Caught in a Fantasy Amid Subterfuge

Why not lie about Vietnam? Everybody does it. The war in Southeast Asia was born in a lie and conducted in lies by mendacious politicians and spin artists who, to this day, have not been called to account for their falsifications.

Tonkin Bay--the attack-that-wasn’t by North Vietnamese gunboats on a U.S. destroyer that served as the pretext for our massive involvement--was an enormous, calculated whopper.

Our presidents and their advisors, from Kennedy to Nixon and Ford, prevaricated, invented and outright lied for years about the course and casualties of the war. Bob Kerrey probably is embroidering the truth about the murderous incident that won him a Bronze Star. U.S. generals, with their fake body counts and perjurious “5 o’clock follies” press conferences, twisted truth until it looked like baloney even to those conducting the briefings.

Joseph Ellis, the Mount Holyoke history professor who faked a Vietnam combat history, caught the contagion. (Never mind he also daydreamed participation in the civil rights struggle and a starring role on his high-school football team.) Lies in an atmosphere of subterfuge are catching. If the whole war was a nightmare of falsehoods and blood, why hunt down a poor prevaricating professor indulging in relatively harmless Rambo fantasies? If there is such a thing, he’s an innocent liar whose counterfeit tales physically harmed no one.

There are still liars among us whose deceptions actually killed. Henry Kissinger surpassed Baron Munchausen when he was President Nixon’s key advisor. It’s now known that Kissinger committed near treason when he successfully persuaded the South Vietnamese to balk at communist peace proposals until Nixon was reelected, at the cost of who knows how many lives. The list of official liars is endless. (And Bill Clinton’s huge serial whoppers? Let’s not go there.)

I have been a professor and know the student-teacher bond is sanctified by bald unvarnished truth. Otherwise, why teach? Prof. Ellis knows it, too. In my view, Ellis, steeped in the history of the Vietnam War that he taught, got caught up in the infectious phantasmagoria that corrupted many more strategically placed people.

OK, let’s punish him. He told a lie so easily traced I cannot imagine self-destruction was not his goal. But for us, and the Boston Globe, to treat his misdemeanor as a major war crime, a betrayal of trust to rank with Benedict Arnold’s, is itself mendacious.

Let Ellis go in shame, but turn our attention to the really big, culpable liars with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people, including our soldiers, on their hands.