That smells of historical revisionism to me.  I have maps from the 1940s showing that a road between Fairbanks and Livengood already existed.  I also have a piece written in 1957 by George Sundborg in his role as editor of the Daily News-Menace, where he described the construction of the Elliott Highway (or the extension of the aforementioned existing road) and the Nome-Council Road as being "the first segment(s) of the road to Nome".  That our current batch of journalists don't possess such historical perspective (excepting perhaps Dermot Cole and Mike Dunham) doesn't mean that we should believe them and excuse away existing evidence.