It is among the most durable of left-wing delusions, one that refuses to die a worthy death nearly a half-century after liberal propagandists dumped it on the public.
The bogus claim made its most recent appearance on -- go figure -- MSNBC during yet another earnestly deceptive broadcast of The Rachel Maddow Show.
Touting the hoary assertion was Steve Schmidt, senior strategist for the McCain campaign in 2008 and a textbook Republican In Name Only ever since he keenly deduced in the wake of McCain's loss that the political trade winds were blowing hard to the left and a contributor gig at MSNBC provided sanctuary.
Maddow and Schmidt were talking about GOP candidate Donald Trump's speech Tuesday night from the deck of the decommissioned battleship U.S.S. Iowa, with Schmidt attempting to explain Trump's appeal. It was when he got to Nixon and Vietnam that Schmidt jumped the rails, with Maddow eagerly contributing to the crash --
MADDOW: Why does the Republican electorate believe that there is nobody who is an actual Republican who can make America great again?
SCHMIDT: So for example, let's look at the 50, 60, 70, however many votes it was to repeal Obamacare. The Republican base is sick of the play-fighting. They're sick of the empty promises, the position papers that have no meaning. Every day that Donald Trump goes out there and he talked about this, when he made his offensive comments about immigrants at the beginning of his run. Did he back down? No -- he doubled down, despite losing millions of dollars in endorsement deals he showed in that moment he was incorruptible. He would speak truth to power as he sees it ...
MADDOW (taken aback that any Republican can be described this way): Incorruptible ...?
SCHMIDT: Well, he wouldn't back down, he couldn't be bought off. He wasn't another kowtowing, special-interest politician who would bow down and apologize under a censorious media (and this definitely includes you, Rachel). And so Trump every day, whether it's the fight with Roger Ailes, whether it's his attacks on Jeb Bush, is showing that he is strong, that he has the ability to do what he says he can do which is to go into a room with these foreign leaders and make America win again.
MADDOW: It's also made up in the sense that he doesn't, he's not campaigning on anything that he could do as a president or that he understands as president. For example, he says the way you beat ISIS is by electing Donald Trump and then there is a secret plan that will defeat ISIS. I don't believe there is a secret plan.
Maddow then criticized Trump's claims about the trade deficit and Iranian assets frozen in the U.S., followed by Schmidt revisiting her assertion about Trump's alleged "secret plan" to defeat ISIS (The nerve of that man, not revealing it to ISIS!) --
SCHMIDT: There is precedent for a presidential campaign running on a secret plan to end a war, Richard Nixon, of course, in 1968.
MADDOW: Sure.
Seems like only yesterday, give or take a few months, that the same wobbly claim was made by -- ta da! -- Maddow herself on her show back in June.
As I pointed out at the time, the Nixon secret-plan meme has been repeatedly demolished by American University communications professor W. Joseph Campbell at his must-read blog, Media Myth Alert, most recently in June 2014 after it was claimed by a Democrat in the Illinois legislature.
Campbell conducted a full-text search of databases for major U.S. newspapers, including the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Baltimore Sun, Wall Street Journal, and Chicago Tribune, using the search terms "Nixon" and "secret plan," from January 1967 and January 1969. The number of times he found a story outlining candidate Nixon's supposedly much-touted but never divulged strategy for ending the war? Zero.
Schmidt, Maddow and others pushing this myth would have you believe that Nixon ran on a campaign of ending the war in Vietnam based on a strategy he was loathe to outline, yet this somehow never got reported by the busload of political scribes covering his lengthy campaign.
In another post, Campbell describes how the Washington Post's obituary for longtime White House reporter Helen Thomas in July 2013 included the unsourced claim that Thomas challenged Nixon in a press conference on Jan. 27, 1969, seven days after he took office, to elaborate on his "secret plan" to end the war.
According to a transcript of the conference published in the Post the following day, Thomas asked Nixon about his, ahem, "peace plan" for Vietnam. Campbell wrote to the Post and asked for a correction of the error in Thomas's obituary. Last I heard it still hasn't run.
It would be refreshing when liberals make this claim if they could at least include passing reference to the key role played Nixon's predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, in creating a military disaster in Vietnam that Nixon was forced to clean up.
