Demythologizing

People tend to believe what they want --or need--to believe. A recent Chicago Daily News and Sun-Times survey found, for example, 17% of those interviewed in Charlotte, N.C., convinced that the Apollo 11 moon landing a year ago was only a Hollywood fake. On quite another level, many Americans will not countenance the thought that U.S. soldiers could possibly have massacred Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

Other "myths" make the rounds regularly. Two of them, however, fell victim last week to authoritative debunking. For some Americans it has been an article of faith that the campus upheavals of recent years could not be the spontaneous work of their children, but must in fact be the fruit of sinister plotting and manipulation by the Communists. A corollary conviction has it that any dissenters who come off the worse from encounters with law enforcement officers undoubtedly asked for it. Both were knocked down by no less an authority than the Federal Bureau of Investigation. William C. Sullivan, the bureau's No. 3 man, said that there was "no centralized conspiratorial plot stemming from the Communist Party" behind the campus uprisings, although, he said, the Communists had tried to exploit the unrest. And the FBI investigation of the Kent State killings discloses that the Ohio National Guardsmen who opened fire, killing four students, were not surrounded by demonstrators and could have controlled the situation without shooting.

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