2.14.3: “What the 1967 Record Actually Says”
This post recovers the fuller newspaper history cut from Chapter 2.14, where I trimmed a decade and a half of press coverage down to a single anchor story. The full record is worth having in one place, and it touches on a live academic debate I want to name carefully rather than pick a side in prematurely.
The first widely reported instance of soldiers being spit on as a matter of policy response came from Neil Sheehan's New York Times report on August 27, 1967, describing National Guardsmen enduring simulated spitting and abuse as part of a “New Control Technique” used to train them not to react to protesters.[1] Two months later, James Reston reported in the Times that soldiers of the 82nd Airborne Division, deployed to the Pentagon to face antiwar demonstrators, were spat on and goaded by protesters in the front line.[2] Soldiers on duty were under strict orders to stand in dignified silence and not respond. Veterans, no longer bound by those orders, sometimes didn't hold back; one WWII Medal of Honor recipient reportedly punched a civilian who spat on him and called him a killer, as reported in the Sheboygan Press in 1968.[3]
The reporting didn't stop there. Incidents were covered in print by The Associated Press [4] and Washington Post [5] in 1971, and televised by CBS Evening News the same year,[6] and the phenomenon persisted into the 1980s with coverage in TIME Magazine, ABC Evening News, and a series of Chicago Tribune columns by Bob Greene, who solicited reader stories and later compiled them into the book Homecoming (Putnam, 1989). The most famous single incident (activist Ron Kovic being spat on at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach) is documented in his own memoir, Born on the Fourth of July (Akashic, 2016) and corroborated in a contemporaneous front-page New York Times story.
Jerry Lembcke, a sociologist, Vietnam veteran, and member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, published a well-known 1998 book arguing that the popular image of returning veterans being spat on by antiwar protesters was never convincingly documented as an eyewitness-corroborated event — that it functioned as a myth, encouraged in part by the Nixon administration, to separate "good" veterans from the antiwar movement and discredit protesters as anti-troop.[7]
Screenshot from Jerry Lembke’s interview with Binghamton University.
It turns out I'm not the first person to put these two sources in front of him. In February 2007, Northwestern law professor James Lindgren went digging through the same 1967–1972 newspaper archives and published a series of posts at the Volokh Conspiracy [8] laying out exactly this reporting — Sheehan and Reston included, alongside half a dozen other contemporaneous accounts. Lembcke responded with an eighteen-point rebuttal. The clearest record of what was actually in it now lives in the comments of a 2008 blog exchange where Lembcke showed up and posted under his own name.[9] On Reston's account specifically, Lembcke wrote that he was "willing to count" it as evidence when he first read Lindgren's post then walked that back months later, after a colleague suggested Reston might not have personally witnessed what he reported. On Sheehan's story about National Guardsmen training to endure simulated spitting, Lembcke's response, as another participant in that same thread described it, was that he didn't recall that kind of training from his own time in service, so he doubted it happened elsewhere, a standard even a sympathetic reader in that same comment section called out as insufficient.
For the better part of a decade (in the book itself, as well as articles in academic journals, op-eds for major outlets, and essays in veterans magazines), Lembcke stated his conclusion in absolute terms: no evidence, no reports, nobody.[10] When he was pressed on that language in 2008, he described it as a kind of "royal we" — figurative, not literal, closer to saying "everyone knows Bush lied about WMDs" than a claim about the actual historical record.[11] That's a real distinction, and I don't think it's dishonest exactly. But it's not the distinction he drew for ten years of unhedged public claims, made in his own name, in his own book. A hedge you only reach for once you've been cornered on it isn't a hedge. It's a retreat — and retreats are worth naming, especially when the person retreating is arguing a case you'd otherwise want to believe.
So: the citations above are dated, sourced, and contemporaneous, and at least two of them were already put in front of Lembcke directly, years before I went looking. What he did with that challenge is on the public record too, and it looks less like a careful scholar incorporating new evidence than a moving target. None of this settles whether every soldier who ever claimed to be spat on is telling the truth. Some of those stories are probably exaggerated, a few are probably invented, and Lembcke is right that the myth outgrew whatever kernel of fact started it. But "the myth got bigger than the facts" and "there were no facts" are two different claims. Only one of them survives contact with 1967.
Sheehan, Neil. “Guardsmen Cope with Simulated Rioting to Learn New Control Techniques,” The New York Times (August 27, 1967), page 63.
James Reston. “Everybody is a Loser,” The New York Times (October 23, 1967), page 1.
Tiede, Tom. "Medal of Honor Winners Find Themselves Subjected to Abuse," The Sheboygan Press (Mar. 16, 1968), page 5
Lang, John S. "Girl Demonstrator Faces Loss of Job," Associated Press (Jul. 19, 1971), page 4.
Fitt, Alfred. "The Lack of a Defined Goal... Bothered Me Most," Washington Post (Sep. 15, 1971), page A8.
Morton, Dean. "VIETNAM VETERAN #214568 [Delmar Pickett, Jr.]" CBS Evening News for Dec. 27, 1971.
Jerry Lembcke, The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam (NYU Press, 1998).
James Lindgren, "Spitting Report" series, The Volokh Conspiracy, Feb. 2007.
"Holding Together Myth and Memory with Spit and Politics," The Edge of the American West, Feb. 14–17, 2008; edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2008/02/14/holding-together-myth-and-memory-with-spit-and-politics. Lembcke posts in the comments under his own name starting Feb. 16.
Quotes compiled by Lindgren in the same thread from:
The Spitting Image (NYU Press, 1998), p. 75.
Humanity and Society, vol. 26, issue 1 (2002)
The Veteran, vol. 33, no. 1 (2003)
"Debunking a Spitting Image," Boston Globe (April 30, 2005)
11. Lembcke's comment, same thread as [9], Feb. 17, 2008, at 10:25 am.
