John in Carolina has done the historical research to show that an editorial that appeared in the New York Times in June included a gratuitous lie about historical figures in order to make a tendentious point about the army today. I don’t think men like Eisenhower, Patton, or Marshall would appreciate having their biographies changed just for someone to argue that the government is lying about Iraq just as it lied about Vietnam. And shouldn’t a man writing about his grandfather know a bit more about his grandfather’s military history?

Lucian K. Truscott IV wrote in the NYT,

There was a time when the Army did not have a problem retaining young leaders – men like Dwight Eisenhower, George Patton, George Marshall, Omar Bradley and my grandfather, Lucian K. Truscott Jr. Having endured the horrors of World War I trenches, these men did not run headlong out of the Army in the 1920’s and 30’s when nobody wanted to think of the military, much less pay for it. They had made a pact with each other and with their country, and all sides were going to keep it.”

Read John’s research to check the veracity of this assertion. Of course, there has been no correction yet from the Times. Perhaps, they could issue one in their seemingly ever-growing corrections page.

(UPDATE: The editorial was from June of this year, not recently as I originally stated.)

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