Publisher Description
Reaching for Glory lets us eavesdrop on LBJ’s private, often tortured thoughts during the most crucial year of his presidency — when his dreams of being hailed as the equal of Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt were destroyed by the war in Vietnam.
As Reaching for Glory opens, LBJ is campaigning for the greatest presidential landslide in history. To win, he hands embarrassing secrets about Barry Goldwater to friendly reporters. When Johnson’s closest aide is arrested in a sex scandal, he tries to keep it from exploding before the election.
This audiobook reveals the secret history of how Lyndon Johnson took us step by step, often by stealth, into Vietnam. While publicly boasting that there will be victory in Vietnam, he privately worries that the war can never be won and that it will crush his presidency. He foresees the backlash against the war, civil rights, and the Great Society that will bring Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan to power.
Reaching for Glory lets us hear LBJ’s private telephone conversations with Jacqueline Kennedy just after her husband’s assassination. It allows us to live at Lyndon Johnson’s side, day by day, through the dramatic, triumphant, catastrophic, and pivotal year of a turbulent presidency that continues to affect all of our lives.
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“Beschloss is a knowledgeable, assured, and dispassionate collector…With an apparently limitless self-regard, LBJ taped himself practicing the most unscrupulous forms of American national politics, which in that era could sink very low indeed. The depictions of Vietnam are torturous. They show an administration getting into hotter and hotter water, anguishing but adapting to the changing temperature degree by degree, slowly boiling itself alive.”
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Foreign Affairs
