In the summer of 1965, President Johnson faced an agonizing decision. General Westmoreland had come to him with a "bombshell" request for 150,000 more troops in Vietnam. LBJ, who wished to be remembered as a great reformer, not as a war president, saw the proposed escalation for what it was—the turning point for American involvement in Vietnam. This is one of the most discussed chapters in modern presidential history, but George Herring, the acknowledged dean of Vietnam War historians, has found a fascinating new way to tell this story—through the remarkable legacy of LBJ’s taped telephone conversations. A concise, inside look at seven critical weeks in 1965—presented as a Rotunda ebook linking to transcripts and audio files of the original presidential tapes— The War Bells Have Rung offers both student and scholar a vivid and accessible look at a decision on which LBJ’s presidency would pivot and that would change modern American history.

The break-in at Watergate and the cover-up that followed brought about the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, creating a political shockwave that reverberates to this day. But Ken Hughes's unparalleled investigation of secret presidential tapes has allowed him to unearth a pattern of actions by Nixon going back long before 1972, to the final months of the Johnson administration. Hughes identifies a clear narrative line that begins during the 1968 campaign, when Nixon, concerned about the impact on his presidential bid of the Paris peace talks with the Vietnamese, secretly undermined the negotiations through a Republican fundraiser named Anna Chennault, and the story goes far beyond what we think we know about Watergate.

In Fatal Politics, presidential tapes expert Ken Hughes turns to the final years of the war and Nixon's reelection bid of 1972 to expose the president's darkest secret. While publicly President Richard M. Nixon promised to keep American troops in Vietnam only until the South Vietnamese could take their place, in private he agreed with his advisers that Saigon could never survive without American boots on the ground. Putting his reelection above the lives of American soldiers, however, Nixon kept America in the war into the fourth year of his presidency. At the same time, he secretly negotiated a decent interval deal with the Communists. Fatal Politics tells a story of political manipulation and betrayal that will change how Americans remember Vietnam.