The End of Ambition

A groundbreaking new history of how the Vietnam War thwarted U.S. liberal ambitions in the developing world and at home in the 1960s

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 U.S. 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 t