This was the case with the Spanish-American War in 1898, where the press is usually blamed for getting the nation into a conflict. According to the legend, the publisher William Randolph Hearst, whose newspapers loved to run sensational headlines and provocative stories, honed in on the Cuban revolt against Spain because the real-life drama attracted readers in an increasingly competitive newspaper market. When an accidental explosion blew up the USS Maine, the Hearst papers blamed Spain and drummed up patriotic sentiment. “Remember the Maine!” read the headline. Soon after, Congress declared war.

William Randolph Hearst gave “America First” its nationalistic edge.

The myth vastly oversimplifies the reality. The U.S. fleet was already on its way toward Spanish territorial possessions when the explosion occurred. Joseph Campbell and other historians have effectively punctured most of the pillars of the conventional story. Numerous Republicans leaders had been moved by humanitarian concerns. Senator Redfield Proctor of Vermont delivered a speech describing the condition of Cubans who had been detained in camps: “One-half have died and one-quarter of the living are so diseased that they cannot be saved.” A major diplomatic impasse with Spain set up the conditions for the conflict, and the growing imperial ambitions of numerous advisers who were working with President William McKinley also played a role. As the historian George Herring wrote in his book From Colony to Superpower, the Republican platform in 1896 had “set forth a full-fledged expansionist agenda” and “the War of 1898 provided an opportunity to implement much of this agenda—and more.” The drive for imperialism meshed with powerful racial stereotypes among U.S. policy makers about the need for white Anglo-Saxon society to “civilize” and “modernize” neighboring populations. The Republican Party also had political interests on its mind, including the upcoming midterms and the 1900 presidential election. Republican Senator Thomas Platt warned McKinley that William Jennings Bryan could do well on a platform of “Free Silver and Free Cuba,” if McKinley did not take steps on his own. Even so, much of the local press in the rural hinterland did not support the war and even the “yellow press,” according to Campbell, offered less than lock-step support for military intervention in Cuba. There were many influential opponents of war, including powerful figures in the business and financial community. In the end, it was McKinley and the Republican Congress who chose war.

The role of choice among presidents and Congress in times of military conflict also explains much of what happened with Vietnam. For many years, the conventional wisdom about this devastating quagmire was that policy makers in the White House were blinded by a Cold War consensus that if one country, no matter how small, fell to communism, everything else around it would follow. Even the late Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in his apologetic book about the war, In Retrospect, blamed the power of the “domino theory” for what he admitted was a bad decision. The national press had always been considered part of what drove this fear into the minds of policy makers and the public. Most reporters blindly accepted the logic of the Cold War and reiterated the warnings that the U.S. had to stand firm wherever communism tried to rear its head. As William Hammond argued in Reporting Vietnam, journalists listened to official military sources until well into the war.