Lyndon Johnson, when it comes to his role in the Vietnam War, is popularly portrayed as an irrational "hawkish" leader who bullied his advisers and refused to solicit a wide range of opinions. that depiction, David Barrett argues, is simplistic and far from accurate.

In this book, Barrett contends that Johnson's insistence on secrecy, plus his colorful personality, have overshadowed his approach to policymaking and his consideration of a wide spectrum of opinion from a variety of formal and informal advisers. Following a paper trail of memoranda, letters, diaries, and notes, Barrett not...

The recent declassification of "top secret" Vietnam War papers of the Johnson administration provides an unusually intimate portrait of presidential decision making and fills an important gap in the literature on presidents and on the Vietnam War.
For years, the "Pentagon Papers" served as the most influential published collection of Vietnam-era policy making documents. However, as Vietnam scholar George McT. Kahin has written, the "Pentagon Papers" are "generally very sketchy and inadequate with respect to the political dimension; and for the critical years, 1964-1968, the gaps are...

In the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, questions persisted about how the potential cataclysm had been allowed to develop. A subsequent congressional investigation focused on what came to be known as the "photo gap" five weeks during which intelligence-gathering flights over Cuba had been attenuated.In "Blind over Cuba," David M. Barrett and Max Holland challenge the popular perception of the Kennedy administration's handling of the Soviet Union's surreptitious deployment of missiles in the Western Hemisphere. Rather than epitomizing it as a masterpiece of crisis management by policy...