The headlines proclaimed “NATO crisis worsens,” and “Atlantic alliance in disarray.” The French government bitterly criticized American policy, refusing to support the American military build-up. German newspapers lampooned the American defense secretary for his harsh language about their responsibility as allies of the United States. Many Americans called for the withdrawal of American troops from Europe. Public protests erupted in European cities, and the president from Texas was criticized for his “cowboy style” of diplomacy and his preference for using unilateral military force against Third World nations.

Sound familiar?

Although these issues resemble today’s news, they actually describe the NATO crisis of 1966 when President Lyndon Baines Johnson faced the imperious French leader Charles de Gaulle.

President de Gaulle, the wartime leader of the Free French, was determined to challenge American leadership within the alliance. In March 1966 he announced that France would withdraw its forces from the military structure of NATO, and he would soon travel to Moscow to negotiate with the new leaders of the Kremlin. Denouncing American policy in Vietnam, de Gaulle styled himself the independent champion of a Europe that could now stand on its own two feet and that would stretch from “the Atlantic to the Urals.”

The French leader hoped to build on the foundation of the 1963 Franco-German treaty and pull the young West German republic from its dependency on its Washington connection.

Believing that the Cold War in Europe was now essentially over, the “General,” as he was always referred to, was a man in a hurry, determined to achieve French grandeur within Europe.

Johnson, in de Gaulle’s view, was a vulgar Texan and a mediocre politician, and it was “absolutely intolerable” that Europe was dependent on the United States and its “accidental president.”

Historians rarely credit Johnson with any skills in the conduct of foreign policy. To most scholars and pundits, Johnson was, as one put it, “the quintessential provincial” who was ill-equipped by nature or temperament to deal with foreign policy. Johnson sometimes played to that image as a hick, once telling reporters on his plane: “Boys, I don’t understand foreigners. They’re different from us.”

Most historians are quick to credit LBJ with his successes in domestic legislation such as civil rights, yet they always balance this against his disastrous course in Southeast Asia and the overall “failure” of his foreign policy.

However, Johnson’s handling of de Gaulle and the NATO Crisis of 1966 calls for a different verdict.

Johnson could have used the French defiance for domestic political gain, rallying Americans behind his Vietnam policy by denouncing the ungrateful Europeans. The political cartoonist Bill Mauldin drew a caricature of de Gaulle standing among the white crosses at the cemetery in Normandy, proclaiming, “Why do you Americans stay where you’re not wanted?”

Even as fierce a critic of LBJ as J. William Fulbright, the head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, found de Gaulle’s approach “offensive.” But Johnson scrupulously observed the dictum he had given to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara: “When a man asks you to leave his house, you don’t argue; you get your hat and go.”

The president directed his advisers to expedite the withdrawal of the NATO military headquarters from Paris and all American soldiers from France. He refused to get into a public argument with de Gaulle, and he reined in his anti-de Gaulle advisers, many of them sophisticated diplomats like Dean Acheson, George Ball and John McCloy.

These establishment leaders were convinced that the United States should somehow punish France under Article V of the NATO treaty and withdraw its security guarantee. LBJ may have been provincial, but he understood geography. As long as the United States was defending West Germany, it would also be defending France, no matter what the French did or said publicly to provoke Washington.

Johnson’s restraint – a quality he is rarely credited with – paid off in this first major NATO crisis. Johnson believed that publicly attacking the Europeans would damage the alliance’s support in the United States, and he recognized that America’s strong relationship with Europe was central to defusing the Cold War in Europe and fostering a stable relationship with the Soviet Union.

Despite disagreements over Vietnam, he worked carefully with the British and Germans to reconstitute the foundations of the NATO alliance and its financial burdens, effectively isolating de Gaulle and France from the rest of Europe. When the Soviets invaded a liberalizing Czechoslovakia and destroyed any hope for de Gaulle’s vision of Europe, Johnson’s policy allowed the United States to resume working together with French leaders.

When de Gaulle resigned in April 1969, his successors quietly began cooperating with NATO again. The NATO alliance’s strength and cohesion over the next two decades helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet empire in Eastern Europe. Vietnam still casts its shadow over Johnson’s accomplishments, but the war never caused LBJ to lose sight of the central importance and significance of the Western alliance in America’s international stature. That lesson – that European and American cooperation has been vital to international peace and stability since World War II – is one that the current Texan in the White House would be wise not to forget.

Thomas Alan Schwartz is an associate professor of history at Vanderbilt University and the author of “Lyndon Johnson and Europe: In the Shadow of Vietnam” (Harvard University Press, 2003).