Bush could use LBJ as a role model

NASHVILLE, June 16 (UPI) -- President Bush would do well to consider the actions of Lyndon Johnson, according to Thomas Alan Schwartz, a Vanderbilt University historian.

Schwartz said Bush's reaching out to European leaders to work together against the spread of nuclear weapons -- despite their differences concerning Iraq -- recalls the politics of the LBJ presidency.

Bush used the June 2 meeting of major industrialized nations to show that rifts caused by the United States' decision to go to war against Iraq would not prevent the countries from cooperating on other issues.

Schwartz, the author of "Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam," (Harvard University Press 2003), said historians rarely credit America's first president from Texas with any foreign policy skills.

Schwartz said Johnson's handling of French leader Charles de Gaulle and the NATO crisis of 1966 shows LBJ as a diplomat.

De Gaulle called for both NATO and American forces to leave France. Schwartz said Johnson could have used this for political gain but instead showed restraint.