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Books > History > Asian / Middle Eastern history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945 > Vietnam War
Traditionally seen as a master of domestic politics, Lyndon
Johnson is frequently portrayed as inept in foreign relations,
consumed by the war in Vietnam, and unable to provide vision or
leadership for the Western alliance. In this persuasive revisionist
history, Thomas Alan Schwartz takes issue with many of the popular
and scholarly assumptions about the president seen as the classic
"ugly American."
In the first comprehensive study of Johnson's policy toward
Europe--the most important theater of the Cold War--Schwartz shows
a president who guided the United States with a policy that
balanced the solidarity of the Western alliance with the need to
stabilize the Cold War and reduce the nuclear danger. He faced the
dilemmas of maintaining the cohesion of the alliance, especially
with the French withdrawal from NATO, while trying to reduce
tensions between eastern and western Europe, managing bitter
conflicts over international monetary and trade policies, and
prosecuting an escalating war in Southeast Asia.
Impressively researched and engagingly written, "Lyndon Johnson
and Europe" shows a fascinating new side to this giant of
twentieth-century American history and demonstrates that Johnson's
diplomacy toward Europe deserves recognition as one of the most
important achievements of his presidency.
Donut Dolly puts you in the Vietnam War face down in the dirt under
a sniper attack, inside a helicopter being struck by lightning, at
dinner next to a commanding general, and slogging through the mud
along a line of foxholes. You see the war through the eyes of one
of the first women officially allowed in the combat zone. When
Joann Puffer Kotcher left for Vietnam in 1966, she was fresh out of
the University of Michigan with a year of teaching, and a year as
an American Red Cross Donut Dolly in Korea. All she wanted was to
go someplace exciting. In Vietnam, she visited troops from the
Central Highlands to the Mekong Delta, from the South China Sea to
the Cambodian border. At four duty stations, she set up recreation
centers and made mobile visits wherever commanders requested. That
included Special Forces Teams in remote combat zone jungles. She
brought reminders of home, thoughts of a sister or the girl next
door. Officers asked her to take risks because they believed her
visits to the front lines were important to the men. Every Vietnam
veteran who meets her thinks of her as a brother-at-arms. Donut
Dolly is Kotcher's personal view of the war, recorded in a journal
kept during her tour, day by day as she experienced it. It is a
faithful representation of the twists and turns of the turbulent,
controversial time. While in Vietnam, Kotcher was once abducted;
dodged an ambush in the Delta; talked with a true war hero in a
hospital who had charged a machine gun; and had a conversation with
a prostitute. A rare account of an American Red Cross volunteer in
Vietnam, Donut Dolly will appeal to those interested in the Vietnam
War, to those who have interest in the military, and to women
aspiring to go beyond the ordinary.
Named by Studs Turkel as ""the poet of the Vietnam War,"" W.D.
Ehrhart has written and lectured on a wide variety of topics and
has been a preeminent voice on the Vietnam War for decades. Revered
in academia, he has been the subject of many master's theses,
doctoral dissertations, journals and books for which he was
interviewed. Yet only two major interviews have been published to
date. This complete collection of unpublished interviews from 1991
through 2016 presents Ehrhart's developing views on a range of
subjects over three decades.
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