War stories
by digby
Compared to a some of our most revered and loathed politicians, Brian Williams is a piker. A lot of people have been reminding the Republicans about Ronald Reagan’s tall tale about having been there when the allies liberated the Death Camps. Brian Beutler wrote about this one a while back:
Ronaldus Magnus. The most beloved man in all of conservatism repeatedly confused (or “confused”) scenes from his acting career with heroic battlefield moments…that he never participated in or witnessed. Reagan, for instance, is reported to have boasted to Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Simon Wiesenthal of photographing concentration camps at the end of World War II. He even told Shamir he’d helped liberate Auschwitz. In his autobiography he wrote “by the time I got out of the Army Air Corps all I wanted to do–in common with several million other veterans–was to rest up, make love to my wife.” But as Michael Schaller wrote in his bookReckoning with Reagan, “This obscured the fact that unlike most of the “several million other veterans,” Reagan had left neither home nor wife while in military service.”
I don’t see how anyone can condemn Williams and defend this. Not only was Reagan’s recollection an total fabrication, he put himself at the site of one of the most memorable moments in World War II. No word on why he’d abstained from making love to his wife for the duration since he was in Culver City and she was in the Palisades. Maybe he needed to rest up from schtupping starlets …
But how about this one which people may not recall:
Joe McCarthy AKA Tailgunner Joe. Because of his education McCarthy was given a commission, and he retired from the Marines as a captain. But he later claimed he’d enlisted as a private, flown more missions than he’d actually flown and been sent a letter of commendation by the Chief of Naval Operations. Turns out McCarthy wrote the letter himself. This all occurred before the work that made him truly famous: chief Communist witch hunter on Capitol Hill and chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
You have to give the guy some credit. It takes real chutzpah to write your own letter of commendation.
There’s nothing new about embellishing war stories.It’s a bipartisan sport. Williams’ doesn’t strike me as much of a transgression as those things go. Then again he is a journalist and I suppose they have to get worked up so they can pretend that “integrity” is something they still care about.
Oh, by the way, last time I checked, Lara Logan is still the chief foreign correspondent for 60 Minutes.
.