The Mythology of Munich

JFK's successor, Lyndon B. Johnson, learned the lesson of Munich a little too literally. At once resentful and insecure around the Harvard men he inherited from JFK, Johnson was scornful of JFK's father, Joe Kennedy, who as ambassador to Britain in the late 1930s had been an appeaser. LBJ had fastened on the newsreel image of Chamberlain returning from Munich holding, in one hand, Hitler's useless paper promises and, in the other, an English gentleman's tightly rolled umbrella. "I wasn't any Chamberlain umbrella man," LBJ scoffed in 1960. Indeed not. "Johnson," historian Doris Kearns Goodwin noted to The New York Times a few years ago, "had these great colorful words to describe the danger of appeasement: If you let a bully come into your front yard one day, the next day he'll be up on your porch, and the day after that he'll rape your wife in your own bed."

Johnson and his advisers mistook what was essentially a civil war in Vietnam for a global assault by monolithic communism. Too late, Americans began to realize that the Chinese and Russians and North Vietnamese each had their own, not always matching, agendas, and that if South Vietnam fell to the communists, that did not mean that all the "dominoes" of Southeast Asia would tumble as well. The fiasco of Vietnam—58,000 Americans dead in a long, losing effort—generated a legion of new members for the "Never Again" club. "No More Vietnams" became a mantra, especially for liberals who had marched against the war.

Among some war hawks, however, defeat in Vietnam created a whole new myth: that the civilian leaders had tied the hands of the military and snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. This variation on an old theme (in Germany after World War I, it was widely believed that the Army's General Staff had been "stabbed in the back" by craven civilian leaders) had its strongest adherents among the top brass. One of the most frustrated was the commander of Pacific Forces, who had wanted, among other measures, to mine North Vietnamese harbors and unleash strategic bombers. His name was Adm. John S. McCain Jr. In his memoirs, "Faith of My Fathers," his son John S. McCain III recalls returning home from five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to find his father deeply discouraged by the failure of will of the civilian leaders.

As a politician, the younger McCain became a firm believer in all or nothing: he held that the United States should not enter into conflict unless prepared to do what it takes to win. Hence, in 1983 he spoke out against intervention in Lebanon because he believed (correctly) that the United States was not fully committed to the peacekeeping effort. In the late '90s, when America intervened in the Balkans, McCain wanted to send in U.S. ground forces because he believed (wrongly) that the Serbs would not back down before mere air power. In Iraq, he has faulted the Bush administration for failing to send in enough troops. He has been Bush's strongest supporter on the "surge" and vehemently warned of the dire consequences of defeat for the region, and for the soul of the U.S. military.

McCain's all-or-nothing mentality makes a kind of sense and has a certain purity and nobility. But it may not reflect the messy reality of limited wars against local insurgencies. Statesmanship, particularly for a superpower, inevitably requires compromise—including, in some cases, saying one thing while doing another. (In the more elevated parlance of diplomats, this is sometimes known as two-tracking the problem.) The really great statesmen know this, and so, intuitively, do many Americans—once they stop spouting clichés about Munich or Vietnam.

Ronald Reagan is a case in point. Reagan came into office in 1981 inveighing against the "Evil Empire." But he spent much of his second term negotiating with Soviet leaders, even, briefly, discussing the abolition of nuclear weapons. He was able to negotiate, however, because he was dealing from a position of strength, having committed billions to building up conventional and nuclear forces and developing a missile defense system.