jerry:

Good example! However, Savo Island was when we still viewed the war as on a knife’s edge. Nobody thought/knew we were winning just yet.

I think Pelelieu (some still think that battle was unnecessary and a mistake) and Iwo Jima (thousands dead for an island whose strategic value was questionable) would be viewed as better examples in the Pacific Theater of the high command lying to the press and the American public (or be portrayed that way today).

Of late, I’ve also seen references to Korea as the counterpoint to Vietnam. The irony, of course, is that Korea was not (even as late as the 1980s) a democracy, the war was not being won (either when the Chinese intervened or later for three years along what became the DMZ), battles were fought for bits of geography of marginal tactical (as opposed to political) value. Most of all, it was not even clear that the South’s was the winning side (until the 1970s, the GDP was almost certainly higher in the industrialized north than the agrarian south). By Korea, of course, the press (see Izzy Stone) had already begun to argue that the entire enterprise was criminal, based on a lie, worthless, and that we were backing the wrong side.

And Harry Truman was certainly no FDR! (‘Course, Ike was an idiot, someone you might welcome as a grandfather or uncle, but hardly presidential material, especially next to the far more intellectual Stevenson.)