Beyond the Cold War Lyndon Johnson and the New Global Challenges of the 1960s

by Gavin, Francis J.; Lawrence, Mark Atwood

• ISBN13: 9780199790692
• ISBN10: 0199790698
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2014-01-16
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In writing about international affairs in the 1960s, historians have naturally focused on the Cold War. The decade featured perilous confrontations between the United States and the Soviet Union over Berlin and Cuba, the massive buildup of nuclear stockpiles, the escalation of war in Vietnam, and bitter East-West rivalry throughout the developing world. As the world historical force of globalization has quickened and deepened, however, historians have begun to see that many of the global challenges that we face today

Beyond the Cold War examines how the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson responded to this changing international landscape. To what extent did U.S. leaders understand these changes? How did they prioritize these issues alongside the geostrategic concerns that dominated their daily agendas and the headlines of the day? How successfully did Americans grapple with these long-range problems, with what implications for the future? What lessons lie in the efforts of Johnson and his aides to cope with a new and inchoate agenda of problems? By reconsidering the 1960s, this work suggests a new research agenda predicated on the idea that the Cold War was not the only - or perhaps even the most important - feature of international life in the postwar period.

Author Biography

Francis J. Gavin is the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss for International Security and Law at the University of Texas. He is the author of Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 and Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America's Atomic Age. From 2005 to 2010, he directed The American Assembly's Next Generation Project: U.S. Global Policy and the Future of International Institutions.

Mark Atwood Lawrence, a native of Westport, Massachusetts, earned his BA from Stanford University in 1988 and his PhD from Yale University in 1999. He joined the History Department at the University of Texas at Austin in 2000 and was promoted to Associate Professor in 2006. He is author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History, as well as numerous articles and essays on the history of U.S. foreign relations.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Introduction, Francis J. Gavin and Mark Atwood Lawrence

Part I: Thinking Beyond East and West
1. Lyndon Johnson and the Challenges of Economic Globalization, Daniel Sargent
2. Toward a New Deal for the World? Lyndon Johnson's Aspirations to Renew the Twentieth Century's Pax Americana, Patrick O. Cohrs
3. Moving Beyond the Cold War: The Johnson Administration, Bridge-Building, and Détente, Thomas A. Schwartz

Part II: Internationalizing the Great Society
4. One Global War on Poverty: The Johnson Administration Fights Poverty at Home and Abroad, 1964-1968, Sheyda Jahanbani
5. LBJ's Third War: The War on Hunger, Nick Cullather
6. LBJ and World Population: Planning the Greater Society One Family at a Time, Matthew Connelly
7. Globalizing the Great Society: Lyndon Johnson and the Pursuit of Smallpox Eradication, Erez Manela

Part III: Adapting to a World of Scarcity
8. Thinking Globally: U.S. Foreign Aid, Paul Ehrlich, and the Emergence of Environmentalism in the 1960s, Tom Robertson
9. "More a Gun at Our Heads than Theirs": The 1967 Arab Oil Embargo, Third World Raw Materials Sovereignty, and American Diplomacy, Christopher R.W. Dietrich

Part IV: Shifting Moralities
10. The Rise of Human Rights during the Johnson Years, Sarah B. Snyder
11. Globalized Faith, Radicalized Religion, and the Domestic Sources of U.S. Foreign Policy, Andrew Preston