Bøger af Frank E. Vandiver

In riveting detail, veteran US Civil War historian Frank E. Vandiver recounts the campaigns and major battles of the first war of the Industrial Revolution, with its machinery, firepower, and engineering beyond imagination. With provocative insight, he traces a picture of the war as rooted in the character and vision of its two leaders and their two sectional revolutions.

With American involvement in Iraq in the forefront of national news coverage and in the minds of many citizens, questions concerning America's involvement in past conflicts have once again arisen. This is the story of how the United States has gone to war and how the evolution of the nation's war-making apparatus has mirrored the nation's rise to global power. It focuses on the president's role as commander-in-chief vis-a-vis Congress from George Washington to George W. Bush. Conflicts range from the War of 1812 to the Mexican and Civil Wars, the two World Wars, conflicts in Southeast Asia, and recent wars in the Middle East. Topics include Congress's role in various wars, the evolution of the War Department to the Department of Defense, as well as developments in weapons, tactics, and strategy.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 one volume overview serves as a quick introduction to these important issues.

Discusses the nature and effectiveness of the Confederacy's high command, the men who composed it, the decisions they made, and the influences that shaped their policies. Frank Vandiver presents not only a concise description of the machinery of the Confederate high command but also sharp analyses of the figures who dominated the system.

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.