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NEWSWEEK Cover: What Would Winston Do?

(Photo: http://www.newscom.com/cgi-bin/prnh/20080615/NYSU006 )

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 theMunich andVietnam cliches in their campaigns. In the June 23 cover, "What Would Winston Do?" (on newsstands Monday, June 23), Thomas writes, "TheMunich andVietnam 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 involvethe 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 aMunich.') 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.

    Watch Hitchens talk about the book on
http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501?tid=relatedcl.

    Cover:
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/141502

    Christopher Hitchens' review:
    http://www.newsweek.com/id/141501

SOURCE Newsweek