In recent years, with enough regularity to warrant talk of a developing revisionist school, historians have sought to extricate Lyndon Johnson's foreign-policy legacy from the mire of Vietnam. Scholars like John Dumbrell, Alan McPherson and Thomas Schwartz have all produced studies that, by examining other areas of Johnson's foreign policy, have presented a view of LBJ that is far more pragmatic and thoughtful than the inflexible leader in evidence during the descent into war in Southeast Asia.

One nation where this reappraisal of Johnson has yet to really gather pace is China. But in his new book, Piercing the Bamboo Curtain, Michael Lumbers seeks to address this gap by offering up a new appraisal of Johnson's efforts toward Beijing. In doing so, moreover, he successfully confronts one of the key challenges facing historians dealing with the Johnson presidency: how to broach the point of crossover between Vietnam and other areas of foreign policy. China, of course, played an important role in US policy deliberations over Vietnam in the 1960s. Studies of US–Chinese relations during this era, however, have failed to adequately factor in the Vietnam conundrum; likewise, studies of the US role in Vietnam have excessively simplified the way that the relationship between Washington and Beijing evolved during this period. As a result, our understanding of LBJ's policy toward China has remained one-dimensional – portrayed as a period of unimaginative caution before the diplomatic shock and awe of the Nixon–Kissinger “opening.”

Piercing the Bamboo Curtain challenges this prevailing orthodoxy by demonstrating the way that Johnson's policy toward China evolved throughout his presidency. Between 1964 and 1968, Lumbers argues, Johnson's policy shifted from one of “containment” to one of “tentative bridge-building”; in fact, he contends, the period established “many of the perceptual preconditions for the Sino-American rapprochement that unfolded during the Nixon era” (3). Furthermore, and most significantly, this change in approach developed due to the evolving situation confronting the US in Vietnam and the ongoing ramifications of the Cultural Revolution.

In spite of its evident merits, though, the book actually begins quite slowly. The opening chapter – on John Kennedy's approach toward China – is perhaps the least successful. Condensing three years of policy discussions and deliberations into one chapter, after all, is sure to be difficult. Consequently, the central argument and analysis of the chapter sometimes get drowned out by the sheer weight of evidence presented. To a lesser extent, the same is also true of the second chapter, which examines the early stages of Johnson's policy toward Beijing.

It is after this, however, that the book really begins to get into its stride with four historiographically important chapters: two on the impact that the escalation of the conflict in Vietnam had on the relationship and two on the way that the Cultural Revolution and shifting policy patterns in Washington began to alter US policy further. What emerges is a view of US policy toward China that is far more considered – and flexible – than that traditionally ascribed to the Johnson administration. Vietnam, it transpires, actually served to motivate a more engaged policy toward Beijing, one that was in marked contrast to Johnson's first year in office when European attempts to engage diplomatically with China were viewed with marked disdain by Washington. And although this process was tempered by the events of the Cultural Revolution, Lumbers demonstrates that Johnson's last year in office “marked a further thawing of high-level attitudes” toward the Chinese (214).

On the one hand, Lumbers's book succeeds in significantly contributing to ongoing reappraisals of Johnson's presidency. LBJ emerges from the book as a “forceful, attentive, and informed statesman whose China policy reflected his own preferences and inclinations” (254). On the other hand, though, its impact is more marked (and, indeed, important). For not only does it add to our understanding of the administration's Vietnam policy (which in such a crowded field is a significant achievement), it also situates Nixon and Kissinger's subsequent China policy within a much broader narrative of evolving US policy toward Beijing. In doing so, the book makes a highly significant contribution to the history of the Cold War.