| Review of: | Lyndon Johnson and Europe: in the shadow of Vietnam by Thomas Alan Schwartz |
|---|---|
| Reviewed By: | Keith Kyle |
| Reviewed in: | International Affairs |
| Date accepted online: | 27/07/2004 |
| Published in print: | Volume 80, Issue 2, Pages 367-414 |
History
Thomas Alan Schwartz has a thesis to promote and by and large in this accessible book he does it effectively. His thesis is that previous writers on the thirty-sixth president-such as Fredrik Logevall in
Inheriting Kennedy's policies and personnel, Johnson at first went along with the idea of a multilateral force (MLF) as a way of both incorporating and at the same time taming German nuclear ambitions. But 'when European objections began to pile up and LBJ's self-confidence had been fortified by electoral victory, he did not persist'. 'While you are trying to save face', he told his staff, 'you'll lose your ass' (p. 44). From the outset he was interested in the improvement of relations with the Soviet Union, beginning in the sphere of rhetoric. He ordered the avoidance of such phrases as 'captive nations' and 'ruthless totalitarians', and, once he saw his way to breaking free of the commitment to the MLF, he was able to press hard for a non-proliferation treaty. West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard was not only obliged to give up the 'hardware solution' but was also made to stick by embarrassing financial commitments.
The book's cover contains a picture of Johnson giving 'the treatment', as his intense techniques of blandishment were often described, to a pipe-smoking Harold Wilson. In fact, as this book serves to illustrate, the degree of Anglo-American harmony often fluctuated during this period. LBJ's advisers did not have a very high opinion of Britain's economic management and LBJ himself often voiced the suspicion that 'Britain is not that important anymore' (p. 49). In 1965, after the Americans had for the first time bombed North Vietnam, Wilson suggested that he fly immediately to Washington, Johnson responded, 'Why don't you run Malaysia and let me run Vietnam?' Nevertheless Johnson was keen enough to discuss European matters (and details of the British budget) with Wilson and to ensure that the Germans helped to prop up the pound by increasing purchases in Britain, with the German finance minister raising 'unshirted Hell about this surrender to the Anglo-Saxons'.
Although Harold Wilson was often characterized as lacking political principles, he had in fact at least two to which he clung with remarkable tenacity: the $2.80 exchange rate of the pound and the British role east of Suez. Neither principle was a socialist one and by 1967-8 both had had to be abandoned. But the author shows the great importance attached in 1965 by the Americans to both. 'They've got us by the yin yang', Johnson expostulated when he thought erroneously that Wilson would use the threat of devaluation to get his way (p. 80). At the end of his major trawl through the documents, Schwartz concludes that Britain's part in the American governing system 'went far beyond that of a separate sovereign state in international relations theory' (p. 232).
Perhaps the strongest case for Johnson's foreign statesmanship can be made over his reaction to President de Gaulle's decision to eject NATO headquarters from France and to withdraw France from the integrated command system. He declined to echo the very strong language that was to be heard from the affronted creators of the alliance and told Robert McNamara, his Secretary of Defense, 'When a man asks you to leave his house, you don't argue; you get your hat and go'. LBJ resisted major pressures from Congress to cut back on America's military presence in Europe, but to the end of his presidency he persisted in hoping that, following the crushing of the Prague Spring, the Russians would agree to an arms control summit 'to take some of the polecat off of them'.
Schwartz's short but effective book is largely dependent on American, British and to a much lesser degree French and German sources. The rest of Europe, despite the title, does not exist. But it is a book whose illuminating endnotes require to be read.