http://www.newsweek.com/id/141502 - Cover
http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501
- Christopher Hitchens’ review
Contact:
Jan Angilella FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
at
212-445-5638 Sunday, June 15, 2008
COVER:
WHAT WOULD WINSTON DO?
NEWSWEEK
EXAMINES 2008 APPEASEMENT DEBATE IN CONTEXT
OF
MUNICH AND CHURCHILL
----
CHRISTOPHER
HITCHENS ON PAT BUCHANAN'S 'CHURCHILL, HITLER AND THE UNNECESSARY WAR':
'BUCHANAN IS THE MOST TRENCHANT CRITIC OF WHAT HE CONSIDERS OUR FONDEST
NATIONAL ILLUSION'
New York-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, writes Newsweek Editor-at-Large Evan Thomas
in the current issue's cover package. "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, Thomas writes. He writes that both
McCain and Obama may use the Munich and Vitenam clichés in their campaigns. In
the June 23 cover, "What Would Winston Do?" (on newsstands Monday,
June 23), Thomas writes, "The Munich and Vietnam analogies are, of course,
closely linked. Arguably, the fear of appeasement, of not standing up to the
communists, was the single most important factor in dragging America into
Vietnam. In recent years, American politics has been trapped by both clichés.
It is worth examining just how one dangerous trope led to another-and how the
overreaction to both has repeatedly led America astray abroad."
Also in
the cover package, Contributor Christopher Hitchens takes on Pat Buchanan and
his new book, "Churchill, Hitler and the Unnecessary War."
"Descending as he does from the tradition of Charles Lindbergh's America
First movement, which looked for (and claimed to have found) a certain
cosmopolitan lobby behind FDR's willingness to involve the United States in
global war, Buchanan is the most trenchant critic of what he considers our
fondest national illusion, and his book has the feel and stamp of a work that
he has been readying all his life," Hitchens writes.
"I
myself have written several criticisms of the cult of Churchill, and of the
uncritical way that it has been used to stifle or cudgel those with misgivings.
('Adlai,' said John F. Kennedy of his outstanding U.N. ambassador during the
Bay of Pigs crisis, 'wanted a Munich.') Yet the more the record is scrutinized
and re-examined, the more creditable it seems that at least two Western
statesmen, for widely different reasons, regarded coexistence with Nazism as
undesirable as well as impossible. History may judge whether the undesirability
or the impossibility was the more salient objection, but any attempt to
separate the two considerations is likely to result in a book that stinks, as
this one unmistakably does," Hitchens writes.
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