Jim Lindgren Smashes the ‘Stories of spat-upon Vietnam veterans are bogus’ Myth

Actually, Lindgren was just warming up over at Volokh (HT NixGuy in an e-mail), focusing only on 1967-1972 in his Thursday morning post.

The quote in my post’s title is directly from this Jerry Lembcke article in September of 2003. Note that “all” is implied, and that Lembcke attaches no qualifiers such as “upon returning from Vietnam.”

Lembcke also wrote this in April of 2005:

I looked back to the time when the spit was supposedly flying, the late 1960s and early 1970s. I found nothing. No news reports or even claims that someone was being spat on.

Jim Lindgren’s bottom line:

Contrary to Lembcke’s claims, I quite easily found many accounts published in the 1967-1972 period claiming spitting on servicemen.

Did he ever. Go there.

I’ll focus on just one of those published accounts referred to by Lindgren, because I speculated on the following a few days ago at this prior post:

I suspect that Lembcke’s search would not have included op-ed columnists. It would be interesting to see if Cal Thomas, Pat Buchanan, Bill Buckley, James Reston, Jack Anderson, or some of the other leading pundits at the time ever came across a soldier who had been spat on. There were also many more local op-ed columnists at the time who were likely outside the scope of Lembcke’s search.

I named those gentlemen because they were among the syndicated columnists used by my hometown newspaper, the Cincinnati Enquirer, at the time, and I had a vague memory that at least one of them had reported on a spitting incident as an eyewitness. Proving that the Alzheimer’s hasn’t totally set in yet, it turns out that The New York Times’ James Reston did just that, as Lindgren notes (here’s a ProQuest database URL for those who have library card access):

Among the journalists who gave first-hand accounts of spitting on soldiers was James Reston, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Spitting was one of the actions tame enough for Reston to describe in his New York Times front page story covering the October 21-22, 1967 Washington anti-war demonstrations: “It is difficult to report publicly the ugly and vulgar provocation of many of the militants. They spat on some of the soldiers in the front line at the Pentagon and goaded them with the most vicious personal slander. Many of the signs carried by a small number of militants . . . are too obscene to print.”

For the skeptics, here’s a pic of the actual newspaper copy of part of Lindgren’s quote:

Here’s Lindgren’s pile-on:

Indeed, one might say that people at the time were almost obsessed with spitting: in just a day of searching, I found dozens of stories about spitting on flags, spitting on police, spitting on the military, and spitting on protesters. Responsible anti-war activists, such as Allard Lowenstein implored students who opposed the war to stop all the spitting (May 14, 1969 WAPO).

Lindgren promises that there will be “….. More Blockbuster Revelations to Come on Some of Jerry Lembcke’s Other Arguments (in a few days).”

Lembcke, at his September 2003 article’s last paragraph, not only repeats the bogus claim made earlier in the article, but also gives away the dark underbelly of his agenda (bold is mine):

The truth is that nobody spat on Vietnam veterans and nobody is spitting on the soldiers today. Attempts to silence opponents of the war with those figments of hostility are dishonest and should, themselves, be banished from our discourse.

God help us if people like Jerry Lembcke ever get any real power.

Meanwhile back at Holy Cross, I would hope that current students, their parents (shelling out $32,280 per year for tuition alone), as well as the rest of the college community in Worcester, Massachusetts, are at least a little interested in maintaining that Jesuit institution’s reputation for academic integrity. If so, they should consider “banishing” an historical revisionist and inveterate liar (or, conceivably, the worst professorial historical researcher on earth) from their faculty. I would think that some prospective students and THEIR parents might be watching.

I would also hope that the Greater Cincinnati-area dupes (here and here) who got taken in by Lembcke recognize the inescapable corner they’ve been painted into. They need to get their “I was wrong; I am sorry” statements out, and in a big hurry. Nobody can say I didn’t warn them.

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UPDATE: Also note how Lembcke has become more strident over the years. At the 1999 Holy Cross Magazine article I cited at a previous post, he was a bit more low key:

My search for evidence turned up a couple of claims which, if interpreted generously, could have been construed to suggest that veterans or servicemen in uniform may have been spat on. But I also found research done by other scholars that showed quite convincingly that acts of hostility against veterans by protesters were almost nonexistent.

And while I’m at it, this Lembcke claim at that same article about the relationship between the antiwar movement and Nam vets is laughable, and pitiful: “The historical record shows that there was widespread solidarity between the anti-war movement and veterans.” Oh puh-leeze — Only those vets who came back and stridently opposed the war were embraced by the antiwar movement; the rest were generally reviled.

UPDATE 2: For entertainment, check out how some of the holdouts are moving the goalposts in the comments at Lindgren’s Volokh post. Now that there have been shown to be plenty of contemporaneous media eyewitness accounts (with possibly more to come in Lindgren’s next post or posts), only police reports and court cases will suffice — never mind that a liberal Pulitzer winner like James Reston (or, perhaps, Times reporters who relayed the incidents to him) saw spitting take place, or that it had become so common that antiwar movement leaders felt compelled to speak out against doing it. Denial is a river that flows through the heart of leftist orthodoxy.

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Previous Posts:

• Feb. 6 — More Vietnam-Era Spitting Stories (from Library Database Research Jerry Lembcke Has Chosen to Ignore)
• Feb. 5 — ‘Spittle-ize THIS’ Update: Jerry Lembcke’s ‘Search for Evidence’ Appears Not to Have Gone Very Far (copied Post)
• Feb. 4 — ‘Spittle-ize THIS’ Update: Jerry Lembcke’s ‘Search for Evidence’ Appears Not to Have Gone Very Far (Original Post)
• Feb. 4 — A Lot of People Need to Start Walking The ‘No Spitting on Viet Vets’ Claim Back, and Quickly