To their credit, both AP and World Press Photo undertook meticulous investigations into the authorship of "Napalm Girl." (A new documentary, "The Stringer," also delves into the question).Their commitment to accuracy regarding that detail is commendable. Yet so much else about the photograph is swathed in hyperbole and invention.
"'Napalm Girl' has become embroidered with media myths -- false, dubious, or improbable tales about and/or propagated by the news media," W. Joseph Campbell wrote in his eye-opening 2016 book, "Getting It Wrong: Debunking the Greatest Myths in American Journalism." A former reporter turned university professor, Campbell dissected many well-known tales about the press's influence -- from Edward R. Murrow's takedown of Senator Joseph McCarthy to the Watergate coverage of reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein -- and demonstrated that the media's impact was not nearly as dramatic as legend has it.
The photo of the children running from their village is in the same category.
Ever since "Napalm Girl" first appeared, multiple distortions and exaggerations have attached to it. The most pernicious was that the children in the picture had been attacked by Americans. In fact, as contemporaneous news accounts made clear, the napalming of Trang Bàng was a tragic case of friendly fire by South Vietnam. For example, The New York Times headlined its story "South Vietnamese Drop Napalm on Own Troops." The Chicago Tribune likewise reported on "napalm dropped by a Vietnamese air force Skyraider diving onto the wrong target."
Yet the horror depicted in the photo has repeatedly been ascribed to the United States. Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democratic presidential candidate, declared that the napalm that burned "little Kim and countless thousands of other children" had been "dropped in the name of America." The following year Susan Sontag wrote in her award-winning book "On Photography" that little Kim had been "sprayed by American napalm."
Campbell cites other instances of the claim, which keeps recurring. In a story mentioning the photograph as recently as January, The Independent described it as showing a Vietnamese girl "running down a street ... as she flees an American napalm attack."
Campbell punctures other myths about "Napalm Girl." One is that the picture exerted such emotional power that it galvanized American public opinion against the war. Another is that its appearance sped up the US withdrawal from Vietnam.
Not so.
Claims that "Napalm Girl" stirred Americans to oppose the war have been made again and again. Journalism professor Samuel Freedman's assertion that the "searing image played no small part in deepening opposition in the United States to the war" is one of many assembled in Campbell's book.
But a majority of Americans had turned against the war long before June 1972. As years of Gallup polling data show, more than half the public were calling US involvement in Vietnam a mistake as far back as August 1968. In May 1971, more than a year before "Napalm Girl," 61 percent of respondents said they opposed the war. That number remained largely unchanged until the war was over. No evidence has ever shown that the photograph had a measurable effect on public opinion.
Nor is there any evidence that it shortened the war, another claim that has been made many times -- including by Ut, who has told interviewers that the picture "stopped the war in Vietnam."
In reality, the United States began reducing its combat presence in Vietnam more than three years before "Napalm Girl" was published. By June 1972, nearly 90 percent of US troops had left. The US withdrawal did not speed up after the picture appeared, and though the last Americans departed in 1973, the war continued until the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Raw and disturbing as the photograph was, it changed nothing on the ground.
The tragedy of Trang Bàng was real. The suffering in that photograph was real. But the myth that the image changed history is not. "Napalm Girl" remains unforgettable -- not for the influence it wielded but for the agony it captured. In the end, its true legacy is not about the power of journalism but about the cruelty of war.