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Drawing on recently declassified documents as well as some of the latest published research, this book provides a fresh general account of President Johnson's handling of US foreign relations. It begins with an exploration of the Johnson White House, and then considers US policies towards Vietnam, Britain and France, the NATO alliance, the Soviet Union and communist China, the Middle East, the Western Hemisphere, and the international economy. The book contends that although the war in Vietnam could have been prosecuted more effectively, overall Johnson dealt with the world beyond the borders of the United States very capably. In particular, he dealt with successive challenges to the NATO alliance in a skilled and intelligent manner, leaving it politically stronger when he left office in 1969 than it had been in 1963. The book provides the most sympathetic general account of Johnson's foreign policy thus far and confounds the traditional image of him as maladroit in the realm of diplomacy.

This book unravels the intertwining threads of the protracted agony of France's war with Algeria, the American role in the fall of the Fourth Republic, the long shadow of Charles de Gaulle, and the decisive post-war power of the United States. At its heart is an analysis of how Washington helped bring de Gaulle to power and a penetrating revisionist account of his Algerian policy. Departing from widely held interpretations of the Algerian War, the book approaches the conflict as an international diplomatic crisis whose outcome was primarily dependent on French relations with Washington, the NATO alliance, and the United Nations, rather than on military engagement. It makes extensive use of previously unexamined documents from the Department of State, the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and heretofore secret files of the Archives of the French Army at Vincennes and the Colonial Ministry at Aix-en-Provence. The book argues convincingly that de Gaulle always intended to keep Algeria French, in line with his goal to make France the center of a reorganized French union of autonomous but dependent African states and the heart of a Europe of cooperating states. Such a union, which the French called Eurafrica, would further France's chance to be an equal partner with Britain and the United States in a reordered “Free World.” In recent years the Algerian War has reclaimed its place in popular memory in France. Its interpreters have continued to view the conflict as a national, internal drama and de Gaulle as the second-time savior who ended French participation in a ruinous colonial war. But by analyzing the conflict in terms of French foreign policy, the book shows the pivotal role of the United States and counters certain political myths that portray de Gaulle as an emancipator of colonial peoples.