LBJ and the World: Foreign Policy in the Johnson Years

On Thursday, November 2nd, the Clements Center for National Security and the LBJ Presidential Library hosted “LBJ and the World: Foreign Policy in the Johnson Years,” a discussion on the foreign policy of the Johnson administration by four contributors of the newly published LBJ’s America: The Life and Legacies of Lyndon Baines Johnson, edited by Library Director Mark Lawrence and LBJ Foundation President and CEO Mark Updegrove. Francis Gavin, Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and Director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins University, Sheyda Jahanbani, Associate Professor of History at the University of Kansas, and Fredrik Logevall, Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and Professor of History at Harvard University, participated in a panel discussion, moderated by Marc Selverstone, Director and Professor of Presidential Studies and Co-Chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia.

This event was held in conjunction with the LBJ Library’s Harry Middleton Lecture, which will brings together eminent historians of the 1960s who have contributed to LBJ’s America: The Life and Legacies of Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Francis J. Gavin is the Giovanni Agnelli Distinguished Professor and the inaugural director of the Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS. Previously, he was the first Frank Stanton Chair in Nuclear Security Policy Studies at MIT and the Tom Slick Professor of International Affairs and the Director of the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Gavin’s writings include Gold, Dollars, and Power: The Politics of International Monetary Relations, 1958-1971 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Nuclear Statecraft: History and Strategy in America’s Atomic Age (Cornell University Press, 2012) and Nuclear Weapons and American Grand Strategy (Brookings Institution Press, 2020), which was named a 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title.

Sheyda Jahanbani is associate professor at the University of Kansas focusing on the history of the United States and the world in the twentieth century. An expert on U.S. relations with the “Third World,” the history of development, and the emergence of distinctly global social problems in the post-World War II period, Jahanbani is author of The Poverty of the World: Discovering the Poor at Home and Abroad, 1940-1970, published in September 2023 by Oxford University Press, and is working on book tracing the history of “global citizenship” during the Cold War. 

Fredrik Logevall is the Laurence D. Belfer Professor of International Affairs and professor of history at Harvard University. He is the author or editor of eleven books, including most recently JFK: Coming of Age in the American Century, 1917-1956 (Random House, 2020), which won the Elizabeth Longford Prize and was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. His book Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam (Random House, 2012), won the Pulitzer Prize and the Parkman Prize, among other awards. 

 

Marc J. Selverstone is associate professor in presidential studies and chair of the Presidential Recordings Program at the University of Virginia’s Miller Center for Public Affairs. He is the author of Constructing the Monolith: The United States, Great Britain, and International Communism, 1945-1950 (Harvard University Press, 2009), which won the Stuart L. Bernath Book Prize from the Society for Historians of American Foreign Relations, and The Kennedy Withdrawal: Camelot and the American Commitment to Vietnam (Harvard University Press, 2022). He is also the editor of A Companion to John F. Kennedy (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) and general editor of The Presidential Recordings Digital Edition (Virginia, 2010–). 

View photos from the event here.