Ahead of America 250, PolitiFact’s Louis Jacobson penned an article on Monday chronicling what he considered to be eleven instances where presidents “shaded reality as they shaped US history.” Unfortunately for Jacobson, in some instances it was he who did the shading, especially when he considered some of the nation’s most defining foreign policy moments.
The first time Jacobson got himself into trouble was talking about President James Polk and the Mexican-American War. Jacobson wrote:
The path to war began months before the fighting, when Polk ordered Gen. Zachary Taylor (who would succeed him as president) to ‘station his men on the banks of the Rio Grande in an area under dispute between the still-independent state of Texas and Mexico,’ Eric Alterman, a Brooklyn College historian and professor of English and journalism, wrote in ‘Lying in State,’ one of two books he’s written on presidential falsehoods. The casualties in this area became the spark for the war.
He further added, “Despite knowing that the land was disputed, Polk framed it as blood shed on U.S. soil, justifying a military attack. Polk ‘would eventually go so far as to admit that the battle had taken place on ‘disputed’ rather than American soil,’ Alterman wrote, but that was after the war concluded.”
That’s a bit silly. The Mexican-American War began in 1846 after Texas became a state and the U.S. assumed its disputed border. Every country that has a territory dispute considers the disputed territory their own.
Next, Jacobson turned to the origin story of the media’s Main Character Syndrome, “In 1898, the USS Maine exploded in Cuba, killing 261 crew members. Pushed by a war-hungry media, William McKinley leveraged the incident into the Spanish-American War, even though historians generally believe the explosion was an accident, not an act of sabotage.”
Jacobson is correct that the explosion was likely an accident, but that does not mean McKinley was influenced by the press, as he suggested, “Even though ‘it’s hard to locate an obvious lie among his explanations for the need for war in Cuba,’ Alterman said, ‘McKinley caved into the hysteria manufactured by an increasingly irresponsible press.’”
Serious Spanish-American War historians do not consider yellow journalism to be the reason why the U.S. went to war with Spain. A lot of the stories usually cited to support such a claim simply do not have supporting evidence. The less exciting truth is the court of inquiry that was set to investigate the Maine concluded the keel’s inverted V shape suggested an external explosion.
The next wartime president to find himself on Jacobson’s bad side was Harry Truman, “In 1945, Harry Truman announced the United States’ deployment of the world’s first atomic bomb by saying it was ‘dropped on Hiroshima, a military base.’ It was a seminal moment for the world on the brink of the nuclear age, and it wasn’t the whole story of who would be affected.”
He tried to rebut Truman by claiming, “Precise comparisons of military and civilian deaths are not available, but there’s broad agreement that most of the 66,000 deaths and 69,000 injuries were civilians, not troops.”
However, even Jacobson was forced to concede, ‘Hiroshima was the command center for southern Japan, which made it ‘a significant military target,’ [Albany Law School emeritus professor of legal history Paul] Finkelman said.”
Even when PolitiFact goes back to 1846, 1898, or 1945, it can’t help itself. While Jacobson may not have taken out the truth-o-meter, his nitpicking or, in McKinley’s case, flat-out incorrectness shows the perils of a website that is famous for such a rating system.
