Joe Goes on the Attack Against the Alt-Right Media.

If there was one event which, for me, was the single, most important political event which has occurred in my lifetime, it was the August 7, 1964, Senate and House votes on the ‘Tonkin Resolution’, which effectively initiated the Viet Nam War.

Two journalistic efforts about that war stand out in my mind: David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest, and Frances Fitzgerald’s Fire in the Lake. I regret that it took hundreds of thousands of military and civilian deaths and the immolation of large portions of two countries to create the facts and issues which these two remarkable writers captured in their books. But if, as a Supreme Court justice once said, ‘history also has its claims,’ at least we still have these two histories to remind us about those awful days.

When it comes to remembering those times, however, there is also a third journalist who is rarely mentioned today, but whose work inspired not only the efforts of Halberstam and Fitzgerald, but also set a standard for what the role of a journalist is supposed to be all about.

I am referring to I. F. Stone, who raised questions about the honesty and validity of Lyndon Johnson’s deceitful Tonkin Gulf strategy less than three weeks after those fateful votes occurred. The House vote authorizing the President to widen the war was 416–0, the Senate…