NASHVILLE, Tenn. – As President Bush attempts to mend fences with European leaders in the aftermath of war with Iraq, he would do well to consider the actions of a previous president from Texas, according to Thomas Alan Schwartz, a Vanderbilt University presidential historian.
Bush’s reaching out to European leaders to work together against the spread of nuclear weapons — despite their differences concerning Iraq – recalls the alliance politics of the LBJ presidency, said Schwartz. Bush used the June 2 meeting of major industrialized nations, including France and Germany, to show that rifts caused by the United States’ going to war against Iraq would not prevent the countries from cooperating on other issues.
Schwartz, the author of Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam (Harvard University Press 2003), said historians rarely credit America’s first president from Texas with any foreign policy skills. “Many scholars thought Johnson was a quintessential provincial who was ill-equipped to deal with foreign policy,” Schwartz said. “Johnson’s handling of French leader Charles de Gaulle and the NATO crisis of 1966 calls for a different verdict.”
De Gaulle was determined to challenge American leadership when he called for both NATO and American forces to leave France. Schwartz said Johnson could have used the French defiance for political gain, rallying Americans behind his Vietnam policy by denouncing the Europeans. However, he showed restraint by directing his advisers to expedite the withdrawal of the NATO military headquarters from Paris.
“Johnson believed that publicly attacking the Europeans would damage the alliance’s support in America. He recognized that America’s strong relationship with Europe was central to defusing the Cold War in Europe and fostering a stable relationship with the Soviet Union,” Schwartz said. “Vietnam casts its shadow over Johnson’s accomplishments, but the war never caused LBJ to lose sight of the importance of the Western alliance in America’s international stature.”
That lesson – that European and American cooperation has been vital to international peace and stability since World War II – is one that Schwartz said the current Texan in the White House should remember.
Editor’s note: Thomas Alan Schwartz will discuss his latest book at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., June 5 at 1:30 p.m.
Media contact: Ann Marie Owens, 615-322-NEWS, annmarie.owens@vanderbilt.edu