In this excellent book, Jonathan Colman takes the revisionist case for seeing President Lyndon Johnson's foreign policy in a generally positive light far further than other writers in the field. Colman builds on prior studies such as those by Thomas Alan Schwartz (Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam, 2003), Mitchell Lerner (in various articles and book chapters), Andrew Priest (Kennedy, Johnson and NATO: Britain, America and the Dynamics of Alliance, 1962–68, 2006), and Michael Lumbers (Piercing the Bamboo Curtain: Tentative Bridge-Building to China during the Johnson Years, 2008). Colman sees Johnson as laying the foundations for détente with the Soviet Union and argues that in the case of China, “the very fact that Washington was at last reaching out to the PRC established a precedent” (p. 132).
Johnson as depicted here is not the inward-looking politician who was obsessed by Capitol...