20 Times the Official Version of the Story Was Probably a Little Too Polished

The Johnson administration told Congress that North Vietnamese ships had attacked U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, leading Congress to authorize an escalation of the conflict in Vietnam. The first attack was disputed. The second most certainly never took place. Robert McNamara later acknowledged this. The war that followed cost the lives of more than 58,000 Americans, and it was largely based on an incident that the government knew, even at the time, was questionable.

When the USS Maine exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898, the newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst accused Spain and beat the drums of war. A Navy investigation conducted in 1976 concluded that the explosion was most likely caused by an internal accident. Spain almost certainly had nothing to do with it. The Spanish-American War took place nonetheless.

Columbus did not discover America. Millions of people were already living there, and Norse explorers had arrived there five centuries earlier. Columbus never set foot on the North American continent. What his voyages actually marked the beginning of was a period of conquest and colonization that led to the deaths of tens of millions of Indigenous people. The story of this “discovery” has always been told from a very specific perspective.

According to the official account, it was the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that forced Japan to surrender and brought the war to an end. Historians have been debating this issue for eighty years. There is evidence to suggest that Japan was already considering surrender before the bombs were dropped, and the Soviet Union’s declaration of war on Japan on August 8 may have played an equally decisive role. 

Revere did indeed set out on the night of April 18, 1775. He was not alone, and he did not complete the journey. William Dawes took a different route on the same mission. Samuel Prescott joined them along the way. Revere was captured by a British patrol before reaching Concord. Prescott, however, completed his journey. Longfellow’s poem made Revere an extraordinary hero because the poem needed him to be one, not because history demanded it.

The Boston Tea Party is generally portrayed as a spontaneous outburst of indignation by the colonists. In reality, it was a coordinated operation planned in advance by the Sons of Liberty, with participants in disguise and a specific commercial target. The grievances were real. The spontaneity, however, was not.

For a century and a half, Custer has been portrayed as a tragic hero who died bravely at the Battle of the Little Bighorn. He divided his forces against the advice of his scouts, ignored intelligence regarding the enemy’s strength, and launched a tactically reckless attack. The Lakota and Cheyenne warriors who defeated him were defending lands that the U.S. Army had systematically appropriated, in violation of its own treaties. 

More than half of the signers of the Declaration of Independence owned slaves. Thomas Jefferson, who wrote that all men are created equal, owned more than 600 slaves during his lifetime. The Constitution protected the slave trade for twenty years and considered slaves to be three-fifths of a person for the purposes of political representation. 

The Normandy landings were a true military feat and an act of collective courage. However, they nearly turned into a disaster on several occasions. The paratroopers were scattered in all directions. At Omaha Beach, planning failures led to far greater losses than anticipated. The official account emphasized the heroism—which was very real—while discreetly sidestepping the question of whether the operation had been as well-planned as its results might suggest.

The version that has become entrenched in the official narrative reduces this movement to a few defining moments and a linear path that leads smoothly to justice. It tends to downplay Martin Luther King Jr.’s radical economic policies, which were deeply unpopular at the time of his assassination and which went far beyond the struggle for civil rights to oppose the Vietnam War and advocate for the redistribution of wealth. 

When the American hostages in Iran were released on the very day of Reagan’s inauguration, many considered this coincidence extraordinary. Allegations then circulated that Reagan’s campaign team had secretly negotiated with Iran to delay the release until after the 1980 election, thereby depriving Carter of an outcome that might have saved his presidency. A congressional investigation found no conclusive evidence. Since then, subsequent reports and declassified documents have left the question unresolved, which remains a source of discomfort.

Monroe died in August 1962; the official cause of death was a probable barbiturate overdose, and her death was ruled a probable suicide. The original police report was misplaced for years. The chief investigator for the medical examiner later stated that the case warranted a judicial inquiry, which never took place. The official version is not impossible. It is also unusually clear for a case involving so many gray areas.

The official version was limited to a burglary, an attempt to cover it up, and a resignation. What this interpretation obscures is the broader context: a systematic program of illegal wiretapping, political sabotage, and the use of federal agencies for the purpose of harassment, which had been going on for years. Watergate became the symbol of a scandal, when in reality it was merely a symptom of a phenomenon far broader and more institutional than a simple botched burglary.

Lewis and Clark are celebrated as explorers who crossed an unknown continent. Yet the territory they traversed was home to dozens of well-established nations that already knew it intimately and whose cooperation was essential to the expedition’s survival. The expedition’s success was largely due to the assistance of the people who already lived there, even though its very purpose was to facilitate the future movement of those same people.

This war is often portrayed as a humanitarian intervention aimed at liberating Cuba from Spanish rule. But the reality is more complex: it involved commercial interests, orchestrated media outrage, and political ambitions that had more to do with expansion into the Pacific than with Cuba’s freedom. The United States then seized Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines, where U.S. forces subsequently spent years suppressing an independence movement with considerable brutality.

In 1621, the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag celebrated a three-day festival together. What followed in the decades that followed was the near-total destruction of the Wampanoag nation, caused by war, slavery, and disease. This holiday was made official by Lincoln in 1863 as a means of promoting national unity during wartime. It was not until much later that the idyllic story of the harvest was added to it.

The official report attributed the failure to poor planning and Kennedy’s decision not to provide air support. Less attention was paid to the CIA’s broader assumption that Kennedy would have no choice but to commit U.S. forces once the operation was underway, and to the fact that the agency had not been entirely honest with the new president about the actual conditions necessary for the plan’s success.

Americans are sometimes taught that the War of 1812 ended in a sort of stalemate. The British burned Washington, D.C. The most famous American military victory of that war—Jackson’s victory at New Orleans—took place two weeks after the peace treaty was signed. This narrative of victory was developed at the national level and was long taught in American classrooms without being seriously questioned.

The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone. A 1979 congressional investigation revealed that Kennedy was likely assassinated as part of a conspiracy, based on acoustic evidence that has since been disputed. The relevant government documents remained classified for decades. The lone gunman theory may be correct. It has never been the subject of an established consensus, contrary to what official accounts have sometimes suggested.

According to the official U.S. account, it was Reagan’s military buildup and his moral clarity that brought about the collapse of the Soviet Union. The full picture takes into account Mikhail Gorbachev’s reform program, the internal contradictions of the Soviet economy, and decades of pressure from dissidents within the Eastern Bloc. Reagan’s role was indeed significant. The narrative that a single man and a single country won the Cold War through sheer force of will is one aimed at a very specific audience.