“More Real Than the Real”: American Image Politics on the Eve of the Election
Politics tamfitronics Just over 50 years ago, President Richard Nixon privately wondered if the photograph of Kim Phuc, a nine-year-old Vietnamese girl whose body was burning from napalm, had been staged. He said to his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, “I wonder if that was a fix”—what now might be called “fake news.” But given the credibility in 1972 of news photography, Nixon was unable to dismiss the horror that this photo by the AP’s Nick Ut evoked, even as it stoked resistance to the war.“Napalm bothers people. You get a picture of a little girl with her clothes burnt off,” Haldeman said. “I wondered about that,” Nixon replied. The US military commander in South Vietnam, General William Westmoreland, also questioned the photo, alleging at one point that the girl had been burned in “a...
