At the Water's Edge: American Politics and the Vietnam War

National security policymaking should be above politics, stopping ""at the water's edge,"" writes Wayne State University historian Small. But as he illustrates in this ambitious overview of the Vietnam War's domestic reverberations, such was not the case in the 1960s. Five presidents wrestled with communism in Vietnam, but home front dissent exploded under the war's principal stewards, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who occupy center stage here. ""No other war in U.S. history had such a negative impact on the presidents involved,"" writes Small, arguing that Vietnam overwhelmed Johnson's genius for domestic politics and led him to cripple his cherished Great Society programs and destroy his political career. Considering Nixon, Small shifts his focus from Capitol Hill to the antiwar movement that obsessed him. Nixon presaged the red-blue state divide with his ""politics of polarization,"" appealing to the Silent Majority's traditional values and thereby isolating the raucous antiwar Left. Attempts to silence some of his critics helped produce Watergate and undercut his foreign policy successes in China and the Soviet Union. Although some areas, such as economics and race relations, suffer in this broad brush approach, Small's succinct observations on Congress, the media, the antiwar movement and the various legacies of the war are especially valuable. Similar in tone to George C. Herring's landmark work, America's Longest War: The United States and Vietnam, 1950-1975, Small's book does for the domestic realm what Herring's did for foreign policy, offering a concise rendering of the battles that still echo in the contemporary political arena.