Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam

Gardner's masterful study takes a close look at President Lyndon Johnson's juggling of military strategy, international diplomacy and domestic politics during the Vietnam War. Most interestingly, Gardner (Imperial America) explores LBJ's dream of going beyond the Cold War policy of containment by offering the North Vietnamese huge incentives to abandon communism, e.g., a Mekong River project that would have surpassed the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority. The book features a clear explication of the views of key advisers, most notably Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his struggle with moral and ethical dimensions of Vietnam policy. By the fall of 1967, according to Gardner, most advisers' conferences included a clash between McNamara and colleagues, particularly over the bombing of the North. Making judicious use of newly declassified documents at the Johnson Library in Austin, Tex., Gardner has written a major study of LBJ's incremental reactions to the war's shifting options, shedding new light on the internal debates over the conduct of the war. Photos. (Sept.)