NOTHING IN PETER ARNETT’S SUBSEQUENT HISTORY ENHANCES HIS CREDIBILITY HERE: Destroying a Quote’s History in Order to Save It: A famous Vietnam War dispatch is now 50 years old, but the origins of the phrase are older than that.

Arnett has always been adamant that he got the quote right, and I have no reason to doubt him. Still, I would be remiss if I failed to note that there are skeptics. 2 One is the indefatigable Ralph Keyes, author of “The Quote Verifier: Who Said What, Where, and When,” and scourge of misquoters everywhere. Keyes argues that “a quotation this seminal needs better confirmation.” He points out that Ben Tre was a fair-sized city, not a town or village, and that although damaged it did not come close to being destroyed. Keyes quotes the senior Army officer present at the battle, who insisted that what he actually said to Arnett was: “It was a shame the town was destroyed.” (Arnett says he talked to four officers, not just one.) More intriguing for present purposes is another fact Keyes turned up: The day before Arnett’s story ran, the Times’s James Reston had asked in his column, “How do we win by military force without destroying what we are trying to save?”

Keyes is suggesting that the metaphor was already in the air. He’s right. In fact, the Associated Press itself had used a similar phrase almost exactly a year before Arnett’s dispatch. In late January 1967, the AP distributed a wire photo of a different village with a caption that read in part: “The Americans meantime had started to destroy the village to deny it to the Viet Cong.” The photograph was published across the country. One wonders whether the officer Arnett was quoting had come across the caption the previous year. In other words, the AP might well have created the very meme it would later popularize.

But read the whole thing.