Lyndon Johnson's War America's Cold War Crusade in Vietnam, 1945-1968

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, Hunt 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.

Michael H. Hunt, Everett H. Emerson Professor of History at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is a leading scholar of U.S.-East Asian relations. Among his many books are Crises in U.S. Foreign Policy: An International History Reader and The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy

"A readable and penetrating account of America's tragic experience in Vietnam by one of the nation's leading diplomatic historians. Hunt brings to this account the insights of a specialist in both American and East Asian history--a combination few can match."--Michael J. Hogan, Ohio State University

"Elegant and achingly sad. This brilliant primer on the war in Vietnam is a powerful indictment of American arrogance and paternalism. Hunt engages in no diatribes, delivers no cheap shots, assigns no blame easily. Instead, by treating the Vietnamese side of the story with sensitivity and depth, he exposes the fundamental ethnocentrism of the American war planners and of traditional accounts of the war."--Piero Gleijeses, The Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies

"A tragic tale, told by a talent, full of sound and fury, and signifying quite a lot. In addition to providing a skillful and engaging account of the long escalation, though in mercifully short compass, Hunt draws attention to the right lessons."--Foreign Affairs

"Immensely valuable. Like the war itself, it 'offers no easy answers--and no simple moral judgments.'"--Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post