Frank Everson Vandiver

"Wars have played an integral role in America's transformation from a continental power into a world force. Over time, America's war-making has favored and continues to favor the expansion of the President's role at the expense of the Congress. America's future will be determined in large part by the way in which the nation chooses and engages in military pursuits. Questions about how and when we go to war have never been so vital or relevant. This thought-provoking overview serves as a quick introduction to these important issues."--Jacket.

Presents 1,001 key facts about World War II, providing information about characters, events, and cultural phenomena.

It is still not popular - perhaps it never will be - to be sympathetic to Lyndon Johnson. Vandiver stops short of that but is, in the tradition of the biographer, empathetic with him. Readers may disagree with some aspects of this thought-provoking portrayal, but, as Vandiver has done for Stonewall Jackson and Black Jack Pershing, he offers an understanding of a major wartime figure as he likely saw himself. His purpose is to show what Johnson knew, felt, feared, and tried to do. This, then, is the Vietnam War through Lyndon Johnson's eyes, with Vandiver providing perspective and the missing puzzle pieces not available to Johnson at the time. Vandiver offers a broad, sweeping synthesis of the scholarship on Johnson's war presidency, along with new insights culled from numerous and extensive interviews and a far-reaching immersion in the primary documents housed in archives around the country. He provides an unusual combination of politico-military analysis with on-the-scene battle narratives, dramatically juxtaposing for the reader the reality in Vietnam with the perceptions of it in Washington. Compellingly addressing long-standing questions of whether the White House had become isolated from public opinion and whether Johnson was hardened to the voices raised against the war, Vandiver shows the president as a man who agonized, raged, and grew in response to crises in Vietnam and at home. In the most complete account yet of the period from late 1967 to LBJ's decision not to run for re-election, he probes the shifting honesty of the president's men on the Vietnam scene and identifies a playbill of White House villains who, over the years, have often been cast as heroes. He argues that Johnson entered the war honestly - fully believing that Russia and China were serious threats and convinced by his Tuesday Lunch advisors that aiding South Vietnam was essential to maintaining America's international reputationbut without confidence in his foreign policy role. In the end, Vandiver concludes that, tragically, had Johnson had the faith in his war instincts that he had on other fronts, he might have achieved his goals, emerging at last from the shadow of Vietnam.

A well-researched, objective, but sympathetic history of the Civil War years in the South, told in a graphic, fast-moving narrative that will attract casual readers as well as scholars and Civil War buffs.

"Frank E. Vandiver's detailed research ... provide a vivid description of Stonewall's boyhood, West Point training, early career, years of teaching at the Virginia Military Institute, and Civil War campaigns. Here, too, are insights into Jackson's personal life and his deep religious feelings, which were so influential on his military thought and actions"--Jacket.

The Arnold family have worked the farmland for as far back as they can remember. Well-respected and comfortable in their small, close community, it seems nothing could upset their quiet everyday routine. Then Ellie enters their lives...With her shy smile and kind nature, she fits into the family easily. When Nancy Arnold's eldest son Frank begins to show an interest in the new arrival, she believes that at long last he has found a woman to share his life with. But tensions begin to rise between Frank and his brother, and while Nancy puts it down to sibling rivalry, her husband senses a more dangerous undercurrent. Something has deeply unsettled their peaceful world and Ellie is also affected. Someone is playing a game, a tragic game that will tear apart not only Nancy Arnold's family but the lives of others too...