On 16 March 1968, two US infantry companies entered a Vietnamese village and in the course of a single morning killed over 400 of its unarmed, unresisting inhabitants . . . This is the first book to examine the response of American society to the My Lai massacre and its ambiguous place in American national memory. Kendrick Oliver argues that the massacre revelations left many Americans untroubled. It was only when the soldiers most immediately responsible came to be tried that opposition to the conflict grew, for these prosecutions were regarded by supporters of the war as evidence that the...

Drawing upon newly-released official and private papers, this book provides an intimate account of Anglo-American debates over one of the most grave and politically sensitive foreign-policy issues of the early 1960s. It examines the roles played by John F. Kennedy and Harold Macmillan in the test-ban negotiations between 1961 and 1963. It also describes the way in which contrasting domestic political imperatives and conceptions of how the Cold War could best be won, created tensions between the two allies. Nevertheless, they retained a broad unity of perspective and purpose, eventually...