Overview

The editor tried to document as much as possible the roles of President Lyndon Johnson and his key foreign policy advisers, particularly his White House assistants McGeorge Bundy and Walt W. Rostow, Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, in the administration's consideration of a wide range of national security issues. Major topics covered in the volume include: analyses of the Soviet military threat, the development of new U.S. weapons, the question of U.S. development and deployment of an anti-ballistic missile (ABM) system, chemical and biological weapons, tactical nuclear weapons, counter-insurgency policy, improvement of command and control systems, and military force structure.