Gardner's masterful study takes a close look at President Lyndon Johnson's juggling of military strategy, international diplomacy and domestic politics during the Vietnam War. Most interestingly, Gardner (Imperial America) explores LBJ's dream of going beyond the Cold War policy of containment by offering the North Vietnamese huge incentives to abandon communism, e.g., a Mekong River project that would have surpassed the New Deal's Tennessee Valley Authority. The book features a clear explication of the views of key advisers, most notably Defense Secretary Robert McNamara and his struggle with moral and ethical dimensions of Vietnam policy. By the fall of 1967, according to Gardner, most advisers' conferences included a clash between McNamara and colleagues, particularly over the bombing of the North. Making judicious use of newly declassified documents at the Johnson Library in Austin, Tex., Gardner has written a major study of LBJ's incremental reactions to the war's shifting options, shedding new light on the internal debates over the conduct of the war. Photos. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Gardner (Spheres of Influence, LJ 4/15/93), a highly regarded diplomatic historian, makes good use of recently declassified documents to show convincingly that Vietnam was not solely Lyndon Johnson's war but a series of inevitable conflicts forged in New Deal liberalism and Cold War diplomacy. Johnson's war was motivated by his need to show that the success of the Cuban Missile Crisis was no fluke but that the "loss" of China was. In addition, doves represented by diplomat George Ball and hawks like Gen. William Westmoreland added to the turmoil by presenting conflicting reports of the number of required troops and scenarios of probable outcomes. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara is portrayed as a near tragic figure who went from being chief booster of escalation to exile at the World Bank for recognizing Vietnam as the tragic quagmire it would become. (For McNamara's view of the subject, see In Retrospect, LJ 4/15/95.) A civil war-like home front joined with the looming presence of Robert Kennedy, Johnson's bête noire and probable contender for the 1968 election, to help drive Johnson from office and to an early death in 1973. This scholarly examination of the arrogance, uncertainty, and fears of the American foreign policy establishment is diplomatic history at its best. An excellent companion volume to Francis Fitzgerald's classic Fire in the Lake (1972); highly recommended for collections specializing in the Vietnam War.‘Karl Helicher, Upper Merion Twp. Lib., King of Prussia, Pa. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

As the U.S. restores diplomatic relations with Vietnam, Rutgers history professor Gardner--author of eight studies of U.S. diplomatic history--draws on newly declassified documents to explore the roots of a still-controversial war. The strength of Pay Any Price is the scope of Gardner's analysis: he weaves together political and economic changes in the U.S., intricate international diplomacy, the psychologies and political philosophies of JFK, LBJ, and other key players, and their shifting roles in the military and moral contests the nation faced in Southeast Asia and at home. Johnson learned from the New Deal, Gardner argues, that government-stimulated economic development could improve ordinary people's lives and disarm ideological extremists whose "politics of principle" threatened democracy (and capitalism). LBJ applied this vision both at home and abroad, struggling to win (or at least not lose) the fight for military control and popular support in Vietnam as well as to hold together the New Deal coalition in support of his Great Society. A vivid, three-dimensional portrait of an era whose conflicts still define the nation's problems and possibilities. --Mary Carroll