreign policy of the Lyndon Johnson era demonstrates U.S. concern not only with the Soviet Union, Europe, and nuclear weapons issues, but the overwhelming preoccupation with Vietnam that shaped policy throughout the world.




The Foreign Policy of Lyndon B. Johnson


Book Description

A fresh, up-to-date and balanced overview of Johnson's policies across a range of theatres and issues with the aim of generating a proper understanding of his successes and failures in foreign policy.




Lyndon Johnson and Europe


Book Description

He faced the dilemmas of maintaining the cohesion of the alliance, especially with the French withdrawal from NATO, while trying to reduce tensions between eastern and western Europe, managing bitter conflicts over international monetary and trade policies, and prosecuting an escalating war in Southeast Asia."--BOOK JACKET.




LBJ and Vietnam


Book Description

“[A] compelling analysis . . . A solid addition to our understanding of the Vietnam War and a president.” —Publishers Weekly The Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for Americans—partisans on all sides still debate why it was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all. In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionately how and why President Lyndon Johnson and his administration conducted the war as they did. Drawing on a wealth of newly released documents from the LBJ Library, including the Tom Johnson notes from the influential Tuesday Lunch Group, George Herring discusses the concept of limited war and how it affected President Johnson’s decision making, Johnson’s relations with his military commanders, the administration’s pacification program of 1965–1967, the management of public opinion, and the “fighting while negotiating” strategy pursued after the Tet Offensive in 1968. This in-depth analysis, from a prize-winning historian and National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, exposes numerous flaws in Johnson’s approach, in a “concise, well-researched account” that “critiques Johnson's management of the Vietnam War in terms of military strategy, diplomacy, and domestic public opinion” (Library Journal).




Thomas C. Mann


Book Description

Lyndon Johnson was often blamed for abandoning Kennedy's vision of development and progress in Latin America in favor of his own domestic concerns: anti-communism and economic stability. Johnson, along with his fellow Texan and chief adviser on inter-American affairs Thomas C. Mann, nonetheless offered a vision for American engagement with the developing world even as congressional funding and public enthusiasm for such programs waned and Johnson's presidency collapsed under the weight of the Vietnam War. This book explores Lyndon Johnson's Latin American policy, from his key advisers to development programs and military interventions, to establish a new perspective on the impact of a complex and controversial president on a tumultuous period in the history of the Western Hemisphere. Demonstrating that much of the negative coverage of their efforts emerged from disgruntled Kennedy loyalists, Tunstall Allcock argues that Johnson and Mann were both New Dealers who possessed a keen desire to operate as good neighbors and support Latin American development and regional integration while dealing with domestic pressure from both right and left. Based on extensive primary research in multiple archives, this much-needed book provides a crucial exploration of how inter-American relations transitioned from the enthusiasm and excitement of the Kennedy years to the neglect and frustration of the Nixon presidency.




U.S. History


Book Description

U.S. History is designed to meet the scope and sequence requirements of most introductory courses. The text provides a balanced approach to U.S. history, considering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped the United States from both the top down (politics, economics, diplomacy) and bottom up (eyewitness accounts, lived experience). U.S. History covers key forces that form the American experience, with particular attention to issues of race, class, and gender.







Lyndon Johnson's War


Book Description

The Hill and Wang Critical Issues Series: concise, affordable works on pivotal topics in American history, society, and politics. Using newly available documents from both American and Vietnamese archives, Michael H. Hunt's Lyndon Johnson's War reinterprets the values, choices, misconceptions, and miscalculations that shaped the long process of American intervention in Southeast Asia, and renders more comprehensible--if no less troubling--the tangled origins of the war.




Transplanting the Great Society


Book Description

"Uses recently declassified sources to trace the successes and limitations of the Johnson administration's efforts to use food aid as a diplomatic tool during the Cold War, both to gain support for U.S. policies and to reward or punish allies such as Israel, India, and South Vietnam"--Provided by publisher.




Pay Any Price


Book Description

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good--at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with diplomatic history, Gardner has written the first book on American involvement in the Vietnam War to use the full resources and newly declassified documents of the Johnson Library, and to tell whole the story of Johnson and Vietnam. The book is filled with fresh interpretations, brilliantly incisive portraits of the president and his men, and new perspectives on America's most divisive foreign war. Gardner describes for the first time how, as tragedy swirled around the deliberations in Washington, Clark Clifford and Dean Rusk struggled for the president's soul, culminating in the bombing halt of 1968 and the Johnson decision not to run. The war finally sundered the liberal cold war consensus, Gardner argues, and brought to an end the New Deal politics that had dominated American political life since 1933. Pay Any Price is a major work of history by one of our most distinguished historians.