The War Within - by Tom Wells (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam is a painfully engrossing and popularly written account of how the battle on the home front ended America's least popular war. This absorbing narrative, hailed by critics of every persuasion, is the fruit of over a decade's worth of research: the author sifted through mountains of government documents, press coverage, and transcripts of interviews he conducted with virtually all of the key players, both inside the U.S. government and among the dissenters who eventually brought the war to an end. In these pages the antiwar era comes to life through the words of scores of participants, both the famous and the forgotten, who speak with candor and passion about this tumultuous period. A remarkable story of a powerful grassroots movement and its influence on officials in Washington.

Review Quotes

"An invaluable record of an unforgettable American calamity. . . . The War Within deserves to be read and pondered for the lessons it provides about the surprising power of ordinary citizens to make and break wars and Presidents." --The New York Times

"A vivid history of America's struggle with itself. . . . Wells gives the drama with a novelist's intuitions, drawing skillfully on his remarkable interviews . . . integrated with painstaking archival research. . . . Open this vast, absorbing narrative to any page and one finds vivid personal dramas." --Chicago Tribune Book World

"The definitive story of the movement and its effect on policymakers in Washington." --Boston Globe

"Destined to become the definitive work. . . . Astounding revelations emerge in a book as meticulously researched as this one . . . . Always dramatic." --Portland Oregonian

"Immense, painstakingly researched, painfully engrossing account of how the battle on America's home front ended its longest and least popular war. . . . A balanced, absorbing, tragic narrative." --Kirkus Reviews

"This absorbing drama filled with vivid characterizations is an impressive work." --Publishers Weekly

About the Author

Tom Wells is an author of three books: The War Within: America's Battle over Vietnam, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, and (with Richard A. Leo) The Wrong Guys: Murder, False Confessions, and the Norfolk Four. He has also contributed articles to books on the Vietnam War and the 1960s. He earned a PhD in sociology from the University of California, Berkeley.

He has received fellowships and grants from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, George Soros's Open Society Institute, the Institute for the Study of World Politics, the Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation, the Lyndon Baines Johnson Foundation, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas, Columbia University, and the University of California, Berkeley. He lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he does freelance book editing.

The Washington Post's reviewer of Wild Man called Wells "an exceptional historian."