The Myths of Evan Thomas (Part I)

Evan Thomas, assistant managing editor of Newsweek, is the grandson of famed American socialist Norman Thomas and author of six books. He is also responsible for the embarrassingly inexcusable defense of the media’s pre-trial conviction of several Duke lacrosse players, saying, “The narrative was right, but the facts were wrong." And last month he co-wrote Newsweek’s partisan, pre-emptive attack on John McCain.

With Newsweek’s help, Thomas has now written another amazing article “The Mythology of Munich,” his revisionist history of the last 70 years. Thomas knows the left may soon be running U.S. foreign policy. So Thomas is seeking to justify an upcoming American foreign policy lurch to the left, should Obama move in that direction.

Let’s examine Thomas’ thinking. Thomas believes Churchill’s bulldog defense of England in the face of Hitler’s 1940 invasion threat needs a little rewrite. Churchill, you see, actually considered a secret Hitler peace offer, but helped by Neville Chamberlain’s opposition to the offer, decided instead to tell the world, “We will never surrender.” Thomas likes that Churchill wavered, saying he’s “all the more admirable for it.”

Thomas’ larger objective is to rewrite Munich history by elevating Chamberlain’s role as he diminishes Churchill’s. Thomas suggests critics wrongly view Chamberlain as “weak-kneed” and Churchill as “the beau ideal of indomitable leadership.” And he builds sympathy for Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler by quoting a Roosevelt telegram that praises Chamberlain’s action at the time—as if FDR and his entire administration didn’t see the folly of Munich within a few months. Thomas here and elsewhere acts as if readers themselves barely know history, or that people who know World War II are no longer with us (Thomas was born in 1951).

Thomas states Munich’s lesson was that “giving into aggression just invites more aggression.” In fact, Munich’s lesson is that we have to meet aggression head-on immediately and decisively, for it’s much harder after the aggressor strengthens. Hitler was bent on aggression, which should have been evident enough to Chamberlain in 1938 that he was willing to take him on. By characterizing Munich's lesson as “giving into aggression just invites more aggression,” Thomas implies that not stopping Hitler when he digested Czechoslovakia and doing little to Hitler after Poland’s fall (the Phony War) were no big deal—stop aggression sooner or later, the result is the same. But waiting until 1940 to fight in fact cost the allies millions of unnecessary lives. (See William Shirer’s Rise and Fall of the Third Reich.) Munich’s lesson was act swiftly to save lives.

Thomas is out to knock down the Munich “myth” because he sees (as we unenlightened do not) the “messy reality” of “statesmanship.” It “inevitably involves compromise, including. . . saying one thing while doing another.” Whatever Reagan said, he was in fact a negotiator. And in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy “understood that choice between appeasement and force is a false one, the trick is to know when to deal and when to fight.”

Is Thomas really saying Chamberlain was right to “deal” and not “fight” with Hitler? Well, maybe not. For Thomas also tells us, “the only real Hitler was Hitler,” so even if his friend Chamberlain might have been a bit wrong at Munich, don’t apply the Munich lesson anywhere else. For Thomas, what made Hitler different from other megalomaniac dictators like Stalin, Milosevic, and Saddam is that he set out to conquer Europe "and he very nearly succeeded." This is an odd statement for Thomas, a man seeking to disparage the Munich "myth," to make. The reason Hitler nearly succeeded is that he wasn't stopped at Munich!

In sum, Thomas thinks we misunderstand the Munich lesson because Chamberlain actually had some backbone and Roosevelt supported him. But if you don’t like his first answer, Thomas’ second defense is that Hitler was sui generis. Does that sound like a lawyer talking? Surprise, Thomas is a lawyer.