Abstract
The best example of this tendency is when Fernlund criticizes Johnson for the mistake of stepping down and announcing to the country he would not seek his party's nomination for president: "In the worst decision of his political career," Fernlund writes, Johnson "caved in on March 31, 1968, to enormous pressure, pressure from his own party, which foolishly started to abandon him over the war, and pressure from the antiwar movement, which was one-part shrill, one-part silly, one-part substantive, and 100 percent constitutional" (p. 143). Fernlund blames the antiwar movement for bringing down Johnson's presidency, but he fails to mention the series of crucial meetings the president held with the so-called Wise Men (his top national security advisers and assorted World War ? heroes) to reevaluate his administration's Vietnam policies in the wake of the Tet offensive.