Pay any price1990

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook nurtured by New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good. In his desire to make that idea work at home and abroad, he contributed to one of the most tragic turning points in American history. As LBJ sought to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, he constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative that had long governed American foreign policy.

Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of Lyndon Johnson and America's fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. In a brilliant blending of political biography and diplomatic history,...