Lyndon Johnson and Foreign Policy: What the New Documents Show
Article Summary and Author Biography
Newly released records show that L.B.J., for all his political canniness and cunning, never managed U.S. foreign policy well-even excluding the Vietnam War.
David Fromkin is Chairman of the International Relations Department, Director of the Center for International Relations, and Professor of Law, of History, and of International Relations at Boston University. His book about America's role in the modern world, In the Time of the Americans, will be published this spring.
Oxford University Press
1995
304 pp.
$27.50
University of Texas Press
1994
228 pp.
$29.95
Lyndon Baines Johnson School for Public Affairs
1993
192 pp.
$15.00
Cambridge University Press
1994
320 pp.
$54.95
Review Essay
In the latest installment of his epic biography of U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, Robert Caro reveals a man who obsessively sought power to assuage a misplaced sense of his own suffering -- but also to help those whose struggles were less abstract.
Collection
A slideshow with highlights from H.W. Brands’ review essay in the September/October issue.
Lyndon Johnson should have been a great president. He was better than anybody alive at getting things done in Washington. He proved it in his first few years as president, when he persuaded the hitherto squabbling branches of government to work together. Freed for a time from checking and balancing, the president and Congress dealt with a long overdue domestic agenda; the result was the more than 200 laws and programs constituting the "Great Society" initiative. The United States witnessed the rare spectacle of its system of government actually working. A Republican business leader remarked, "Now that Americans have seen what a really professional politician can accomplish, they’ll never elect an amateur again."
A broad consensus supported the goals to which Johnson devoted his amazing energies and persuasive powers. At home, he acted to eradicate poverty and racial discrimination and to improve education—a closely related goal. Abroad, he tried to achieve a working relationship with the Soviet Union so the two superpowers could conduct their disagreements peacefully. In L.B.J., the United States seemed to have found a leader who knew both where to go and how to get there.
WHAT WENT WRONG?
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