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This book explores French president Charles de Gaulle’s frank, persistent, and discrete campaign to dissuade President Kennedy from expanding the American military/economic aid program in Vietnam from their first summit meeting between in May 1961 up until Kennedy green-lit a coup against South Vietnamese president Ngo Dinh Diem in the late summer of 1963. There were many thorny issues that complicated the Franco-American relationship in the early 1960s—ranging from nuclear policy, British entry into the European Economic Community (EEC), and conditions for negotiating with Moscow—but Vietnam was the one case where de Gaulle was unquestionably right and Kennedy terribly wrong in hindsight. Kennedy’s decision to ignore de Gaulle on this matter was far costlier than any other, setting off a chain of events that resulted in the deaths of over 58,000 American soldiers, turned hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese into refugees, and dealt a massive blow to American prestige across the globe. Despite de Gaulle’s efforts to constructively share French experience and use his resources to help engineer an American exit, the Kennedy administration responded to his peace initiatives with bitter silence and inaction. In the end, the Kennedy administration assumed that it was uniquely qualified to win “hearts and minds” in the Third World, while the discredited imperialists in the Élysée in Paris had lost their right to formulate Western policy in Southeast Asia by virtue of a long string of humiliating military defeats in their former colonies.

Landpower in the Long War is the first holistic account of the projection of landpower during the wars of post-9/11. Moving beyond the existing accounts of conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, the book includes vital chapters on socio-cultural and institutional factors that influence the power-projection of American landpower. Although there are a number of positive accounts herein, such as the recounting of successful humanitarian missions, the underlying theme is one of the need for landpower reform better to achieve U.S. strategic objectives. This is not an account of why America has looked to military power in the post-9/11 world, but how it has projected it.

The Legacy of J. William Fulbright: Policy, Power, and Ideology offers a fresh retrospective on the influential career of Senator J. William Fulbright, a leading foreign policy thinker and the longest-serving chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in American history. Juxtaposing Fulbright’s career as a foreign policy intellectual, including his powerful framing of post–World War II liberal internationalism, with his advocacy for the eponymous educational exchange program that he devised, this book contextualizes liberal internationalism within a broader sweep of US foreign policy thinking. Especially relevant is the role of American culture and political institutions in the formulation of liberal internationalism as well as the erosion of liberal internationalist confidence in the years after the Vietnam War, all exemplified by Fulbright’s public utterances, his conduct in office, and the foreign influence of the famed scholarly exchange program that bears his name.

This work examines the relationships that developed between the domestic U.S. press and the Central Intelligence Agency, from the foundation of the agency in 1947 to the first major congressional investigation of the U.S. intelligence system in 1975–1976. The press environment in which the CIA developed had important consequences for the types of activities the agency undertook, and after some initial difficulties the CIA enjoyed a highly favorable press environment in its early years. The CIA did, on occasion, attempt to use reporters operationally and spread propaganda around the world. This work argues, however, that a more important factor in the generally positive press environment that the early CIA enjoyed was the social relationships that developed between members of the press, especially management, and members of the agency. Common ties of elite education, wartime service, and a shared view of the danger of communism allowed the agency both to conduct a variety of activities without exposure in the United States, and to protect itself from oversight and establish its place in the U.S. national security bureaucracy. Even during the height of cooperative ties, however, there were those in the press critical of the CIA and others who, even if cooperating, were wary of agency activities. Over time, these countertrends increased as the Cold War consensus frayed, and press attention led to sustained investigation of the Central Intelligence Agency in the infamous Year of Intelligence, 1975–1976.