But facts are facts, and history is history--including what Cronkite actually did as TV's most influential journalist during the first years of the Vietnam War. Despite all the posthumous praise for Cronkite's February 1968 telecast that dubbed the war "a stalemate," the facts of history show that the broadcast came only after Cronkite's protracted support for the war.

In 1965, reporting from Vietnam, Cronkite dramatized the murderous war effort with enthusiasm....

Also in 1965--the pivotal year of escalation--Cronkite expressed explicit support for the Vietnam War. He lauded "the courageous decision that Communism's advance must be stopped in Asia and that guerrilla warfare as a means to a political end must be finally discouraged."

Why does this matter now? Because citing Cronkite as an example of courageous reporting on a war is a dangerously low bar--as if reporting that a war can't be won, after cheerleading it for years, is somehow the ultimate in journalistic quality and courage.

See Solomon's book and film War Made Easy for an extended look at Cronkite's important contribution to the U.S.'s war on Vietnam.

It's a given that the Washington Post empathizes and identifies with the denizens of official Washington. But it takes a real moral narcissism to suggest that the real tragedy of Vietnam is that "Mr. McNamara was never forgiven by many of his bitter enemies from the Vietnam days."

Half a million American soldiers went to war on his watch. More than 16,000 died; 42,000 more would fall in the seven years to come.

What's missing, of course, is the number of Vietnamese and other Indochinese who died as a result of the war whose escalation McNamara oversaw; estimates range from 1 million to more than 3 million, but Weiner never gets around to mentioning them. More than halfway through the piece, the article does quote a repentant McNamara talking about how escalating the war would cause "more distress at the amount of suffering being visited on the noncombatants in Vietnam, South and North"--though the reference is to unspecified "suffering," and even then the focus is on the "distress" such suffering would cause us.

Clearly, it's morally perverse to treat one's own nation's losses in a war that nation started as the important point, while ignoring the far greater losses of the lands your country invaded. It's that ability to set aside the evil that one inflicts on others that allows wars like Vietnam to be carried out.

The scientists trying to learn how to wipe out "specific types of memory" are lagging way behind.

Don't need to remember the vast quantities of napalm, Agent Orange and cluster bombs that the U.S. military dropped on Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in the 1960s and 1970s? Or the continuing realities of burn victims, dioxin poisoning and unexploded warheads?

Don't want to consider the many thousands of civilians killed by Salvadoran death squads, Guatemalan troops and Nicaraguan Contra guerillas during the 1980s, courtesy of U.S. taxpayers?

Don't care to recall the Pentagon's estimate that the Gulf War in early 1991 killed 100,000 Iraqi people during a six-week period?

Forget about it! That's what selective memory is for.

The Times' ethical concern that people "tempted to erase a severely painful memory" might "in the process [lose] other, personally important memories that were somehow related" prompts Solomon to further his metaphor: "Dominant media have blotted out countless painful memories--national or personal--if only by treating them as irrelevant or incidental." In other words, "Enough bleach in the spin cycles will do the trick."