Robert Buzzanco is Associate Professor of History at the University of Houston. He is the author of Masters of War: Military Dissent and Politics in the Vietnam Era (1996), which received the Stuart L. Bernath Prize for best book in diplomatic history in 1996. In 1998 he was named as outstanding young scholar in his field by the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations.

"The Indochina wars have cast a long shadow over world affairs. For the victims, they were a devastating catastrophe. Their legacy for the United States was substantial, interacting in complex ways with internal developments in American society. Buzzanco's study examines these themes with skill and insight, informed by outstanding scholarship and enriched by perceptive understanding." Noam Chomsky, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Acknowledgements viIntroduction: Intersection: The Vietnam War and the Social and Political Movements of the 1960s 1Part I The Vietnam War1 Containment, Liberalism, and Vietnam: Background to the American War 132 Why (Not) Vietnam? The Vietnamese, the French, and the Americans to 1960 223 Destroying the Country to Save It: The American War on Vietnam, 1960-1968 614 The Empire Strikes Back: The Vietnam War from 1968 to 1975 101Part II The Movements of the 1960s5 “Many Deeds of War”: Hope and Anguish in the 1960s 1396 Love Me, I’m a Liberal: The Politics of 1960s and Vietnam 1507 The Struggles at Home: Civil Rights and Women’s Liberation 1918 “One, Two, Three, What Are We Fightin’ For?” Cultural Politics in the Vietnam Era 234Notes 252Bibliography 264Index 270