The Vietnam War began in earnest 50 years ago this Monday, when two U.S. ships off the coast of Vietnam began shooting at ghosts.

In this excerpt from her best-selling new book, Nomi Prins writes about the period during the administration of Lyndon Johnson when bankers began to move away from the president as they saw their global ambitions hemmed in by the Vietnam War.

President Obama appeared in Austin, Texas, on Thursday night to deliver that rarest of speeches: a tribute to a former president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose administration still remains in controversy.

The Johnson comeback brings with it a new appreciation of the durability of the reforms enacted on his watch.

Those who prize civility over frank talk or success in politics may be disheartened to learn that attack ads of the type President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney have begun to fling at each other are as old as the republic itself, and as New York magazine columnist Frank Rich says, they’re absolutely essential for effective politics.

Robert Caro has so far spent 36 years writing the saga of Lyndon Johnson -- more time than the ambitious Texan spent climbing from Congress to the White House. Caro just released his fourth installment, “The Passage of Power,” which chronicles Johnson’s exit from a strong position in the Senate into the relative powerlessness of the vice presidency.

A week ago, the publisher of Harper's Magazine wrote that President Barack Obama, through expedient political compromises, has lost the moral authority that an American president must command, and therefore has lost his right to a second presidential term.

For $300 billion the president could do something truly different -- he could eliminate unemployment altogether.

Obama's Eisenhower nostalgia is troubling. That was half a century ago—before the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps and federal aid to education.