Pay Any Price: Lyndon Johnson and the Wars for Vietnam

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good—at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered o…