| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 87.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Foreign Policies of Lyndon Johnson: Beyond Vietnam. Ed. by H. W. Brands. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1999. vi, 194 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-89096-873-X.)

Did Lyndon B. Johnson merely follow in John F. Kennedy's footsteps, or did he set out on his own to lead the nation into war? The authors here are concerned with other questions, beginning with: Did the Vietnam War loom so large that it prevented Johnson from accomplishing anything else in foreign policy? Robert Dallek sets the stage nicely for a new consideration of LBJ's supposed personal limitations, suggesting that despite Vietnam Johnson was ready to act effectively in other areas. 1

John Prados and Thomas Schwartz demonstrate LBJ's determination to hold the western alliance together yet seek détente with Russia. "I'll try to hold this Alliance together longer than anybody else will," he affirmed, "longer than the British will, and longer than the Germans. But they have got to put something in the family pot." Prados writes of Johnson's keen desire to do something about limiting nuclear weapons. He was thwarted, not by Vietnam, but by the Soviet Union's fateful insistence upon crushing the independence movement in Czechoslovakia—a decision, Prados notes, filled with irony, for, if the arms race had been brought under control then, a Gorbachev solution to the ills of the Soviet economy might have had a greater chance of succeeding. . . .

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