The Big Con Back to the Seventies (2): This One's for the True Blues Only

Anyone who follows my work closely knows that one of my obsessions is conservative zombie lies about Vietnam: stories made up, often at the highest levels, by right-wing moutebanks to spread the propaganda that VIetnam was a noble and successful venture until liberals in Congress came along and screwed it up. The granddaddy of the lies is the one about how South Vietnam could have survived as a free and independent country after the American withdrawal in 1973, but for a vote by Congressional liberals denying aid to Saigon in 1974. This decision to deny military aid to Vietnam has been blown up in the wingnut imagination as a world-historic stab in the back, an event on par in historic importance with D-Day, Agincourt, the signing of the Declaration of Independence, possibly all rolled into one. Actually, as the facts demonstrate, [1] that decision was bi-partisan, uncontroversial, overwhelmingly popular, led by Barry Goldwater and tacitly endorsed by Nixon and Kissinger, who understood that South Vietnam could never survive as an free and independent country no matter how much money we shoveled them.

So it was rather with delight that I stumbled across on Proquest Historical Newspapers the New York Times's "News Summary and Index" for August 7, 1974, which advertising on the paper's inside pages a welter of such earth-shattering political news as "Ford appears solemn and preoccupied" (page 16), "Weicker presses for curbs on tax data" (page 18), and "Tristate G.O.P. officials fear election losses," the following teaser for what the stab-in-the-back right considers The Most Important Event In The History Of American Wars:

"House cuts gas and Vietnam funds" (page 7)

As Henry Kissinger argued to Nixon in 1972 about what would happen when America finally ended its commitment to South Vietnam, "no one will give a damn." No one did. The conservative fantasy that this legislative battle was some sort of epic high-noon showdown between the forces of honor and dishonor is simply...made up.