WaPo’s ‘five myths’ feature about Vietnam ignores ‘Cronkite Moment,’ Nixon ‘secret plan,’ ‘Napalm Girl’

You might think that a collection of leading myths about the Vietnam War surely would include the “Cronkite Moment.”

LBJ: Not tuned to Cronkite

Or would cite the hoary claim that Richard Nixon during his run for the presidency in 1968 touted a “secret plan” to end the war.

Or would address the mistaken notion that American warplanes dropped the napalm that burned Kim Phuc, the girl at the center of the “Napalm Girl” photograph taken in 1972.

Those are the three most prominent, persistent, and popular media myths about Vietnam.

Yet none of them figured in the Washington Post’s rundown, published yesterday, discussing five “deeply entrenched myths” about the war.

The Post’s compilation, which was pegged to the recent 18-hour PBS documentary series about Vietnam, included such “myths” as: “The refugees who came to the U.S. were Vietnam’s elite” and “American soldiers [in Vietnam] were mostly draftees.”

To be sure, those are not unimportant aspects of the war. But “deeply entrenched myths”? Maybe.

But maybe not.

They’re certainly not invoked as frequently as the mythical “Cronkite Moment” of February 1968, when Walter Cronkite’s downbeat, on-air assessment about Vietnam supposedly came as an epiphany to President Lyndon B. Johnson. Upon hearing Cronkite’s characterization, Johnson, it is said, recognized that his war policy was in tatters.

Media myths: Prominent cases of ‘fake news’ masquerading as fact

But as I discuss in my media-mythbusting book, Getting It Wrong, Johnson did not see the Cronkite program when it aired on February 27, 1968. The president at the time was at a black-tie birthday party in Austin, Texas. And it is not clear when, or whether, Johnson watched the program on videotape at some later date.

Not only that, but Johnson publicly doubled down on his Vietnam policy in the days and weeks after Cronkite’s program.

The president remained conspicuously hawkish on the war at a time when Cronkite’s views should have been most potent and influential. Instead, Johnson in effect brushed aside Cronkite’s pessimism and sought to rally popular support for the flagging war effort.

Besides, what Cronkite said — that the U.S. war effort was “mired in stalemate” — was hardly a novel or shattering analysis. “Stalemate” had been invoked in the American press for months to characterize the conflict.

That Nixon had a “secret plan” to end the war, but wouldn’t say what it was during his campaign in 1968, is another tenacious myth.

What ‘secret plan’?

The anecdote seems superficially plausible, given Nixon’s inclination to deceit and duplicity.

But it’s a campaign pledge he never made. (William Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter and columnist for the New York Times, periodically called attention to the “secret plan” myth, once observing: “Like the urban myth of crocodiles in the sewers, the [Nixon] non-quotation never seems to go away ….”)

Nixon never made a “secret plan” part of his campaign. In fact, he pointedly and publicly disavowed such a notion. In an article published March 28, 1968, in the Los Angeles Times, Nixon was quoted as saying he had “no gimmicks or secret plans” for Vietnam.

“If I had any way to end the war,” he was further quoted as saying, “I would pass it on to President Johnson.”

Had Nixon claimed during the 1968 campaign to possess a “secret plan” for Vietnam, the country’s leading newspapers inevitably would have seized on the claim and publicized it.

They didn’t.

Ut: Took the ‘Napalm Girl’ photo

The myths of the “Napalm Girl” surely have become “deeply entrenched” since the photograph was taken in June 1972 by Nick Ut of the Associated Press. Prominent among those myths is that the napalm was dropped by U.S. warplanes.

In fact, the attack was carried out by A-1 Skyraiders of the South Vietnamese Air Force, as news reports at the time made clear.

The myth of U.S. culpability nonetheless took hold years ago, misappropriated to illustrate the consequences of America’s intervention in Vietnam. But as I write in Getting It Wrong, “to make that argument is to misrepresent the photograph, distort its meaning, and garble the circumstances of its making.”

And for sure, the photograph has been often misrepresented.

Related myths have it that “Napalm Girl” was so powerful it turned American public opinion against the war (it didn’t), that it hastened an end to the war (the conflict went on till April 1975), and that it appeared on the front pages of newspapers across the country (page-one display was far from unanimous).

It’s worth noting that yesterday’s compilation was not the first time that a “five myths” rundown in the Post ignored obvious candidates.

An essay published in May about five “most persistent” myths of Watergate unaccountably overlooked the scandal’s most prominent and tenacious myth — that the Post’s own reporting brought down Nixon’s corrupt presidency.

WJC

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