This is the most comprehensive, perceptive, and nuanced review to date of the foreign policy of the Lyndon Johnson era. It demonstrates U.S. concern not just with the Soviet Union, Europe, and nuclear weapons issues, but the overwhelming preoccupation with Vietnam that shaped policy throughout the world. Using the most recently declassified documents, it explains in thoroughly readable prose the intricacies of the foreign policy dilemmas that forced Johnson's Great Society domestic agenda into retreat.