Diplomatic immunity.

• Author: Heilbrunn, Jacob
• Position: Book Review

LYNDON JOHNSON AND EUROPE: In the Shadow of Vietnam by Thomas Alan Schwartz Harvard University Press, $29.95

In 1958, The Ugly American became a bestseller. It was written by William J. Lederer, a retired naval officer, and Eugene Burdick, a university professor. In it, the United States is losing the Cold War, not because of Soviet or Chinese treachery, but because of its own incompetence. The American representatives abroad are hicks from the South, who are ignorant of local languages and customs.

As Thomas Alan Schwartz notes in his excellent Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam, Lyndon B. Johnson became the personification of the ugly American for many of his countrymen during Vietnam. Johnson was routinely portrayed as a fool, a provincial who was innocent of the complexities of international relations. The anecdotes are legion: In a remark that Yogi Berra might have appreciated, Johnson, returning from a trip to Asia, tells reporters, "Boys, I don't understand foreigners. They're different from us." Henry Kissinger observed, "President Johnson did not take naturally to foreign relations."

Schwartz will have none of this. As historians are wont to do, he seeks to rehabilitate what has been condemned. He does not go so far as to describe Johnson as a diplomatic mastermind, but it seems safe to say that something more than grudging admiration suffuses his book. He depicts a Johnson who overcame his initial clumsiness and learned in office to protect and assert American interests in Europe: "Lyndon Johnson emerges ... as an astute and able practitioner of alliance politics, a leader who recognized how to assemble cross-national coalitions and work toward his overriding goals and objectives." In other words, he wanted to win.

What about Vietnam? Schwartz treats Vietnam only as the backdrop to Johnson's attempts to hold NATO together and reach a detente with the Soviet Union. Indeed, Schwartz reminds us--and it is an important reminder--that Johnson was less hidebound than the Germans in seeking to reach an accommodation with the Kremlin.

In Schwartz's telling, Vietnam is only part of the reason that Johnson has gotten such a bum rap. He detects a kind of reverse racism against Southerners. Washington Post cartoonist Herblock, he reminds us, showed Johnson as a white slave master whipping the White House staff. Contrasted with the urbane John F. Kennedy, Johnson was a vulgarian unfit for Georgetown salons. Schwartz is...