R J Del Vecchio: The WSJ roasts Lembke Contributed by Bill Faith
Del emails:
The debunking of Lembke's bunk has now made it all the way into the big time. NOW will the idiot defenders of his 100% biased writings finally back off? The answer is NO, because you see, he MUST be right, the antiwar people MUST be clean, pure, living at the highest peak of moral ground, they have to go into fanatic resistance to any of the sad but real history of the bad treatment that too many antiwar people (be fair, not all of them) gave to vets and encouraged everyone else to give to vets. Their insecurity is demonstrated by the screaming passion of their attacks on anyone who points out the facts of the history and the falseness of Lembke's book. ...
From the Wall Street Journal Opinion page:
James Taranto
An referred to a column by Slate's , in which he asserted that the "myth" that Vietnam War opponents spat on veterans has been debunked. Shafer rests this claim on Jerry Lembcke's 1998 book, "Spitting Image: Myth, Memory and the Legacy of Vietnam," which Shafer says he has made his "best efforts to publicize":
Lembcke found no news accounts or even claims from the late 1960s or early 1970s of vets getting spat at. . . . Then, starting around 1980, members of the Vietnam War generation began sharing the tales, which Lembcke calls "urban myths."
But , blogging at The Volokh Conspiracy, says he "easily found many accounts published in the 1967-1972 period claiming spitting on servicemen." They include articles in the New York Times and Washington Post, as well as smaller papers. Here's just one example:
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."
If such stories existed, why did Lembcke fail to find them? offers this quite plausible explanation:
Having done literally thousands of WESTLAW and LEXIS/NEXIS searches, I can say that when something starts appearing in the press in the early 1980s, that is almost always a function of when these two news services started including the full texts of major newspapers.
We recall once editing an article in which the author claimed that some idea gained greater currency because an Nexis search for it turned up more references with each passing year. The trouble is, Nexis includes more publications with each passing year, so that results like this will be deceptive unless you limit the search to publications that have full Nexis coverage for the entire period of interest.
Did Lembke, a sociologist at Holy Cross University, really make such a basic error in methodology?
Contributed by Bill Faith on February 10, 2007 at 03:27 PM in , , , |