Lyndon Johnson's War
This richly documented sequel to the author's Planning A Tragedy presents a devastating picture of Lyndon Johnson victimized by sycophantic advisers, of pressure from the American military almost amounting to blackmail and of the president's own intellectual limitations. An essential volume for any collection on the history of the Vietnam War.
Related
In the Atlantic Policy Studies conducted during the past three years by the Council on Foreign Relations four books with a predominantly economic content are being published.[i] The authors and subjects of these books are, in order of publication: John O. Coppock on agriculture; John Pincus on less developed countries; Bela Balassa on trade liberalization among industrial countries; and Richard N. Cooper on international monetary affairs (to be published later this year). From these sources and from others, Harold Van B. Cleveland, in another volume in the series, has drawn conclusions about Atlantic economic relations in his "The Atlantic Idea and Its European Rivals." The purpose of this article is not to review these significant studies but to appraise their conclusions about whether the economic connections and conflicts in the Atlantic are, on balance, moving the nations of the area toward a coherent community in some sense of the word.
The unique role of the United States in the world economy arises not from the fact that it is by far the largest trading nation but from the importance of the Government's payments abroad and the magnitude of U.S. private foreign investment. In 1966, the Government provided $4.6 billion in economic aid and foreign credits, and military expenditures abroad were $3.6 billion (apart from military aid), while the outflow of private capital was close to $4 billion. It is clear enough that the international transactions of the U.S. Government are essentially of a political character, although they have important economic effects on this country and the rest of the world. What is not so clear is that there are political aspects to our private foreign investment-not because it is motivated by foreign policy considerations, but because foreign countries are concerned about its impact on their economic and foreign policies. This is inevitable, given the magnitude of these investments and their role in the economies of the countries in which they are made.
One of the great problems in arms control is that advances in technology, and their application to military programs, tend to invalidate or render meaningless even the soundest arms-control proposals. Twice in the last decade this has occurred, once when the diffusion of nuclear technology and the production of large numbers of nuclear weapons rendered futile any hope of complete nuclear disarmament, and again when the advent of intercontinental missiles made necessary a rethinking of all the proposals for limiting or abolishing strategic strike forces. It may well be that we are about to witness a similar overtaking of current arms-control proposals because of the possibility of deploying highly effective ballistic missile defenses.

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