In volume four of this multi-part biography, the author, a Pulitzer Prize winner, follows Lyndon Johnson through both the most frustrating and the most triumphant periods of his career, describing Johnson's volatile relationship with John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy during the fight they waged for the 1960 Democratic nomination for president, through Johnson's unhappy vice presidency, his assumption to the presidency after Kennedy's assassination,...

"Doris Kearns Goodwin's extraordinary and insightful book draws from meticulous research in addition to the author's time spent working at the White House from 1967 to 1969. After Lyndon Johnson's term ended, Goodwin remained his confidante and assisted in the preparation of his memoir. In Lyndon Johnson and the American Dream, she traces the 36th president's life from childhood to his early days in politics, and from his leadership of the Senate...

"[A] compelling analysis . . . A solid addition to our understanding of the Vietnam War and a president." -Publishers Weekly The 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 dispassionately how...

Examines the 1968 presidential election to evaluate its lasting influence on American politics and the Democratic Party, exploring the pivotal roles of Robert Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy, two high-profile assassinations, and the Chicago riots.

"In the spring of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson had a decision to make. Just months after moving into the White House under the worst of circumstances--following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy--he had decide whether to run to win the presidency in his own right. He turned to his most reliable, trusted political strategist: his wife, Lady Bird Johnson. The memo she produced for him, long overlooked by biographers, is just one revealing...

An account of the thirth-seventh presidency sets Nixon's administration against a backdrop of the tumultuous civil rights movement while offering insight into how key events in the 1960s set the stage for today's political divides.

"Zelizer takes the full measure of the entire story [of Johnson's liberal agenda] in all its epic sweep. Before Johnson, Kennedy tried and failed to achieve many of these advances. Our practiced understanding is that this was an unprecedented liberal hour in America, a moment, after Kennedy's death, when the seas parted and Johnson could simply stroll through to victory. As Zelizer shows, this view is off-base: in many respects America was even more...

David Burner is Professor of History at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. He is the author of John F. Kennedy and a New Generation, Herbert Hoover: A Public Life, and The Politics of Provincialism: The Democratic Party in Transition, 1918-1932. David Burner's panoramic history of the 1960s conveys the ferocity of debate and the testing of visionary hopes that still require us to make sense of the decade. He begins with the civil rights...

1968 was an unprecedented year in terms of upheaval on numerous scales: political, military, economic, social, cultural. In the United States, perhaps no one was more undone by the events of 1968 than President Lyndon Baines Johnson. Kyle Longley leads his readers on a behind-the-scenes tour of what Johnson characterized as the 'year of a continuous nightmare'. Longley explores how LBJ perceived the most significant events of 1968, including the Vietnam...