Elites for Peace

The Vietnam war has spurred many books on various aspects of the conflict, but to date no book has been published that focuses singularly on the United States Senate. Elites for Peace gives special attention to the Senate during the Johnson presidency, when the conflict escalated into a major war. Stone chronicles how the Senate struggled to support the war in the aftermath of the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which the Senate passed nearly unanimously in 1964. Despite the resolution, Stone's detailed analysis shows that numerous influential senators actually opposed Johnson's policies as early as 1965. Elites for Peace examines war-related issues that resonate in American military interventions up to the present day, among them the credibility of official justifications for intervention, the goals of intervention, the role of the United Nations and international law, civilian casualties, the treatment of prisoners, and foreign intervention into a country in a state of civil war. The book brings fresh perspective to episodes surrounding the Vietnam conflict, including the Senate's response to the French government's management of the first Indochina War in 1953-54, the debate on the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 and on the escalation of the war in the following year, the televised Foreign Relations Committee hearings of 1966, Vietnam as an issue in the Senate elections held later that year, and the role of the Senate in decisions made by the president after the 1968 Tet offensive. Both scholarly and timely, this accessible volume will be of great interest to all who are concerned with the problem of war and the course of American foreign policy, as well as historians, politicalscientists, students of language and communication, and scholars particularly concerned with the study of peace and war.