This historical study examines America's Cold War diplomacy and covert operations intended to lure Cambodia from neutrality to alliance.Although most Americans paid little attention to Cambodia during Dwight D. Eisenhower's presidency, the global ideological struggle with the Soviet Union guaranteed US vigilance throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia's leader, Norodom Sihanouk, refused to take sides in the Cold War, a policy that disturbed US officials. From 1953 to 19...

This critical study of US intervention in the Laotian Civil War is "a major contribution to the literature on America's Southeast Asian involvement" ( Publishers Weekly).In the decade preceding the first US combat operations in Vietnam, the Eisenhower administration sought to defeat a communist-led insurgency in neighboring Laos. Although US foreign policy in the 1950s focused primarily on threats posed by the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of Chin...

Before U.S. combat units were deployed to Vietnam, presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy strove to defeat a communist-led insurgency in Laos. This impoverished, landlocked Southeast Asian kingdom was geopolitically significant because it bordered more powerful communist and anticommunist nations. The Ho Chi Minh Trail, which traversed the country, was also a critical route for North Vietnamese infiltration into South Vietnam.In So Much to Lose: John F. Kennedy and American Policy i...

Hailed as a "pithy and compelling account of an intensely relevant topic" (Kirkus Reviews), this wide-ranging volume offers a superb account of a key moment in modern U.S. and world history. Drawing upon the latest research in archives in China, Russia, and Vietnam, Mark Lawrence creates an extraordinary, panoramic view of all sides of the war. His narrative begins well before American forces set foot in Vietnam, delving into French colonialism's contribution to the 1945 Vietnamese revolut...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Based on the celebrated PBS television series, the complete text of an engrossing history of America’s least-understood conflict, “a significant milestone [that] will no doubt do much to determine how the war is understood for years to come.” —The Washington PostMore than forty years have passed since the end of the Vietnam War, but its memory continues to loom large in the national psyche. In this intimate history, Geoffrey C. Ward a...

Even fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, it is still hard to grasp that we no longer live under its immense specter. For nearly half a century, from the end of World War II to the early 1990s, all world events hung in the balance of a simmering dispute between two of the greatest military powers in history. Hundreds of millions of people held their collective breath as the United States and the Soviet Union, two national ideological entities, waged proxy wars to determine spheres ...

The first book to give equal weight to the Vietnamese and American sides of the Vietnam war.

Now, for the first time, Kissinger gives us in a single volume an in-depth, inside view of the Vietnam War, personally collected, annotated, revised, and updated from his bestselling memoirs and his book Diplomacy.Many other authors have written about what they thought happened—or thought should have happened—in Vietnam, but it was Henry Kissinger who was there at the epicenter, involved in every decision from the long, frustrating negotiations with the No...

#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER. The definitive insider's account of American policy making in Vietnam."Can anyone remember a public official with the courage to confess error and explain where he and his country went wrong? This is what Robert McNamara does in this brave, honest, honorable, and altogether compelling book."—Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.Written twenty years after the end of the Vietnam War, former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara's con...

“A magisterial narrative history. Brilliantly recaptures the hopes, illusions, fears, suspicions, frustrations, and disappointments of these tumultuous years” (Los Angeles Times) during the Vietnam War.*Winner of the Overseas Press Club's Cornelius J. Ryan Award for Best Nonfiction Book, the Commonwealth Club of California's Gold Medal for Nonfiction, and the PEN Center West Award for Best Research Nonfiction*Twenty-five years afte...

Stunning in its insight, On Strategy is required reading not just for everyone who is interested in the Vietnam War, but for anyone who is concerned about the place of the United States on the world stage and how America can, and more importantly cannot, employ its immense military force to help bring peace to an increasingly troubled world.“On Stategy is just about the best thing I have read on Vietnam.”—Drew Middleton, The New York T...

"[A] compelling analysis . . . A solid addition to our understanding of the Vietnam War and a president." — Publishers WeeklyThe Vietnam War remains a divisive memory for Americans—partisans on all sides still debate why it was fought, how it could have been better fought, and whether it could have been won at all.In this major study, a noted expert on the war brings a needed objectivity to these debates by examining dispassionate...