Last week mark the 50th anniversary of journalist Peter Arnett's Vietnam dispatch for the Associated Press that included this much-misquoted quotation: "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."
The phrase has become among the most iconic in our political discourse. During January's brief government shutdown, Tom Hicks Jr., who co-chaired Donald Trump's presidential campaign, compared Democrats to "the apocryphal commander in the Vietnam War" who was willing to "destroy the village to save it." Last year a columnist for MarketWatch suggested that President Trump was willing "to destroy America in order to 'save' it."
The metaphor is everywhere. It's been applied to efforts to revitalize suffering neighborhoods and rebuild great companies. Newspapers, cities, sports teams, universities, private clubs have all been described as being threatened with destruction in order to be saved. But where did it really come from? Although Arnett's reporting, which attributed the quotation to an anonymous "United States major," is usually credited as the origin, the truth is more complex.
When the phrase was first published on Feb. 8, 1968, the New York Times buried the dispatch containing it, printing just two paragraphs on the battle of Ben Tre. Almost instantly, however, the line was being misquoted everywhere. On Feb. 10, an Oregon newspaper rendered it as "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Two weeks later the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported on a group of protesters carrying a banner that read, "It Was Necessary to Destroy the Village in Order to Save It." In whatever form, the words had become a mantra of the anti-war movement.
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. 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' 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 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. The AP might well have created the very meme it would later popularize.
But the concept of destroying to save was not invented for Vietnam. In 1940, before the U.S. had entered World War II, a piece in the Atlanta Daily World used the metaphor to explain why the fight against fascism abroad was not an excuse for intolerance of dissent at home: "We won't save democracy by killing it ... and we won't make American democracy worth saving by destroying it in the so-called attempt to save it."
There are much earlier uses. Following the Civil War, for example, Southern courts heard a whole string of cases brought by people whose crops or barns had been burned by retreating Confederate forces to keep them out of Union hands. Although judges in some of the cases ordered compensation, they were at pains to point out that under the prevailing rules of war, private property might legitimately "be destroyed to save it from the enemy."
But the actual father of the metaphor--the man who put it into roughly the form we know today--seems to have been Justice Edward White of the U.S. Supreme Court. In a 1908 decision known as the Employers' Liability Cases, the justices were asked to give a narrow reading to a congressional enactment concerning common carriers in the District of Columbia. The court refused. The requested reading, according to White's opinion for the majority, would in effect add a new clause to the statute. He then explained why doing so would be wrong:
"To write into the act the qualifying words therefore would be but adding to its provisions in order to save it in one aspect, and thereby to destroy it in another--that is, to destroy in order to save, and to save in order to destroy."
White's clever turn of phrase was widely quoted in the years following, and thus is almost certainly the source of our modern figure of speech. The unnamed major who described the fighting at Ben Tre was not inventing a metaphor, but employing one long in use.
Editorial on 02/18/2018