CNN's Tailwind Tale: Inside Vietnam's Last Great Myth

On June 7, 1998 CNN broadcast Valley of Death, the story of a 1970 raid into Laos by U.S. Special Forces. According to the report, Operation Tailwind had used sarin nerve gas to kill U.S. soldiers who had defected to the North Vietnamese. After a firestorm of controversy, CNN retracted the report, ruining the career of rising star April Oliver and compromising the network's credibility. Called "the TV news story of the year" by TV Guide, CNN's Operation Tailwind fiasco was the biggest news scandal of the 1990s. Hearing about the story after its broadcast, Jerry Lembcke was struck by its resemblance to war legends and myths. His search for the origins of the tale, and an explanation for why top-level journalists would believe it, led him into the shocking world of political paranoia, where conspiracy theory, popular culture, religious fundamentalism, and the fantasies of war veterans cross paths. Approaching the story as a case study in why people believe what they do, Lembcke reversed the normal inquiry into how journalists shape what the rest of us know, to ask questions about the social forces that shape what journalists know. With a likeness to Herbert Gans' 1980 classic, Deciding What's News, Jerry Lembcke's CNN's Tailwind Tale is at once a study of American journalism that opens a window on America itself. Special link to the author's interview on Radio Nation discussing this new book - CNN's Tailwind Tale

Table of Contents:
Chapter 1 Preface Chapter 2 Valley of Death: From Blockbuster to Just Busted. Chapter 3 Tailwind (Take 1): Courage and Covert Operations. Chapter 4 Tailwind (Take 2): A Government Betrays Its People. Chapter 5 Lies and Legends, Men and Remembered Mettle Chapter 6 Two Parts Apocalypse Now and a Pinch of Sarin: Popular Culture's Recipe for Valley of Death. Chapter 7 Beyond Reason: Revelation in The Valley of Death Chapter 8 Consider the Sources: Thomas Moorer and John Singlaub Chapter 9 What Was She Thinking? April Oliver's Willing Suspension of Disbelief Chapter 10 The CNN-Tailwind Affair: Journalism in a Fearful America Chapter 11 Afterword

About the Author :
Jerry Lembcke is associate professor of sociology at the College of the Holy Cross. He is the author of The Spitting Image: Myth, Memory, and the Legacy of Vietnam and several articles on the news media, popular culture, and public memory about the war in Vietnam. He lives in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Review :
Jerry Lembcke has once again produced a compelling discussion of a post-Vietnam myth. Like his last book, The Spitting Image, this one explores the strange mechanics by which collective experiences coalesce into rumors, rumors into the illusion of memories, and these false memories into reported 'fact.' With detailed discussions of post-war media, literature, and politics, the book will appeal to those interested in cultural history, journalism, and the making of national myth. An exquisite book that tempers criticism with compassion while exploring the power of myth in shaping memories of the Vietnam war among those who felt soldiers were betrayed by liberal elites. Lembcke has written an unusual and compelling study that blends media critique with explorations of folklore, popular culture, and apocalyptic metaphor. With extraordinary doggedness, Jerry Lembcke tears the lid off one of the most remarkable-and peculiar-journalistic hoaxes in modern times. As Lembcke makes clear in this powerful book, sometimes even the media can be seduced by the too-good-to-be-true con. Like Oliver Stone's historically false but widely viewed conspiracy movie JFK, Lembcke asserts that CNN'sTailwind Tale developed a carrying power not because it was true but because it felt true.