The Mythology of Munich

If you were making the movie, the scene might go something like this: It is late May 1940. France is collapsing and the Nazis are pushing the British Expeditionary Force into the English Channel. Britain stands alone against Hitler's mighty onslaught. In London the War Cabinet has gathered to consider a peace feeler: if Britain agrees to stop fighting, Hitler will allow the British to keep most of their empire. The notion seems tempting, under the dire circumstances, and politicians like Neville Chamberlain—the former British prime minister who, wrongly, thought he could appease Hitler by letting him swallow a chunk of Czechoslovakia in 1938—want to pursue it. But, lo, no! A lone voice—a familiar bulldog growl—fills the room. England must never yield, insists Winston Churchill (contemptuously mispronouncing the word Nazi as "Nahr-zee"). "If this long island story of ours is to end at last," Churchill rumbles, "let it end only when each one of us lies choking in his own blood on the ground."

Stirring stuff, a Manichaean drama of courage standing against weakness and evil, and pretty much the way Churchill wanted the story told, though not quite the way it happened. The events of late May 1940 are a little less black and white than a docudrama would portray them. Recent accounts by historians like John Lukacs suggest that Churchill was not so much a lion at the ramparts as a brave and able but anxious statesman/politician, worried that his Army was not up to the fight and that the British people weren't really ready for the ordeal to come. For five days in late May 1940, he felt his way, calculating the odds, fretting about "slippery slopes" and working through the problem. At first he said that he wanted to think about the secret deal, but then stiffened and—ultimately with Chamberlain's support—decided to fight on. When he spoke to the British people on June 4, Churchill was magnificent: "We shall fight on the beaches … we shall fight on the fields … we shall never surrender." A human hero—not a man of myth, and all the more admirable for it.

And what of Churchill's great comrade, Franklin D. Roosevelt? When Chamberlain first announced, after returning from signing his deal with Hitler at Munich in 1938, that "peace is at hand," FDR sent Chamberlain a telegram: "Good man," it said. "I am not a bit upset over the final result," FDR wrote the U.S. ambassador to Italy. When Hitler began to chew up the rest of Europe in 1939, FDR temporized and maneuvered to build political support for intervention among his decidedly isolationist countrymen. Indeed, the United States did not declare war on Germany until Germany declared war on the United States in December 1941, four days after Pearl Harbor.

It may be true, as the saying goes, that leaders who ignore history are doomed to repeat it. But it's also true that leaders who carelessly or heedlessly use historical analogies, who twist or hype the lessons of the past, may be destined to make even bigger mistakes than their predecessors. In modern American history, no metaphor has been more used—or abused—than "Munich." The lesson of appeasement—that giving in to aggression just invites more aggression—has calcified into dogma. Neville Chamberlain's name has become code for a weak-kneed, caviling politician, just as Winston Churchill has become the beau ideal of indomitable leadership. American politicians have gone to extraordinary lengths to be seen as Churchill, not Chamberlain, with results that have not always been in America's best interests.

The words "Munich" and "appeasement" have been re-interjected into the 2008 political debate, courtesy of President George W. Bush, who still entertains dreams of a Churchillian legacy. Addressing the Knesset, Israel's Parliament, during the 60th anniversary of Israel's founding on May 15, Bush warned against "the false comfort of appeasement" when it comes to Iran and its loudmouthed President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Bush did not mention Barack Obama's name; nor did John McCain when he joined the chorus the next day. But Bush didn't have to. "Yes, there have been appeasers in the past, and the president is exactly right, and one of them is Neville Chamberlain," McCain told reporters. The journalists asked: did McCain think that Obama was an appeaser? McCain answered indirectly, but unsubtly, "I think Barack Obama needs to explain why he wants to sit down and talk with a man who is the head of a government that is a state sponsor of terror, that is responsible for the killing of brave young Americans, that wants to wipe Israel off the map and denies the Holocaust. That's what I think Senator Obama ought to explain to the American people."

Obama denies the entire premise of McCain's challenge. In his eyes Ahmadinejad may be deplorable, but he's no Hitler. Obama has pointed out that the president is not the real power in Iran, and that in fact Ahmadinejad may no longer even be in office after elections scheduled for next summer. He knows that as a young Democrat he cannot afford to look weak on national security: a week after he first declared, during a debate, that he would negotiate with any world leader without preconditions, he emphasized that he would order strikes against known terrorist targets inside the borders of ally Pakistan (as the United States does now, with mixed results). McCain—and before him, Hillary Clinton—has mocked Obama's stance on Iran as naive. But the critique didn't work for Hillary, and Obama is betting it won't in the general election, either: rather than trying to look tougher than McCain, Obama is going to argue that the familiar tropes—every dictator is Hitler, every negotiation is Munich—do not apply to the challenges facing the next president.