Popular memory identifies Johnson as the President who sponsored historic and successful civil rights laws, and who advanced a wider and very ambitious, if ultimately flawed, programme of domestic reform.
Part of the intention behind the chapters in this book is to take seriously the contention of leading foreign players from the Johnson Administration that its non-Vietnam policies in general, and its Soviet policy in particular, deserve reappraisal. The book should also be seen as a contribution to the 'beyond Vietnam' Johnson historiography which has emerged in recent years.
It does seek to question the common opinion, expressed for example by Deborah Welch Larson: 'Johnson was too preoccupied with Vietnam to make a sustained effort to improve US-Soviet relations'.
The chapters in the book do not ignore the Vietnam War. US-Soviet relations and American perceptions of the 'Soviet threat' were closely intertwined with America's conduct of the war, and two fairly long chapters of this book are devoted to Vietnam.
The war profoundly affected both bilateral US-Soviet relations and superpower competition in other regions of the world. In a sense, the ending of the Cold War enables us to also put the Vietnam War into its international historical context.
