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Doing “Tuesday Lunch” at Lyndon Johnson's White House: New Archival Evidence on Vietnam Decisionmaking

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

David M. Barrett
David M. Barrett*
Affiliation:
Villanova University
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Extract

Over the past decade, a number of political scientists have employed presidential papers and other archival materials in order to test various hypotheses regarding American politics. This has been particularly true concerning the Vietnam War and the American presidency (Kahin 1986; Burke and Greenstein 1989; Berman 1982, 1989; Kolko 1985; Hatcher 1990), as scholars have explored the interconnections between ideology, political style, presidential character, and other variables which may explain America's participation in that war. Thus, while some in the profession may have disdained the use of traditional historical research and methodology, there clearly has been a modest resurgence of archival research for the purposes of theory building.

While I am among those who see real possibilities for illuminating political processes by drawing on archival sources, their usefulness should not be overstated: even rich archival collections-may not “solve” debates over causation of political phenomena.

Type
Research Article
Information
PS: Political Science & Politics , Volume 24 , Issue 4 , December 1991 , pp. 676 - 679
Copyright
Copyright © The American Political Science Association 1991

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References

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