The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence
The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence
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The End of Ambition
The United States and the Third World in the Vietnam Era

Author: Mark Atwood Lawrence

Narrator: Jim Seybert

Unabridged: 16 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 11/09/2021


Synopsis

At the start of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy and other American liberals expressed boundless optimism about the ability of the United States to promote democracy and development in Asia, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. With US power, resources, and expertise, almost anything seemed possible in the countries of the Cold War's "Third World"—developing, postcolonial nations unaligned with the United States or Soviet Union. Yet by the end of the decade, this vision lay in ruins. What happened? In The End of Ambition, Mark Atwood Lawrence offers a groundbreaking new history of America's most consequential decade. He reveals how the Vietnam War, combined with dizzying social and political changes in the United States, led to a collapse of American liberal ambition in the Third World—and how this transformation was connected to shrinking aspirations back home in America.

By the middle and late 1960s, democracy had given way to dictatorship in many Third World countries, while poverty and inequality remained pervasive. As America's costly war in Vietnam dragged on and as the Kennedy years gave way to the administrations of Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon, America became increasingly risk averse and embraced a new policy of promoting mere stability in the Third World.

About Mark Atwood Lawrence

Mark Atwood Lawrence teaches history at the University of Texas at Austin. He is the author of Assuming the Burden: Europe and the American Commitment to War in Vietnam and The Vietnam War: A Concise International History.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Joseph on March 21, 2025

I would describe this book as useful for historians but not terribly fun to read. It is rather wonky, with a lot of discussion of aid programs and the inner workings of the NSC. The main argument, though, is interesting. MAL contends that the United States, especially liberal admins, went through a......more

Goodreads review by Andrew on December 22, 2022

Strong work on US foreign affairs in relation to areas outside of Vietnam during the Vietnam era. Lawrence makes the argument that it was LBJ rather than Nixon who changed US policy to be more appeasing to dictators in the name of realpolitik. He portrays JFK as more engaged with proponents of diffe......more