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Title: Guns or Butter: The Presidency of Lyndon Johnson by Irving Bernstein ISBN: 0-19-506312-0 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: January, 1996 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $45.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (2 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Balanced Look at the Presidency of LBJ
Comment: While considering this book I found a book review by American Studies Today Online, so I have posted it at the bottom of this review. I thought it was appropriate.
"Book Review: Guns or Butter: the Presidency of Lyndon Johnson by Irving Bernstein.
"Warfare, rioting, assassinations: mayhem continues to be the dominant image of America in the mid-1960s, with Lyndon Johnson presiding. This book is intended to redress an 'unfair balance' in the treatment of the man and his time in office, which has skewed our perception almost exclusively to what went wrong.
"The tragedy of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, according to the author of this new political biography, was that Johnson believed that he could have both guns and butter - that his vision of the United States as a 'great society' could be fulfilled alongside the waging of war in southeast Asia. It was to be a tragedy of epic proportions.
"In the aftermath of Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, and especially after the Democrats' landslide victory in the presidential election a year later, Johnson set about the task of continuing and extending his predecessor's liberal reform programme. Legislative achievements included the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, and a series of progressive measures relating to immigration, education and conservation. Together they constituted a new 'New Deal': FDR was LBJ's political hero.
"With rapid economic growth in the mid-1960s, the Democrats could have looked forward to a lengthy stay in office during which Johnson's vision of the 'great society' might have been made still more a reality. But his decision to engage US military forces in the long-running conflict in Vietnam changed everything.
"Bernstein has produced a very readable narrative of the domestic triumphs and foreign travails of the Johnson administration, richly documented from the archives of the LBJ presidential library in Austin, Texas. His book gives fascinating insights into the American political process, and into Johnson's complex personality.
"Despite the author' s hope to rehabilitate LBJ's reputation by focussing on the domestic accomplishments, it is the descent into the quagmire of Vietnam that comes to dominate his account. The style of writing is often vivid, sometimes colloquial, always lucid. There are useful historical backgrounds given to all the issues under discussion, and brief biographical sketches of the principal policy-makers in the Johnson administration. The book is generously illustrated, and is a storehouse of material from which teachers and students can draw readily for a better understanding of those dramatic years of American hope and despair, dream and nightmare, over which LBJ presided."
American Studies Today Online
Rating: 5
Summary: A overdue look at what went right with LBJ's presidency.
Comment: I've read this book twice and each time my admiration grows. Bernstein has written a book that accurately assesses what went right with Johnson's presidency. Johnson, on domestic policy, rivaled FDR in brilliance. Although Bernstein's goal is to show us the "forgotten" LBJ, he doesn't shrink from showing us how badly he failed when it came to the Vietnam War. This book contained lots of information but it never got bogged down in the details.
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Title: The Presidency of James Earl Carter, Jr. by Burton I. Kaufman ISBN: 0700605738 Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas Pub. Date: March, 1993 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Flawed Giant: Lyndon B. Johnson, 1960-1973 by Robert Dallek ISBN: 0195054652 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 01 April, 1998 List Price(USD): $40.00 |
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Title: We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History by John Lewis Gaddis ISBN: 0198780710 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: July, 1998 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: In Retrospect : The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam by Brian VanDeMark, Robert S. McNamara ISBN: 0679767495 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 19 March, 1996 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Worse Than Watergate: The Secret Presidency of George W. Bush by John W. Dean ISBN: 031600023X Publisher: Little Brown & Company Pub. Date: 06 April, 2004 List Price(USD): $22.95 |
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