This ground-breaking book probes the way that two capitalist superpowers, Great Britain and the United States, responded to the momentous challenge of revolution that emerged during the early years of this century. Focusing on two key figures--Woodrow Wilson and David Lloyd George--the book explores the collective impact on the Western democracies of the revolutions that swept Mexico in 1910, China in 1911, and, especially, Russia in 1917.

The war within the war was the struggle among Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin for the shape of the world that would follow World War II. That delicate diplomacy is spelled out in Lloyd Gardner's brilliant reinterpretation of the negotiations that divided Europe and laid the foundations of the cold war. Mr. Gardner begins his story not conventionally in 1941 but with the British attempt to appease Hitler at Munich in 1938. Here, the author argues, were the roots of the territorial agreements that culminated at Yalta the "spheres of influence" which the Americans sought to avoid as an Old...

Lyndon Johnson brought to the presidency a political outlook steeped in New Deal liberalism and the idea of government intervention for the public good at home or abroad. Seeking to fulfill John Kennedy's pledge in Southeast Asia, LBJ constructed a fatal coupling of the Great Society and the anti-Communist imperative. Pay Any Price is Lloyd Gardner's riveting account of the fall into Vietnam; of behind-the-scenes decision-making at the highest levels of government; of miscalculation, blinkered optimism, and moral obtuseness. Blending political biography with diplomatic history, Gardner has...

The first Vietnam War, a war of diplomatic maneuver and decisions made from afar, began in 1941, while the fires of World War II raged. With masterly command of documents never before analyzed in a book, Lloyd C. Gardner paints an absorbing picture of the events of that fateful period.