Mark Atwood Lawrence, "The End of Ambition: The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era" (Princeton UP, 2021)

New Books in American Studies · Oct 6, 2021 · 58m

Histories of the Vietnam War are not in short supply. In U.S. history, it ranks alongside the Civil War and World War Two in terms of author coverage. The aftermath of the war has received a similar amount of attention, with historians noting the effect that the end of the war had on domestic politics and U.S. foreign policy. But what about shifts during the war itself? While the war dominated thinking in the Johnson Administration and overshadowed a whole host of other foreign policy issues, it did not cause them to simply disappear. Quite the opposite: Lyndon Johnson was confronted by a…