http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A21239-2004Aug21.html
Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete
Critics Fail to Disprove Kerry's Version of Vietnam War Episode
By Michael Dobbs
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, August 22, 2004; Page A01
When John F. Kerry rescued Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River in the jungles of Vietnam in March 1969, neither man could possibly have imagined that the episode would become a much-disputed focus of an American presidential campaign 35 years later.
For Kerry, then a green and gangly Navy lieutenant junior grade and now the Democratic challenger to a wartime Republican president, that tale of heroism under fire has become integral to his campaign. A centerpiece of public rallies, videos and a new campaign advertisement, it has helped distinguish the candidate from his Democratic primary rivals and from President Bush, who spent the war at home as a member of the Texas Air National Guard.
For the Massachusetts senator's critics, who include three of the five Swift boat skippers who were present that day, the incident demonstrates why Kerry does not deserve to be commander in chief. They accuse him of cowardice, hogging the limelight and lying. Far from displaying coolness under fire, they say, Kerry was never fired upon and fled the scene at the moment of maximum danger.
Establishing the facts is complicated not merely by fading memories and sometimes ambiguous archival evidence, but also by the bitterly partisan nature of the presidential campaign.
An investigation by The Washington Post into what happened that day suggests that both sides have withheld information from the public record and provided an incomplete, and sometimes inaccurate, picture of what took place. But although Kerry's accusers have succeeded in raising doubts about his war record, they have failed to come up with sufficient evidence to prove him a liar.
Two best-selling books have formed the basis for public discussion of the events of March 13, 1969, as a result of which Kerry won a Bronze Star and his third Purple Heart. The fullest account of Kerry's experience in Vietnam is "Tour of Duty" by prominent presidential historian Douglas Brinkley. It was written with Kerry's cooperation and with exclusive access to his diaries and other writings about the Vietnam War. "Unfit for Command," by John E. O'Neill, who succeeded Kerry as commander of his Swift boat, and Jerome R. Corsi, lays out a detailed attack on Kerry's record.
The Post's research shows that both accounts contain significant flaws and factual errors. This reconstruction of the climactic day in Kerry's military career is based on more than two dozen interviews with former crewmates and officers who served with him, as well as research in the Naval Historical Center here, where the Swift boat records are preserved. Kerry himself was the only surviving skipper on the river that day who declined a request for an interview.
On the core issue of whether Kerry was wounded under enemy fire, thereby qualifying for a third Purple Heart, the Navy records clearly favor Kerry. Several documents, including the after-action report and the Bronze Star citation for a Swift boat skipper who has accused Kerry of lying, refer to "all units" coming under "automatic and small-weapons fire."
The eyewitness accounts, on the other hand, are conflicting. Kerry's former crew members support his version, as does Rassmann, the Special Forces officer rescued from the river. But many of the other skippers and enlisted men who were on the river that day dispute Kerry's account and have signed up with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a public advocacy group that has aired television advertisements accusing Kerry of lying about his wartime service.
From an outsider's perspective, the flotilla of five 50-foot Swift boats that followed the Bay Hap River that humid March day has spawned two competing bands of brothers. One is fiercely loyal to Kerry and frequently appears with him at campaign events. The other dislikes him intensely and is doing everything it can to block his election.
Many Swift boat veterans opposed to Kerry acknowledge that their disgust with him was fueled by his involvement in the antiwar movement. When they returned from Vietnam, they say, they were dogged by accusations of atrocities. While Kerry went on to make a prominent political career, they got jobs as teachers, accountants, surveyors and oil field workers. When he ran for president, partly on the strength of his war record, their resentment exploded.
At one level, an attempt to establish what happened during a Vietcong ambush on the Bay Hap River 35 years ago is a simple search for facts. At another, it is the story of the divisions that tore the United States, and its armed forces, into two opposing camps at the time of the Vietnam War -- tensions that have resurfaced with a vengeance during the current political campaign.
"The old wounds have been reopened, and they still bleed," said Larry Thurlow, one of Kerry's accusers, who was awarded a Bronze Star for heroism for going to the rescue of a boat that was rocked by a mine explosion that day. He says he got involved with the anti-Kerry campaign organized by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth because Kerry's distortion of the truth about the Vietnam War "makes me madder than hell."
"We decided we aren't going to take it anymore."
Boats Thrown Into Fight
When Kerry signed up to command a Swift boat in the summer of 1968, he was inspired by the example of his hero, John F. Kennedy, who had commanded the PT-109 patrol boat in the Pacific in World War II. But Kerry had little expectation of seeing serious action. At the time the Swift boats -- or PCFs (patrol craft fast), in Navy jargon -- were largely restricted to coastal patrols. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry wrote in a book of war reminiscences published in 1986.
The role of the Swift boats changed dramatically toward the end of 1968, when Adm. Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., commander of U.S. naval forces in South Vietnam, decided to use them to block Vietcong supply routes through the Mekong Delta. Hundreds of young men such as Kerry, with little combat experience, suddenly found themselves face to face with the enemy.
Taking a 50-foot aluminum boat up a river or canal was replete with danger, ranging from ambushes to booby traps to mines. Kerry and his comrades would experience all these risks on March 13, 1969. The purpose of the mission was twofold: to insert pro-government forces upriver in a group of Vietcong-controlled villages; and more generally to show the flag, keeping the waterways free for commerce.
In some ways, it was a day like any other. The previous day, Kerry had taken part in a Swift boat expedition that had come under fire, and several windows of Kerry's boat were blown out. A friend, Lt. j.g. William B. Rood, almost lost an eye in the ambush. [Now an editor with the Chicago Tribune, Rood yesterday broke three decades of public silence to support Kerry's version of how he won the Silver Star on Feb. 28. Rood has no firsthand knowledge of the Bronze Star incident.]
In other respects, March 13 would mark the culmination of Kerry's Vietnam War career. With three Purple Hearts, he became eligible for reassignment. Within three weeks, he was out of Vietnam and headed home after a truncated four-month combat tour.
As commander of PCF-94, Kerry was responsible for ferrying a group of Chinese Vietnamese mercenaries, known as Nung, eight miles up the Bay Hap River, and then five miles up the winding Dong Cung Canal to suspected Vietcong villages. His passengers included Rassmann, the Special Forces officer, who had run into Kerry at a party a couple of weeks before and remembered him as "a tall, skinny guy with this humongous jaw."
The expedition began to go wrong soon after they inserted the Nung troops into a deserted village off the Dong Cung Canal. As the mercenaries searched from house to house, Rassmann recalled, one reached for a cloth bag at the base of a coconut tree and was blown to pieces. It was a booby trap. Kerry, who arrived on the scene soon after, helped wrap the body in a poncho and drag it back to the boat, diving into a ditch when he thought he was under fire.
"I never want to see anything like it again," Kerry wrote later. "What was left was human, and yet it wasn't -- a person had been there only a few moments earlier and . . . now it was a horrible mass of torn flesh and broken bones."
In "Tour of Duty," these thoughts are attributed to a "diary" kept by Kerry. But the endnotes to Brinkley's book say that Kerry "did not keep diaries in these weeks in February and March 1969 when the fighting was most intense." In the acknowledgments to his book, Brinkley suggests that he took at least some of the passages from an unfinished book proposal Kerry prepared sometime after November 1971, more than two years after he had returned home from Vietnam.
In his book, Brinkley writes that a skipper who remains friendly to Kerry, Skip Barker, took part in the March 13 raid. But there is no documentary evidence of Barker's participation. Barker could not be reached for comment.
Brinkley, who is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, did not reply to messages left with his office, publisher and cell phone. The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry's journals and other writings to The Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley. A Kerry spokesman, Michael Meehan, said he did not know when Kerry wrote down his reminiscences.
As they were heading back to the boat, Kerry and Rassmann decided to blow up a five-ton rice bin to deny food to the Vietcong. In an interview last week, Rassmann recalled that they climbed on top of the huge pile and dug a hole in the rice. On the count of three, they tossed their grenades into the hole and ran.
Evidently, Kerry did not run fast enough. "He got some frags and pieces of rice in his rear end," Rassmann said with a laugh. "It was more embarrassing than painful." At the time, the incident did not seem significant, and Kerry did not mention it to anyone when he got back on the boat. An unsigned "personnel casualty report," however, erroneously implies that Kerry suffered "shrapnel wounds in his left buttocks" later in the day, following the mine explosion incident, when he also received "contusions to his right forearm."
Anti-Kerry veterans have accused Kerry of conflating the two injuries to strengthen his case for a Bronze Star and Purple Heart. Kerry's Bronze Star citation, however, refers only to his arm injury.
At 2:45 p.m., according to Navy records, Kerry was joined by four other Swift boats for the Bay Hap trip. Kerry led the way on the right-hand side of the river, in PCF-94, followed 15 yards behind by one of his best friends in Vietnam, Don Droz, in PCF-43. A procession of three boats on the left side of the river was led by Richard Pees on PCF-3, followed by Jack Chenoweth on PCF-23 and Thurlow on PCF-51.
Ahead of them was a fishing weir, a series of wooden posts across the river. That morning, the Swiftees had noticed Vietnamese children in sampans attaching nets to the posts and had thought little of it. To get through the weir, their boats had to pass to the left or to the right of the fishing nets.
Just as the Kerry and Pees boats reached the weir, there was a devastating explosion, lifting Pees's boat, PCF-3, three feet out of the water.
Witness Accounts Diverge
"My God, I've never seen anything like it," Chenoweth wrote in what he says is a diary recorded soon after the events. "There was a fantastic flash, a boom, then the 3 boat disappeared in a fountain of water and debris. I was only 30 yards behind." Assuming that they had run into a Vietcong ambush, Chenoweth wrote, "we unleashed everything into the banks."
A later intelligence report established that the mine was probably detonated by a Vietcong sympathizer in a foxhole who hit a plunger as the Swift boats passed through the fishing weir.
Aboard the 3 boat, Pees remembered in an interview being "thrown up in the air" into the windscreen of his pilothouse and landing "kind of dazed," his legs numb, lap covered with blood. When it was over, Pees and three members of his crew would be medevaced to a Coast Guard cutter offshore with serious head and back injuries.
"When the mine went off, we were still going full speed," recalled Michael Medeiros, one of Kerry's crew members. Kerry's boat raced off down the river, away from the ambush zone.
It is at this point that the eyewitness accounts begin to diverge sharply. Everybody agrees that a mine exploded under the 3 boat. There is no argument that Rassmann fell into the river and that Kerry fished him out. Nor is there any dispute that Kerry was hurt in the arm, although the anti-Kerry camp claims he exaggerated the nature of his injury. Much else is hotly contested.
When the first explosion occurred, Rassmann was seated next to the pilothouse on the starboard, or right, side of Kerry's boat, munching a chocolate chip cookie that he recalls having "ripped off from someone's Care package." He saw the 3 boat lift out of the water. Almost simultaneously, Kerry's forward gunner, Tommy Belodeau, began screaming for a replacement for his machine gun, which had jammed. Rassmann grabbed an M-16 and worked his way sideways along the deck, which was only seven inches wide in places.
At this point, Kerry crew members say their boat was hit by a second explosion. Although Kerry's injury report speaks of a mine that "detonated close aboard PCF-94," helmsman Del Sandusky believes it was more likely a rocket or rocket-propelled grenade, as a mine would have inflicted more damage. Whatever it was, the explosion rammed Kerry into the wall of his pilothouse, injuring his right forearm.
The second explosion "blew me right off the boat," Rassmann recalled. Frightened that he might be struck by the propellers of one of the boats, he dived to the bottom of the river, where he dumped his weapons and rucksack. When he surfaced, he said, bullets were "snapping overhead," as well as hitting the water around him.
At first, nobody noticed what had happened to Rassmann. But then Medeiros, who was standing at the stern, saw him bobbing up and down in the water and shouted, "Man overboard." Around this time, crew members said, Kerry decided to go back to help the crippled 3 boat. It is unclear how far down the river Kerry's boat was when he turned around. It could have been anywhere from a few hundred yards to a mile.
O'Neill claims that Kerry "fled the scene" despite the absence of hostile fire. Kerry, in a purported journal entry cited in Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," maintains that he wanted to get his troops ashore "on the outskirts of the ambush."
The Kerry/Rassmann version of what happened next has been retold many times, in TV advertisements and campaign appearances: Rassmann struggling to climb up a scramble net, Kerry leaning over the bow of the boat and pulling him up with his injured arm. As Kerry later recalled, in notes cited by Brinkley, "Somehow we got him on board and I didn't get the bullet in the head that I expected, and we managed to move down near the 3 boat that was still crawling a snail-like zig-zag through the river."
Rassmann remembers several boats coming back up the river toward him. But Chenoweth believes that the rescue must have taken place fairly close to the other boats, which had been drifting slowly downriver. In his diary, he said, he wrote that "we spotted a man overboard, started to pick him up, but 94 [Kerry's boat] got there first."
While Kerry was rescuing Rassmann, the other Swift boats had gone to the assistance of Pees and the 3 boat. Thurlow, in particular, distinguished himself by leaping onto the 3 boat and administering first aid, according to his Bronze Star citation. At one point, he, too, was knocked overboard when the boat hit a sandbar, but he was rescued by crewmates.
The Kerry and anti-Kerry camps differ sharply on whether the flotilla came under enemy fire after the explosion that crippled the 3 boat. Everybody aboard Kerry's boat, including Rassmann, says there was fire from both riverbanks, and the official after-action report speaks of all boats receiving "heavy a/w [automatic weapons] and s/a [small arms] from both banks." The Bronze Star citations for Kerry and Thurlow also speak of prolonged enemy fire.
A report on "battle damage" to Thurlow's boat mentions "three 30 cal bullet holes about super structure." According to Thurlow, at least one of the bullet holes was the result of action the previous day, when he ran into another Vietcong ambush.
Thurlow, Chenoweth, Pees and several of their crew members who belong to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth say neither they nor Kerry came under fire. "If there was fire, I would have made some notation in my journal," Chenoweth said. "But it didn't happen that way. There wasn't any fire." Although he read his diary entry to a reporter over the phone, he declined to supply a copy.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Rassmann said, "are not just questioning Kerry's account, they are questioning my account. I take that very personally. No one can tell me that we were not under fire. I saw it, I heard the splashes, and I was scared to death. For them to come back 35 years after the fact to tarnish not only Kerry's record, but my veracity, is unconscionable."
Until now, eyewitness evidence supporting Kerry's version had come only from his own crewmen. But yesterday, The Post independently contacted a participant who has not spoken out so far in favor of either camp who remembers coming under enemy fire. "There was a lot of firing going on, and it came from both sides of the river," said Wayne D. Langhofer, who manned a machine gun aboard PCF-43, the boat that was directly behind Kerry's.
Langhofer said he distinctly remembered the "clack, clack, clack" of enemy AK-47s, as well as muzzle flashes from the riverbanks. Langhofer, who now works at a Kansas gunpowder plant, said he was approached several months ago by leaders of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth but declined their requests to speak out against Kerry.
Who Initialed Navy Report?
Much of the debate over who is telling the truth boils down to whether the two-page after-action report and other Navy records are accurate or whether they have been embellished by Kerry or someone else. In "Unfit for Command," O'Neill describes the after-action report as "Kerry's report." He contends that language in Thurlow's Bronze Star citation referring to "enemy bullets flying about him" must also have come from "Kerry's after-action report."
O'Neill has said that the initials "KJW" on the bottom of the report "identified" it as having been written by Kerry. It is unclear why this should be so, as Kerry's initials are JFK. A review of other Swift boat after-action reports at the Naval Historical Center here reveals several that include the initials "KJW" but describe incidents at which Kerry was not present.
Other Swift boat veterans, including Thurlow and Chenoweth, have said they believe that Kerry wrote the March 13 report. "I didn't like to write reports," said Thurlow, who was the senior officer in the five-boat flotilla. "John would write the thing up in longhand, and it would then be typed up and sent up the line."
Even if Kerry did write the March 13 after-action report, it seems unlikely that he would have been the source of the information about "enemy bullets" flying around Thurlow. The official witness to those events, according to Thurlow's medal recommendation form, was his own leading petty officer, Robert Lambert, who himself won a Bronze Star for "courage under fire" in going to Thurlow's rescue after he fell into the river. Lambert, who lives in California, declined to comment.
In a telephone interview, the head of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, retired Adm. Roy Hoffmann, who commanded all Swift boats in Vietnam, said he believed that Kerry wrote the March 13 after-action report on the basis of numerical identifiers at the top of the form. He later acknowledged that the numbers referred to the Swift boat unit, and not to Kerry personally. "It's not cast-iron," he said.
Some of the mystery surrounding exactly what happened on the Bay Hap River in March 1969 could be resolved by the full release of all relevant records and personal diaries. Much information is available from the Web sites of the Kerry campaign and Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, and the Navy archives. But both the Kerry and anti-Kerry camps continue to deny or ignore requests for other relevant documents, including Kerry's personal reminiscences (shared only with biographer Brinkley), the boat log of PCF-94 compiled by Medeiros (shared only with Brinkley) and the Chenoweth diary.
Although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records. A Freedom of Information Act request by The Post for Kerry's records produced six pages of information. A spokesman for the Navy Personnel Command, Mike McClellan, said he was not authorized to release the full file, which consists of at least a hundred pages.
Some Felt Betrayed
Kerry's reunion with Rassmann in January this year, nearly 35 years after he pulled the former Green Beret from the river, was a defining moment of his presidential campaign. Many political observers believed that the images of the two men embracing helped Kerry win the Iowa Democratic caucuses. The "No Man Left Behind" theme has become a recurring image of pro-Kerry advertising.
But many of the men Kerry served with in Vietnam feel betrayed and left behind by him. Soon after Kerry returned to the United States, he began organizing antiwar rallies. Before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, he appeared to endorse accusations that U.S. troops in Vietnam had committed war crimes "with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."
The anti-Kerry veterans began mobilizing earlier this year, following publication of the Brinkley biography and the nationwide publicity given to Kerry's emotional reunion with Rassmann. Many of the veterans were contacted personally by Hoffmann, a gung-ho naval officer compared unflatteringly in "Tour of Duty" to the out-of-control lieutenant colonel in the movie "Apocalypse Now" who talked about how he loved "the smell of napalm in the morning."
Hoffmann, who was already angry with Kerry for his antiwar activities on his return from Vietnam, said in an interview that he was "appalled" to find out from reading "Tour of Duty" that Kerry was "considered to be a Navy hero." "I thought there was a tremendous amount of gross exaggeration in the book and, in some places, downright lies. So I started contacting some of my former shipmates," he said.
One of the men Hoffmann contacted was O'Neill, a longtime Kerry critic who debated Kerry on television in 1971. O'Neill put Hoffmann in touch with some wealthy Republican Party contributors. One of O'Neill's contacts was Texas millionaire Bob Perry, who has contributed $200,000 to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Perry has also contributed to the Bush campaign.
"I'd met him three or four times and represented people he knew," said O'Neill, who has practiced law in Houston for nearly 30 years.
In addition to helping to organize the anti-Kerry campaign, O'Neill wrote his own book about the senator's wartime record, which soared to the top of the Amazon.com best-seller list before its publication earlier this month.
With the exception of a sailor named Stephen Gardner, who served with Kerry in late 1968 on PCF-44, Kerry's own crew members have remained loyal to him. "If it wasn't for some of his decisions, we would probably be some of the names in that wall," said Gene Thorson, the engineman on PCF-94, referring to the Vietnam War Memorial. "I respect him very much."
Others who served on boats that operated alongside Kerry on that fateful day in March 1969 say they cannot stand the man who is now challenging George W. Bush for the presidency.
"I think that Kerry's behavior was abominable," said Pees, the commander of the boat that hit the mine. "His actions after the war were particularly disgusting. He distorted the truth when he talked about atrocities. We went out of our way to protect civilians. To suggest otherwise is a grotesque lie. As far as I am concerned, he did not speak the truth about how we conducted operations in Vietnam."
"A lot of people just can't forgive and forget," countered Kerry crew member Medeiros. "He was a great commander. I would have no trouble following him anywhere."
Staff writer Linton Weeks contributed to this report.
Anti-Kerry veterans group releases critical ad
Veterans Group Against Kerry Says Bush Lawyer Gave Legal Advice
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- A group of Vietnam veterans running commercials against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said it received legal advice from an attorney who works for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign.
Benjamin Ginsberg, 53, one of Bush's leading attorneys during the Florida recount that decided the 2000 election, gave legal advice to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, said Jennifer Webster, a spokeswoman for the group.
``It was an effort to make sure we were doing everything legal, that's why you hire a lawyer,'' said Jennifer Webster, a spokeswoman for the group. She said the group sought advice from Ginsberg because he has worked with the Republican National Committee and understands U.S. election law.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said ``there has been no coordination at any time'' between the Bush campaign and any political organizations such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ginsberg, an attorney with Washington-based Patton Boggs LLP, could not be reached immediately. Calls to his home and office and an e-mailed request for comment were not returned.
``It's another piece of the mounting evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group,'' said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton. ``The longer President Bush waits to specifically condemn this smear, the more it looks like his campaign is behind it.''
U.S. law bars coordination between candidates and independent organizations, also known as 527 groups for that section of the Internal Revenue Service code that grants them tax-exempt status. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, among the so-called 527 groups, that are not subject to campaign spending restrictions candidates must follow.
The first link between the Bush campaign and the Swift boat veterans became public Aug. 21, when the Bush campaign said former Air Force Colonel Ken Cordier worked with the Swift boat veterans while serving on Bush's National Veterans Steering Committee. Cordier, who resigned from the campaign, appears in a commercial for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The Bush campaign did not know in advance that Cordier was working for both Bush and the veterans group, Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt said.
The Swift boat group ran ads earlier this month in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia saying Kerry didn't deserve the three Purple Hearts for being wounded and the Silver and Bronze Stars for valor awarded to him by the U.S. Navy for his service in Vietnam. They cite their own recollections of events to dispute Navy records from the time the medals were approved 35 years ago.
Lieutenant Mike Kakfa, a U.S. Navy spokesman, declined to comment on issues regarding Kerry's time in Vietnam.
Other veterans who served with Kerry defend him, including Chicago Tribune editor William Rood, a former Swift Boat officer, Jim Russell, a former Navy lieutenant, and Jim Rassmann, a former U.S. Army Green Beret.
The Kerry campaign said Aug. 20 it filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission to halt the ads, alleging illegal coordination with Bush's campaign.
The Swift Boat Veterans group is spending $1.1 million on ads attacking Kerry. Of that, $550,000 was spent on the spots that ran earlier this month in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia, said spokesman Sean McCabe.
The group listed 10 financial backers in its June 30 filing with the Internal Revenue Service. More than 10,000 new donors gave more than $450,000 in the last two weeks, McCabe said.
Seven of the 10 supporters listed with the IRS are Republicans, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. Among them is Bob Perry, the largest political donor to Republicans in Texas, who provided $100,000. Perry, chief executive officer of closely held Perry Homes in Houston, has declined to be interviewed.
Bush political adviser Karl Rove told the New York Times through a spokeswoman that he and Perry were longtime friends, though they had not spoken for at least a year. Rove and Perry have been associates since at least 1986, when they both worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, the Times said.
John O'Neill, a member of Swift Boat Veterans, debated Kerry on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. O'Neill was enlisted by President Richard Nixon and then-White House counsel Charles Colson, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's 1974 resignation.
Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and former Vietnam prisoner of war, two weeks ago called the Swift Boat group's ad dishonest and urged the White House to condemn it.
Bush said Aug. 23 he would like a halt to all campaign ads by political groups not controlled directly by candidates, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ``I'm denouncing all the stuff,'' he said. The president also said ``Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record'' in Vietnam.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Holly Rosenkrantz at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Glenn Hall at ghall@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 24, 2004 22:25 EDT
Aug. 24 (Bloomberg) -- A group of Vietnam veterans running commercials against Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry said it received legal advice from an attorney who works for President George W. Bush's re-election campaign.
Benjamin Ginsberg, 53, one of Bush's leading attorneys during the Florida recount that decided the 2000 election, gave legal advice to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, said Jennifer Webster, a spokeswoman for the group.
``It was an effort to make sure we were doing everything legal, that's why you hire a lawyer,'' said Jennifer Webster, a spokeswoman for the group. She said the group sought advice from Ginsberg because he has worked with the Republican National Committee and understands U.S. election law.
Bush campaign spokesman Scott Stanzel said ``there has been no coordination at any time'' between the Bush campaign and any political organizations such as the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Ginsberg, an attorney with Washington-based Patton Boggs LLP, could not be reached immediately. Calls to his home and office and an e-mailed request for comment were not returned.
``It's another piece of the mounting evidence of the ties between the Bush campaign and this group,'' said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton. ``The longer President Bush waits to specifically condemn this smear, the more it looks like his campaign is behind it.''
U.S. law bars coordination between candidates and independent organizations, also known as 527 groups for that section of the Internal Revenue Service code that grants them tax-exempt status. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, among the so-called 527 groups, that are not subject to campaign spending restrictions candidates must follow.
The first link between the Bush campaign and the Swift boat veterans became public Aug. 21, when the Bush campaign said former Air Force Colonel Ken Cordier worked with the Swift boat veterans while serving on Bush's National Veterans Steering Committee. Cordier, who resigned from the campaign, appears in a commercial for Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The Bush campaign did not know in advance that Cordier was working for both Bush and the veterans group, Bush spokesman Steve Schmidt said.
The Swift boat group ran ads earlier this month in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia saying Kerry didn't deserve the three Purple Hearts for being wounded and the Silver and Bronze Stars for valor awarded to him by the U.S. Navy for his service in Vietnam. They cite their own recollections of events to dispute Navy records from the time the medals were approved 35 years ago.
Lieutenant Mike Kakfa, a U.S. Navy spokesman, declined to comment on issues regarding Kerry's time in Vietnam.
Other veterans who served with Kerry defend him, including Chicago Tribune editor William Rood, a former Swift Boat officer, Jim Russell, a former Navy lieutenant, and Jim Rassmann, a former U.S. Army Green Beret.
The Kerry campaign said Aug. 20 it filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission to halt the ads, alleging illegal coordination with Bush's campaign.
The Swift Boat Veterans group is spending $1.1 million on ads attacking Kerry. Of that, $550,000 was spent on the spots that ran earlier this month in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia, said spokesman Sean McCabe.
The group listed 10 financial backers in its June 30 filing with the Internal Revenue Service. More than 10,000 new donors gave more than $450,000 in the last two weeks, McCabe said.
Seven of the 10 supporters listed with the IRS are Republicans, according to PoliticalMoneyLine. Among them is Bob Perry, the largest political donor to Republicans in Texas, who provided $100,000. Perry, chief executive officer of closely held Perry Homes in Houston, has declined to be interviewed.
Bush political adviser Karl Rove told the New York Times through a spokeswoman that he and Perry were longtime friends, though they had not spoken for at least a year. Rove and Perry have been associates since at least 1986, when they both worked on the gubernatorial campaign of Bill Clements, the Times said.
John O'Neill, a member of Swift Boat Veterans, debated Kerry on the Dick Cavett Show in 1971. O'Neill was enlisted by President Richard Nixon and then-White House counsel Charles Colson, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon's 1974 resignation.
Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona and former Vietnam prisoner of war, two weeks ago called the Swift Boat group's ad dishonest and urged the White House to condemn it.
Bush said Aug. 23 he would like a halt to all campaign ads by political groups not controlled directly by candidates, including the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. ``I'm denouncing all the stuff,'' he said. The president also said ``Kerry served admirably, and he ought to be proud of his record'' in Vietnam.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Holly Rosenkrantz at hrosenkrantz@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Glenn Hall at ghall@bloomberg.net
Last Updated: August 24, 2004 22:25 EDT
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From CNN last night, (thanks to Atrios):
JOHNS: Behind the scenes, Kerry's aides were fighting the swift boat charges with unusual ferocity. They say they have evidence one of the top members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is an outright liar.
The co-author of the book "Unfit for Command," former swift boat commander John O'Neill said Kerry made up a story about being in Cambodia beyond the legal borders of the Vietnam War in 1968.
O'Neill said no one could cross the border by river and he claimed in an audio tape that his publicist played to CNN that he, himself, had never been to Cambodia either. But in 1971, O'Neill said precisely the opposite to then President Richard Nixon.
O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
NIXON: In a swift boat?
O'NEILL: Yes, sir.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
JOHNS: Now, O'Neill may have an explanation for this but he has not returned CNN's calls. What does seem clear is that a top member of the swift boat group is now being held to the same standard of literal accuracy they've tried to impose on John Kerry -- Aaron.
JOHNS: Behind the scenes, Kerry's aides were fighting the swift boat charges with unusual ferocity. They say they have evidence one of the top members of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is an outright liar.
The co-author of the book "Unfit for Command," former swift boat commander John O'Neill said Kerry made up a story about being in Cambodia beyond the legal borders of the Vietnam War in 1968.
O'Neill said no one could cross the border by river and he claimed in an audio tape that his publicist played to CNN that he, himself, had never been to Cambodia either. But in 1971, O'Neill said precisely the opposite to then President Richard Nixon.
O'NEILL: I was in Cambodia, sir. I worked along the border on the water.
NIXON: In a swift boat?
O'NEILL: Yes, sir.
(END VIDEOTAPE)
JOHNS: Now, O'Neill may have an explanation for this but he has not returned CNN's calls. What does seem clear is that a top member of the swift boat group is now being held to the same standard of literal accuracy they've tried to impose on John Kerry -- Aaron.
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
You can always count on NewsMax for the truth. The dig against Cleland for picking up an American grenade is a nice touch. I guess that's less patriotic than snorting coke, getting loaded, and going AWOL. Bolding mine.
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004 ... 2555.shtml
Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2004
Cleland's Publicity Stunt Flops
Trying again to divert attention from his repeated refusal to leash his multimillion-dollar 527 attack dogs, Sen. John Kerry sent chum Max Cleland to Crawford, Texas, to hand President Bush a letter attacking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But the Georgia Democrat never made it past the Secret Service.
Cleland, who became a triple amputee in Vietnam when he picked up a live American grenade (and not in combat, as some media have reported), had a message from nine Senate Democrats who wrote that Bush had "a special duty" to condemn attacks on Kerry's military record.
Cleland, a former one-term senator from Georgia, claimed: "The question is where is George Bush's honor. The question is where is his shame to attack a fellow veteran who has distinguished himself in combat. Regardless of the political combat involved, it's disgraceful."
What's "disgraceful" is that the Democrats keep trying to pretend the president hasn't already denounced such attacks.
Too bad the president didn't give Cleland a message asking Kerry once more to stop his attacks.
----------------------------------------------------------------
That last line says a lot. Bush *did* try to give Cleland a message:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap2 ... _1460.html
http://www.georgewbush.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=3364
August 25, 2004
Senator John Kerry
304 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Kerry,
We are pleased to welcome your campaign representatives to Texas today. We honor all our veterans, all whom have worn the uniform and served our country. We also honor the military and National Guard troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We are very proud of all of them and believe they deserve our full support.
That’s why so many veterans are troubled by your vote AGAINST funding for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, after you voted FOR sending them into battle. And that’s why we are so concerned about the comments you made AFTER you came home from Vietnam. You accused your fellow veterans of terrible atrocities – and, to this day, you have never apologized. Even last night, you claimed to be proud of your post-war condemnation of our actions.
We’re proud of our service in Vietnam. We served honorably in Vietnam and we were deeply hurt and offended by your comments when you came home.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t build your convention and much of your campaign around your service in Vietnam, and then try to say that only those veterans who agree with you have a right to speak up. There is no double standard for our right to free speech. We all earned it.
You said in 1992 “we do not need to divide America over who served and how.” Yet you and your surrogates continue to criticize President Bush for his service as a fighter pilot in the National Guard.
We are veterans too – and proud to support President Bush. He’s been a strong leader, with a record of outstanding support for our veterans and for our troops in combat. He’s made sure that our troops in combat have the equipment and support they need to accomplish their mission.
He has increased the VA health care budget more than 40% since 2001 – in fact, during his four years in office, President Bush has increased veterans funding twice as much as the previous administration did in eight years ($22 billion over 4 years compared to $10 billion over 8.) And he’s praised the service of all who served our country, including your service in Vietnam.
We urge you to condemn the double standard that you and your campaign have enforced regarding a veteran’s right to openly express their feelings about your activities on return from Vietnam.
Sincerely,
Texas State Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson
Rep. Duke Cunningham
Rep. Duncan Hunter
Rep. Sam Johnson
Lt. General David Palmer
Robert O'Malley, Medal of Honor Recipient
James Fleming, Medal of Honor Recipient
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Castle (Ret.)
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004 ... 2555.shtml
Wednesday, Aug. 25, 2004
Cleland's Publicity Stunt Flops
Trying again to divert attention from his repeated refusal to leash his multimillion-dollar 527 attack dogs, Sen. John Kerry sent chum Max Cleland to Crawford, Texas, to hand President Bush a letter attacking Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. But the Georgia Democrat never made it past the Secret Service.
Cleland, who became a triple amputee in Vietnam when he picked up a live American grenade (and not in combat, as some media have reported), had a message from nine Senate Democrats who wrote that Bush had "a special duty" to condemn attacks on Kerry's military record.
Cleland, a former one-term senator from Georgia, claimed: "The question is where is George Bush's honor. The question is where is his shame to attack a fellow veteran who has distinguished himself in combat. Regardless of the political combat involved, it's disgraceful."
What's "disgraceful" is that the Democrats keep trying to pretend the president hasn't already denounced such attacks.
Too bad the president didn't give Cleland a message asking Kerry once more to stop his attacks.
----------------------------------------------------------------
That last line says a lot. Bush *did* try to give Cleland a message:
http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap2 ... _1460.html
A Texas state official and Vietnam veteran, Jerry Patterson, said someone from the Bush campaign contacted him Wednesday morning and asked him if he would travel to the ranch, welcome Cleland to Texas and accept the former senator's letter to Bush.
"I tried to accept that letter and he would not give it to me," said Patterson. "He would not face me. He kept rolling away from me. He's quite mobile."
Patterson, who spoke with the president on the phone, said the campaign asked him to give Cleland a letter for Kerry written by the Bush campaign and signed by Patterson and seven other veterans.
http://www.georgewbush.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=3364
August 25, 2004
Senator John Kerry
304 Russell Senate Office Building
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Senator Kerry,
We are pleased to welcome your campaign representatives to Texas today. We honor all our veterans, all whom have worn the uniform and served our country. We also honor the military and National Guard troops serving in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We are very proud of all of them and believe they deserve our full support.
That’s why so many veterans are troubled by your vote AGAINST funding for our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, after you voted FOR sending them into battle. And that’s why we are so concerned about the comments you made AFTER you came home from Vietnam. You accused your fellow veterans of terrible atrocities – and, to this day, you have never apologized. Even last night, you claimed to be proud of your post-war condemnation of our actions.
We’re proud of our service in Vietnam. We served honorably in Vietnam and we were deeply hurt and offended by your comments when you came home.
You can’t have it both ways. You can’t build your convention and much of your campaign around your service in Vietnam, and then try to say that only those veterans who agree with you have a right to speak up. There is no double standard for our right to free speech. We all earned it.
You said in 1992 “we do not need to divide America over who served and how.” Yet you and your surrogates continue to criticize President Bush for his service as a fighter pilot in the National Guard.
We are veterans too – and proud to support President Bush. He’s been a strong leader, with a record of outstanding support for our veterans and for our troops in combat. He’s made sure that our troops in combat have the equipment and support they need to accomplish their mission.
He has increased the VA health care budget more than 40% since 2001 – in fact, during his four years in office, President Bush has increased veterans funding twice as much as the previous administration did in eight years ($22 billion over 4 years compared to $10 billion over 8.) And he’s praised the service of all who served our country, including your service in Vietnam.
We urge you to condemn the double standard that you and your campaign have enforced regarding a veteran’s right to openly express their feelings about your activities on return from Vietnam.
Sincerely,
Texas State Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson
Rep. Duke Cunningham
Rep. Duncan Hunter
Rep. Sam Johnson
Lt. General David Palmer
Robert O'Malley, Medal of Honor Recipient
James Fleming, Medal of Honor Recipient
Lieutenant Colonel Richard Castle (Ret.)
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- Location: The Reality-Based Community
- Contact:
"I tried to accept that letter and he would not give it to me," said Patterson. "He would not face me. He kept rolling away from me. He's quite mobile."
I don't know why that's so damn funny.
Ryan
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
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- Posts: 4386
- Joined: Wed Apr 30, 2003 10:48 am
- Location: The Reality-Based Community
- Contact:
Swift boat memories
Eagle Point vet who was there backs Kerry’s assertion that bullets were flying the day he won two medals on a river in Vietnam
By PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune
Robert E. Lambert doesn’t plan to vote for John Kerry.
But the Eagle Point man challenges claims by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that there was no enemy fire aimed at the five swift boats, including the one commanded by Kerry, on March 13, 1969 on the Bay Hap River in the southern tip of what was then South Vietnam.
Lambert, now 64, was a crew member on swift boat PCF-51 that day. The boat was commanded by Navy Lt. Larry Thurlow, a now-retired officer who questions why Kerry was awarded a Bronze star for bravery and a third Purple Heart for the March 13 incident.
"He and another officer now say we weren’t under fire at that time," Lambert said Wednesday afternoon. "Well, I sure was under the impression we were."
Lambert’s Bronze Star medal citation for the incident praises his courage under fire in the aftermath of a mine explosion that rocked another swift boat on that day 35 years ago.
"Anytime you are blown out of the water like that, they always follow that up with small arms fire," he said.
Lambert contacted the Mail Tribune after reading a lengthy article from the Washington Post examining the controversy. That article, carried in the Tribune, indicated that Lambert was a witness to the event but declined to comment.
Although noting he was never contacted by the Post, Lambert stressed that he believes the swift boat controversy has no place in the presidential election.
"This is being blown out of proportion," he said. "It’s absolutely unnecessary and irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned. All of this is nothing but a distraction. It doesn’t have anything to do with what is going on today."
A registered independent, Lambert said the presidential debate ought to be on the future, not the past.
"They should be focused on our exit strategy from Iraq," he said.
Lambert does take issue with Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War once he returned to the states.
"That was absolutely reprehensible but, there again, I’m career military," said Lambert who retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer after 22 years of service.
Nor does he have much time for the debate over who wrote the medal citations. Thurlow says his citation for a Bronze Star, which states the boats were being fired upon, was based on an initial report written by Kerry.
Lambert doesn’t know who wrote the documents.
"They took what everybody said after they got in, piled it altogether and shipped it off and somebody wrote that, either at the division level, squadron level or commander of naval forces, Vietnam level," Lambert said. "They decided what kind of medal was going to be put on it.
"Mine was for pulling Lt. Thurlow out of the river while we were under fire," he said.
Lambert, whose stout arms sport tattoos he picked up in the Navy, was already an "old salt" by 1969. He had joined the Navy right after graduating in 1957 from high in Chino, Calif.
Altogether, he would serve three tours in Vietnam, including a year on a mine sweeper.
In 1969, he was on his second swift boat tour. Among his duties, he helped train the officers in charge of the swift boats. He did not train Kerry.
"When they brought a new crew into country, they broke the crew apart, put each man on a different boat," he said. "Even though I was only a petty officer first class, I trained the officer in charge. When we all decided the officer and crew was ready, we put them back together and gave them a boat."
Lambert has a photo album of swift boats, including several shots of Kerry’s PCF-94, although he doesn’t recall ever having met Kerry. One of his photographs of Kerry’s boat was taken on the morning of March 13, 1969, he added.
He flipped to a photograph of a bullet hole in the side of his swift boat — PCF-51.
"That’s the bullet hole they keep talking about that they got the day before in the 51 boat — that was my purple heart," he said, noting he was hit on the upper left arm.
"When those bullets hit that aluminum, it was like hitting glass," he added. "There was shrapnel everywhere."
His photographs include swift boats riddled from AK-47 rifle rounds and larger holes from rocket blasts.
Lambert said that while he disagrees with Thurlow over whether they were being fired at that day, he and the crew liked and respected him.
"He was an excellent officer," he said. "The man was absolutely professional all the way. I would have went anywhere with him, he was that good.
"But I can understand why Thurlow doesn’t like Kerry — these people did a year in Vietnam, not four months," he said later.
The five swift boats were operating off U.S. Coast Guard cutters farther out in the bay on March 13. The swift boats had dropped off a load of Chinese mercenaries and American Special Forces. The mission of the ground forces was to push the enemy out of the jungle and onto the beach, where the swift boat crews were ready to pounce with their .50-caliber machine guns and other weapons.
According to Kerry’s Bronze Star citation, he was awarded the medal for rescuing Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who had been blown off his swift boat. Rassmann, who lives in Florence, has repeatedly stated the boats were under fire.
"We were done with our OPs and on the way back out to sea," Lambert recalled. "We were exiting the river. Kerry’s boat went through, then the 43 boat."
Then PCF-3 hit a mine.
"The mine was right underneath it, just lifted it right out of the water," he said.
The six-member crew was stunned and shaken by the blast; the boat was running free.
"It was running wide open — we were all running wide open, trying to get out of there," he said.
But while PCF-3 was running at full throttle, there was no one at the helm.
Thurlow pulled his boat up along the PCF-3 boat and told Lambert to take control of the PCF-51 boat, Lambert said.
"Everybody was shooting back," he said. "After my boat officer (Thurlow) jumped on the 3 boat, he was looking at people (the crew). His boat hit a sandbar and he was knocked overboard. So we went in and got him out."
Lambert, who reached down to help Thurlow aboard, was awarded the Bronze Star for his "courage under fire," according to his citation.
"We went right back to the 3 boat and he (Thurlow) went back on the boat," he said. "We got the 3 boat off the sandbar, got a boat tied to each side of it and down the river we went."
Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com
Eagle Point vet who was there backs Kerry’s assertion that bullets were flying the day he won two medals on a river in Vietnam
By PAUL FATTIG
Mail Tribune
Robert E. Lambert doesn’t plan to vote for John Kerry.
But the Eagle Point man challenges claims by a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that there was no enemy fire aimed at the five swift boats, including the one commanded by Kerry, on March 13, 1969 on the Bay Hap River in the southern tip of what was then South Vietnam.
Lambert, now 64, was a crew member on swift boat PCF-51 that day. The boat was commanded by Navy Lt. Larry Thurlow, a now-retired officer who questions why Kerry was awarded a Bronze star for bravery and a third Purple Heart for the March 13 incident.
"He and another officer now say we weren’t under fire at that time," Lambert said Wednesday afternoon. "Well, I sure was under the impression we were."
Lambert’s Bronze Star medal citation for the incident praises his courage under fire in the aftermath of a mine explosion that rocked another swift boat on that day 35 years ago.
"Anytime you are blown out of the water like that, they always follow that up with small arms fire," he said.
Lambert contacted the Mail Tribune after reading a lengthy article from the Washington Post examining the controversy. That article, carried in the Tribune, indicated that Lambert was a witness to the event but declined to comment.
Although noting he was never contacted by the Post, Lambert stressed that he believes the swift boat controversy has no place in the presidential election.
"This is being blown out of proportion," he said. "It’s absolutely unnecessary and irrelevant, as far as I’m concerned. All of this is nothing but a distraction. It doesn’t have anything to do with what is going on today."
A registered independent, Lambert said the presidential debate ought to be on the future, not the past.
"They should be focused on our exit strategy from Iraq," he said.
Lambert does take issue with Kerry’s opposition to the Vietnam War once he returned to the states.
"That was absolutely reprehensible but, there again, I’m career military," said Lambert who retired from the Navy as a chief petty officer after 22 years of service.
Nor does he have much time for the debate over who wrote the medal citations. Thurlow says his citation for a Bronze Star, which states the boats were being fired upon, was based on an initial report written by Kerry.
Lambert doesn’t know who wrote the documents.
"They took what everybody said after they got in, piled it altogether and shipped it off and somebody wrote that, either at the division level, squadron level or commander of naval forces, Vietnam level," Lambert said. "They decided what kind of medal was going to be put on it.
"Mine was for pulling Lt. Thurlow out of the river while we were under fire," he said.
Lambert, whose stout arms sport tattoos he picked up in the Navy, was already an "old salt" by 1969. He had joined the Navy right after graduating in 1957 from high in Chino, Calif.
Altogether, he would serve three tours in Vietnam, including a year on a mine sweeper.
In 1969, he was on his second swift boat tour. Among his duties, he helped train the officers in charge of the swift boats. He did not train Kerry.
"When they brought a new crew into country, they broke the crew apart, put each man on a different boat," he said. "Even though I was only a petty officer first class, I trained the officer in charge. When we all decided the officer and crew was ready, we put them back together and gave them a boat."
Lambert has a photo album of swift boats, including several shots of Kerry’s PCF-94, although he doesn’t recall ever having met Kerry. One of his photographs of Kerry’s boat was taken on the morning of March 13, 1969, he added.
He flipped to a photograph of a bullet hole in the side of his swift boat — PCF-51.
"That’s the bullet hole they keep talking about that they got the day before in the 51 boat — that was my purple heart," he said, noting he was hit on the upper left arm.
"When those bullets hit that aluminum, it was like hitting glass," he added. "There was shrapnel everywhere."
His photographs include swift boats riddled from AK-47 rifle rounds and larger holes from rocket blasts.
Lambert said that while he disagrees with Thurlow over whether they were being fired at that day, he and the crew liked and respected him.
"He was an excellent officer," he said. "The man was absolutely professional all the way. I would have went anywhere with him, he was that good.
"But I can understand why Thurlow doesn’t like Kerry — these people did a year in Vietnam, not four months," he said later.
The five swift boats were operating off U.S. Coast Guard cutters farther out in the bay on March 13. The swift boats had dropped off a load of Chinese mercenaries and American Special Forces. The mission of the ground forces was to push the enemy out of the jungle and onto the beach, where the swift boat crews were ready to pounce with their .50-caliber machine guns and other weapons.
According to Kerry’s Bronze Star citation, he was awarded the medal for rescuing Special Forces officer Jim Rassmann, who had been blown off his swift boat. Rassmann, who lives in Florence, has repeatedly stated the boats were under fire.
"We were done with our OPs and on the way back out to sea," Lambert recalled. "We were exiting the river. Kerry’s boat went through, then the 43 boat."
Then PCF-3 hit a mine.
"The mine was right underneath it, just lifted it right out of the water," he said.
The six-member crew was stunned and shaken by the blast; the boat was running free.
"It was running wide open — we were all running wide open, trying to get out of there," he said.
But while PCF-3 was running at full throttle, there was no one at the helm.
Thurlow pulled his boat up along the PCF-3 boat and told Lambert to take control of the PCF-51 boat, Lambert said.
"Everybody was shooting back," he said. "After my boat officer (Thurlow) jumped on the 3 boat, he was looking at people (the crew). His boat hit a sandbar and he was knocked overboard. So we went in and got him out."
Lambert, who reached down to help Thurlow aboard, was awarded the Bronze Star for his "courage under fire," according to his citation.
"We went right back to the 3 boat and he (Thurlow) went back on the boat," he said. "We got the 3 boat off the sandbar, got a boat tied to each side of it and down the river we went."
Reach reporter Paul Fattig at 776-4496 or e-mail him at pfattig@mailtribune.com
RQOTW: "I'll make sure that our future is defined not by the letters ACLU, but by the letters USA." -- Mitt Romney
-
Matt
- Posts: 539
- Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2003 11:24 pm
- What color are leaves?: Green
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- Location: People's Republic of Maryland
http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2004/col20040824.asp
John Kerry’s Soldier-Smearing
by L. Brent Bozell III
August 24, 2004
It’s late August and someone in America decided it’s time to scrutinize John Kerry’s life story on television. For a week in Boston, John F. Kerry wrapped himself around a war effort he had spent decades denouncing, and Dan, Peter, and Tom sat around and nodded. No one even considered the possibility that Kerry could be – should be – challenged on any point of his self-serving history.
Then the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came along and shattered that mythology. Without their TV ads, the pro-Kerry media would have spent the entire election year with their collective fingers in their ears avoiding any criticism about the life story of the man who would be president.
While reporters breathlessly pass on the Kerry protests that he’s the victim of an unproven "smear," from January to August, and on a smaller scale stretching back to the Vietnam War itself, our "prestige press" has been spreading around John Kerry’s unsubstantiated war-hero stories without any troublesome fact-checking, or even a simple request to Kerry for confirmation. John Kerry has refused to release his records, refused to debate his fellow veterans, and refused to ask his personal biographer Doug Brinkley to release his vaunted wartime journals, and yet nobody in the liberal "news" media cares.
Now in a second ad, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have raised the issue of John Kerry’s scabrous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. If you rely on the conventional news media, you are unfamiliar with this testimony, except, perhaps, for the often-quoted Kerry line, "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
That’s gripping rhetoric, but not the substance of the smear. The meat of the testimony, as featured in the new Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, is when young Kerry starts repeating the claims of alleged fellow veterans that "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies [sic], randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside" of South Vietnam.
He did not excuse his Swift Boat brothers in his declaration of collective military guilt: "We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them."
How many times have our most "reliable" hard news outlets passed along this passage of monstrous American evil that so inflames the veterans against John Kerry? A Nexis search reveals a list of some of the national outlets that had never relayed a quote of these words before the second Swift Vet ad was released: CBS, NBC, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Here are the major newspapers who’ve captured this testimony exactly once: The Washington Post and The New York Times, buried inside their papers on Saturdays in late February. ABC repeated one snippet of the paragraph, the "Genghis Khan" snippet, in four stories surrounding the anniversary of the testimony in April. Kerry said then: "I’m sorry that they’re offended by that, but that’s what happened."
Liberal reporters must wonder why they should have to focus on this paragraph. To them, there was nothing outrageous in asserting in 1971 that we were there to kill communism, but "we found instead that we were killing women and children." Or that America’s achievement in Vietnam to that date was creating "a nation of refugees, bomb craters, amputees, orphans, widows and prostitutes." (Those lines are from Kerry, too, from his book "The New Soldier.")
Reporters are supposed to be our best and brightest creators of the first draft of history, but it somehow befuddles them that Vietnam veterans take this wild testimony about daily commander-sanctioned atrocities by U.S. fighting men as a dramatic smear on their reputations.
One would think that newspaper men and women, more than anyone else, would be skeptical of unverified allegations, especially, as the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi acknowledged in February, when "many of the alleged atrocities have never been verified, and some have been disproved." Why has Kerry not been pressed on the veracity of his own testimony?
The sad thing is that young Kerry was completely celebrated at that time by the "objective" news media, including a laudatory profile on "60 Minutes" asking if he would be president some day. Did no one care about the veracity of these scattershot smears, or did the press just despise the war so much that any lie that hastened its end was a good lie? Is that good lie the only thing that matters to our media today?
John Kerry’s Soldier-Smearing
by L. Brent Bozell III
August 24, 2004
It’s late August and someone in America decided it’s time to scrutinize John Kerry’s life story on television. For a week in Boston, John F. Kerry wrapped himself around a war effort he had spent decades denouncing, and Dan, Peter, and Tom sat around and nodded. No one even considered the possibility that Kerry could be – should be – challenged on any point of his self-serving history.
Then the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth came along and shattered that mythology. Without their TV ads, the pro-Kerry media would have spent the entire election year with their collective fingers in their ears avoiding any criticism about the life story of the man who would be president.
While reporters breathlessly pass on the Kerry protests that he’s the victim of an unproven "smear," from January to August, and on a smaller scale stretching back to the Vietnam War itself, our "prestige press" has been spreading around John Kerry’s unsubstantiated war-hero stories without any troublesome fact-checking, or even a simple request to Kerry for confirmation. John Kerry has refused to release his records, refused to debate his fellow veterans, and refused to ask his personal biographer Doug Brinkley to release his vaunted wartime journals, and yet nobody in the liberal "news" media cares.
Now in a second ad, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have raised the issue of John Kerry’s scabrous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. If you rely on the conventional news media, you are unfamiliar with this testimony, except, perhaps, for the often-quoted Kerry line, "How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
That’s gripping rhetoric, but not the substance of the smear. The meat of the testimony, as featured in the new Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ad, is when young Kerry starts repeating the claims of alleged fellow veterans that "on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command," American soldiers "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies [sic], randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside" of South Vietnam.
He did not excuse his Swift Boat brothers in his declaration of collective military guilt: "We rationalized destroying villages in order to save them."
How many times have our most "reliable" hard news outlets passed along this passage of monstrous American evil that so inflames the veterans against John Kerry? A Nexis search reveals a list of some of the national outlets that had never relayed a quote of these words before the second Swift Vet ad was released: CBS, NBC, National Public Radio, Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, the Los Angeles Times, and USA Today. Here are the major newspapers who’ve captured this testimony exactly once: The Washington Post and The New York Times, buried inside their papers on Saturdays in late February. ABC repeated one snippet of the paragraph, the "Genghis Khan" snippet, in four stories surrounding the anniversary of the testimony in April. Kerry said then: "I’m sorry that they’re offended by that, but that’s what happened."
Liberal reporters must wonder why they should have to focus on this paragraph. To them, there was nothing outrageous in asserting in 1971 that we were there to kill communism, but "we found instead that we were killing women and children." Or that America’s achievement in Vietnam to that date was creating "a nation of refugees, bomb craters, amputees, orphans, widows and prostitutes." (Those lines are from Kerry, too, from his book "The New Soldier.")
Reporters are supposed to be our best and brightest creators of the first draft of history, but it somehow befuddles them that Vietnam veterans take this wild testimony about daily commander-sanctioned atrocities by U.S. fighting men as a dramatic smear on their reputations.
One would think that newspaper men and women, more than anyone else, would be skeptical of unverified allegations, especially, as the Washington Post’s Paul Farhi acknowledged in February, when "many of the alleged atrocities have never been verified, and some have been disproved." Why has Kerry not been pressed on the veracity of his own testimony?
The sad thing is that young Kerry was completely celebrated at that time by the "objective" news media, including a laudatory profile on "60 Minutes" asking if he would be president some day. Did no one care about the veracity of these scattershot smears, or did the press just despise the war so much that any lie that hastened its end was a good lie? Is that good lie the only thing that matters to our media today?
-Matt
-
lukpac
- Top Dog and Sellout
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- Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:51 pm
- Location: Madison, WI
- Contact:
I guess Matt got his account back...
What's This Battle About, Anyway?
Like Kerry, We're Still Conflicted Over Vietnam
By Derek N. Buckaloo and James T. Campbell
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page B01
Back in 1991, a president named George Bush basked in a quick, low-cost victory in Iraq and declared, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." Yet here we are, 13 years later, with another George Bush in the White House and U.S. troops back in Iraq, engaged in another debate about the history and legacy of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam has long shadowed American presidential elections, going all the way back to 1968, when a burgeoning antiwar movement drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House. Yet in no previous race has Vietnam played such a curious role as in this one. With a host of domestic and international crises clamoring for attention, the current campaign seems to turn -- for the moment, at least -- on what the two candidates did or did not do more than 30 years ago.
The reasons for Vietnam's current salience are not difficult to discern. Notwithstanding George W. Bush's much-ballyhooed "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing more than a year ago, U.S. soldiers continue to fight and die in Iraq (and on the largely forgotten battlefields of Afghanistan), conjuring up images of Vietnam-like quagmires. As in Vietnam, the stated rationale for the Iraq war has turned out to be wrong. But the most important reason is simply Sen. John Kerry, a man whose own conflicted relationship with Vietnam, first as a decorated combat soldier and later as an antiwar activist, embodies the nation's still unresolved feelings about that war.
Kerry himself has made his status as a Vietnam vet the cornerstone of his candidacy. From the first sentence of his convention speech ("I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty.") to his frequent appearances with his Navy crewmates, he has wrapped himself in the camouflage cloth of 1969 rather than the senatorial suits he has worn since the mid-1980s. Perhaps his strategy will succeed. But Kerry should hardly be surprised that his Vietnam gambit has torn open old wounds.
In the current partisan climate, it is easy to forget that, when it began, Vietnam was a consensus war, prosecuted by presidents of both major parties, with broad, bipartisan congressional support. If Republicans and Democrats today tend to see the conflict differently, it has less to do with the actual historical record than with the different postures each party adopted in the aftermath of the conflict -- postures symbolized by two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Carter's rise from political obscurity to Democratic Party nominee began just months after the last helicopter had risen from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. His road to the White House was largely propelled by popular disillusionment with the war. As a candidate and later as president, Carter stressed two lessons from the Vietnam experience. The first was the importance of living up to the nation's own principles and values in the conduct of foreign affairs. The best insurance against future Vietnams, he told voters, was enacting "a foreign policy that reflects the decency and generosity and common sense of our own people." The second was the need to acknowledge "limits" -- to recognize that the United States, as powerful as it was, could not simply shape the world to its will.
Carter's combination of idealism and restraint resonated with voters still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, but three years later, in the face of the seizure of 52 American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter's approach came to seem like a policy of abject weakness and surrender. Reagan swept into office in 1980 as the anti-Carter, offering manly strength in place of hesitancy, moral clarity in place of relativism and an utter repudiation of Carter's emphasis on limits. America's "best days are in front of her," Reagan assured voters; it was still "morning in America." (In his convention speech last month, Kerry lifted both those lines, a testament to the greater political appeal, if not the greater wisdom, of Reagan's vision over Carter's.)
Not coincidentally, Reagan offered a radically different understanding of Vietnam, portraying the war as "a noble cause" that could and should have been won. While others spoke of imperial overreach or a traducing of American principles, Reagan spoke of a failure of will, even of betrayal. Tapping into a well-established populist vein, he asserted that American soldiers had been stabbed in the back by "bureaucrats," weak-willed politicians and, most importantly, by an irresponsible antiwar movement spearheaded by hippies and spoiled college students. The implication, as inescapable as it was historically inaccurate, was that the war had been lost by the Democrats and their followers.
In the years since Reagan, Republican leaders have hewed to this same line, portraying themselves as the party of strength and steely resolve and the Democrats as weak, irresolute, incapable of guarding the nation's security. Democrats who have attempted to rebut such allegations have been largely ineffectual and at times comical. (Who can forget the image of a helmeted Michael Dukakis at the controls of a tank?) At best, such efforts play into Republican hands, lending credence to the notion that strength in the international arena is chiefly a function of force of will and demonstrations of "toughness." As recent events have shown, this can be a dangerously naïve belief.
In nominating a decorated combat veteran as their candidate, Democrats clearly hoped to claim the high ground on the Vietnam question. Like President Bush, with whom he overlapped at Yale, Kerry could easily have avoided service in Vietnam, but he volunteered and served with distinction. While Kerry later opposed the war, he did so not as a "hippie" or "draft dodger" but as a soldier who had fought and bled for his country. In both incarnations, he offered a stark contrast to Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and other administration "chickenhawks" -- tough talkers on defense issues who contrived to avoid serving in Vietnam themselves.
The Republican response to Kerry's candidacy has been predictable in direction, if quite shocking in its shamelessness. While Bush himself has professed to "honor" his opponent's service, Republican proxies such as the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" have attacked it, offering a variety of unsubstantiated or false claims about Kerry's military service. In contrast to the 1988 Dukakis campaign, which endured weeks of "Willie Horton" advertisements before mounting an effective response, Kerry and his campaign appear to have repelled the attack, a task made easier by a series of media reports exposing the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the charges, as well as the group's intimate relationship with Republican Party officials and donors. But in the days that the story ran, it certainly damaged Kerry, sowing niggling doubts about his wartime record.
At the same time as they seek to tarnish Kerry's military service, Bush supporters have highlighted his antiwar activities, casting him as a kind of Hanoi Jane. What did Kerry mean when, in the Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971, he accused American soldiers of committing "atrocities" against Vietnam civilians? What exactly did Kerry throw over the White House fence -- his medals or merely the ribbons -- during Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests? How could a loyal soldier speak out against the war when his comrades remained in the field? Former GOP senator Bob Dole, on a recent talk show, even went so far as to suggest that Kerry owes his fellow soldiers an apology for dishonoring his military decorations and making irresponsible accusations about atrocities.
Recent history suggests large returns from such attacks. But they are also fraught with peril. Whatever the facts of Kerry's military record, at least he has a record, unlike Bush, who apparently used family influence to secure a billet in the Texas National Guard. The problem is compounded by the unexplained gaps in Bush's service record. While the allegedly "accidental" destruction of Pentagon records may preclude any definitive accounting, the impression lingers that Bush was AWOL during some portion of his final year in the Guard. The White House's recent release of records of an Alabama dental examination in order to prove that Bush fulfilled his obligation did little to dispel the issue. (Over the years, Americans have grown accustomed to the grim use of dental records to identify soldiers missing in action in Vietnam, but this was surely the first time such records were used to establish the whereabouts of someone living in the White House.)
The Democratic strategy is equally clear, and equally rife with irony and peril: ignore Kerry's antiwar opposition and emphasize his military valor, implicitly contrasting his sense of duty with Bush's ersatz patriotism. While numerous speakers at the Democratic convention expressed opposition to the current military adventure in Iraq, they steered clear of the candidate's opposition to the earlier adventure in Vietnam. Kerry's own speech was a strangely incongruous affair, offering his experience in Vietnam as his most important qualification for the presidency and yet sedulously avoiding any discussion of what the experience meant to him or of any lessons he learned that might be relevant today.
At first glance, it seems a prudent strategy, especially in a campaign whose outcome (the conventional wisdom tells us) will be decided by "swing" voters in a few blue-collar states. But several liabilities of this approach are already apparent. Most obviously, it opened the door to brutal cross-examination from the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" group. More broadly, the Democrats' strategy essentially ratifies the post-Reagan Republican orthodoxy on Vietnam, which contrasts the courage of soldiers on the battlefield with the timidity and treachery of antiwar protesters at home. Such an argument not only distorts history, but it does a real disservice to Kerry himself, whose public opposition to that war may represent the most politically courageous act of his career.
The Democrats' approach also makes it virtually impossible for Kerry to articulate any credible critique of the current morass in Iraq, a conflict in which the confusion of American war aims and the loss of American international prestige do indeed evoke echoes of Vietnam. Having cast himself as the loyal soldier -- and having dutifully voted for the October 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein -- Kerry is now hard-pressed to attack Bush's failings in Iraq. Any criticism is immediately greeted by Republican charges of "waffling," of flip-flopping in pursuit of political advantage.
Kerry has yet to find a way out of this Republican box. Each new distinction he offers -- about the failure of American intelligence, the flouting of allies, the astonishing absence of any plans for winning the peace -- is dismissed by Republicans as yet another "nuance" from a politician who paints the world in endless shades of gray.
The irony in all this is that much of what John Kerry said in his brief career as a war protester was palpably true. American soldiers were placed in an impossible position in Vietnam, defending the "freedom" of people who often regarded them as occupiers rather than liberators. Young Americans continued to be dispatched to Vietnam and to die there long after the folly of U.S. policy was apparent to leaders of both parties, demonstrating, for neither the first nor the last time, that wars can be easier to enter than to exit. Whether any of these truths are pertinent to the current situation is an open question, but neither party is willing to risk that debate. And if the Democrats won't risk it now, with a medal-laden veteran as their candidate, one wonders if they ever will.
Authors' email:dbuckalo@coe.edu
james_t_campbell@brown.edu
Derek Buckaloo is an assistant professor of history at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. James Campbell is an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown University.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
What's This Battle About, Anyway?
Like Kerry, We're Still Conflicted Over Vietnam
By Derek N. Buckaloo and James T. Campbell
Sunday, August 29, 2004; Page B01
Back in 1991, a president named George Bush basked in a quick, low-cost victory in Iraq and declared, "By God, we've kicked the Vietnam syndrome once and for all." Yet here we are, 13 years later, with another George Bush in the White House and U.S. troops back in Iraq, engaged in another debate about the history and legacy of the Vietnam War.
Vietnam has long shadowed American presidential elections, going all the way back to 1968, when a burgeoning antiwar movement drove Lyndon Johnson from the White House. Yet in no previous race has Vietnam played such a curious role as in this one. With a host of domestic and international crises clamoring for attention, the current campaign seems to turn -- for the moment, at least -- on what the two candidates did or did not do more than 30 years ago.
The reasons for Vietnam's current salience are not difficult to discern. Notwithstanding George W. Bush's much-ballyhooed "Mission Accomplished" aircraft carrier landing more than a year ago, U.S. soldiers continue to fight and die in Iraq (and on the largely forgotten battlefields of Afghanistan), conjuring up images of Vietnam-like quagmires. As in Vietnam, the stated rationale for the Iraq war has turned out to be wrong. But the most important reason is simply Sen. John Kerry, a man whose own conflicted relationship with Vietnam, first as a decorated combat soldier and later as an antiwar activist, embodies the nation's still unresolved feelings about that war.
Kerry himself has made his status as a Vietnam vet the cornerstone of his candidacy. From the first sentence of his convention speech ("I'm John Kerry, reporting for duty.") to his frequent appearances with his Navy crewmates, he has wrapped himself in the camouflage cloth of 1969 rather than the senatorial suits he has worn since the mid-1980s. Perhaps his strategy will succeed. But Kerry should hardly be surprised that his Vietnam gambit has torn open old wounds.
In the current partisan climate, it is easy to forget that, when it began, Vietnam was a consensus war, prosecuted by presidents of both major parties, with broad, bipartisan congressional support. If Republicans and Democrats today tend to see the conflict differently, it has less to do with the actual historical record than with the different postures each party adopted in the aftermath of the conflict -- postures symbolized by two former presidents, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan.
Carter's rise from political obscurity to Democratic Party nominee began just months after the last helicopter had risen from the roof of the American embassy in Saigon. His road to the White House was largely propelled by popular disillusionment with the war. As a candidate and later as president, Carter stressed two lessons from the Vietnam experience. The first was the importance of living up to the nation's own principles and values in the conduct of foreign affairs. The best insurance against future Vietnams, he told voters, was enacting "a foreign policy that reflects the decency and generosity and common sense of our own people." The second was the need to acknowledge "limits" -- to recognize that the United States, as powerful as it was, could not simply shape the world to its will.
Carter's combination of idealism and restraint resonated with voters still reeling from Vietnam and Watergate, but three years later, in the face of the seizure of 52 American hostages in Iran and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, Carter's approach came to seem like a policy of abject weakness and surrender. Reagan swept into office in 1980 as the anti-Carter, offering manly strength in place of hesitancy, moral clarity in place of relativism and an utter repudiation of Carter's emphasis on limits. America's "best days are in front of her," Reagan assured voters; it was still "morning in America." (In his convention speech last month, Kerry lifted both those lines, a testament to the greater political appeal, if not the greater wisdom, of Reagan's vision over Carter's.)
Not coincidentally, Reagan offered a radically different understanding of Vietnam, portraying the war as "a noble cause" that could and should have been won. While others spoke of imperial overreach or a traducing of American principles, Reagan spoke of a failure of will, even of betrayal. Tapping into a well-established populist vein, he asserted that American soldiers had been stabbed in the back by "bureaucrats," weak-willed politicians and, most importantly, by an irresponsible antiwar movement spearheaded by hippies and spoiled college students. The implication, as inescapable as it was historically inaccurate, was that the war had been lost by the Democrats and their followers.
In the years since Reagan, Republican leaders have hewed to this same line, portraying themselves as the party of strength and steely resolve and the Democrats as weak, irresolute, incapable of guarding the nation's security. Democrats who have attempted to rebut such allegations have been largely ineffectual and at times comical. (Who can forget the image of a helmeted Michael Dukakis at the controls of a tank?) At best, such efforts play into Republican hands, lending credence to the notion that strength in the international arena is chiefly a function of force of will and demonstrations of "toughness." As recent events have shown, this can be a dangerously naïve belief.
In nominating a decorated combat veteran as their candidate, Democrats clearly hoped to claim the high ground on the Vietnam question. Like President Bush, with whom he overlapped at Yale, Kerry could easily have avoided service in Vietnam, but he volunteered and served with distinction. While Kerry later opposed the war, he did so not as a "hippie" or "draft dodger" but as a soldier who had fought and bled for his country. In both incarnations, he offered a stark contrast to Bush, Dick Cheney, John Ashcroft, Paul Wolfowitz and other administration "chickenhawks" -- tough talkers on defense issues who contrived to avoid serving in Vietnam themselves.
The Republican response to Kerry's candidacy has been predictable in direction, if quite shocking in its shamelessness. While Bush himself has professed to "honor" his opponent's service, Republican proxies such as the so-called "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" have attacked it, offering a variety of unsubstantiated or false claims about Kerry's military service. In contrast to the 1988 Dukakis campaign, which endured weeks of "Willie Horton" advertisements before mounting an effective response, Kerry and his campaign appear to have repelled the attack, a task made easier by a series of media reports exposing the inconsistencies and inaccuracies in the charges, as well as the group's intimate relationship with Republican Party officials and donors. But in the days that the story ran, it certainly damaged Kerry, sowing niggling doubts about his wartime record.
At the same time as they seek to tarnish Kerry's military service, Bush supporters have highlighted his antiwar activities, casting him as a kind of Hanoi Jane. What did Kerry mean when, in the Winter Soldier Investigation of 1971, he accused American soldiers of committing "atrocities" against Vietnam civilians? What exactly did Kerry throw over the White House fence -- his medals or merely the ribbons -- during Vietnam Veterans Against the War protests? How could a loyal soldier speak out against the war when his comrades remained in the field? Former GOP senator Bob Dole, on a recent talk show, even went so far as to suggest that Kerry owes his fellow soldiers an apology for dishonoring his military decorations and making irresponsible accusations about atrocities.
Recent history suggests large returns from such attacks. But they are also fraught with peril. Whatever the facts of Kerry's military record, at least he has a record, unlike Bush, who apparently used family influence to secure a billet in the Texas National Guard. The problem is compounded by the unexplained gaps in Bush's service record. While the allegedly "accidental" destruction of Pentagon records may preclude any definitive accounting, the impression lingers that Bush was AWOL during some portion of his final year in the Guard. The White House's recent release of records of an Alabama dental examination in order to prove that Bush fulfilled his obligation did little to dispel the issue. (Over the years, Americans have grown accustomed to the grim use of dental records to identify soldiers missing in action in Vietnam, but this was surely the first time such records were used to establish the whereabouts of someone living in the White House.)
The Democratic strategy is equally clear, and equally rife with irony and peril: ignore Kerry's antiwar opposition and emphasize his military valor, implicitly contrasting his sense of duty with Bush's ersatz patriotism. While numerous speakers at the Democratic convention expressed opposition to the current military adventure in Iraq, they steered clear of the candidate's opposition to the earlier adventure in Vietnam. Kerry's own speech was a strangely incongruous affair, offering his experience in Vietnam as his most important qualification for the presidency and yet sedulously avoiding any discussion of what the experience meant to him or of any lessons he learned that might be relevant today.
At first glance, it seems a prudent strategy, especially in a campaign whose outcome (the conventional wisdom tells us) will be decided by "swing" voters in a few blue-collar states. But several liabilities of this approach are already apparent. Most obviously, it opened the door to brutal cross-examination from the "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" group. More broadly, the Democrats' strategy essentially ratifies the post-Reagan Republican orthodoxy on Vietnam, which contrasts the courage of soldiers on the battlefield with the timidity and treachery of antiwar protesters at home. Such an argument not only distorts history, but it does a real disservice to Kerry himself, whose public opposition to that war may represent the most politically courageous act of his career.
The Democrats' approach also makes it virtually impossible for Kerry to articulate any credible critique of the current morass in Iraq, a conflict in which the confusion of American war aims and the loss of American international prestige do indeed evoke echoes of Vietnam. Having cast himself as the loyal soldier -- and having dutifully voted for the October 2002 resolution authorizing the use of force against Saddam Hussein -- Kerry is now hard-pressed to attack Bush's failings in Iraq. Any criticism is immediately greeted by Republican charges of "waffling," of flip-flopping in pursuit of political advantage.
Kerry has yet to find a way out of this Republican box. Each new distinction he offers -- about the failure of American intelligence, the flouting of allies, the astonishing absence of any plans for winning the peace -- is dismissed by Republicans as yet another "nuance" from a politician who paints the world in endless shades of gray.
The irony in all this is that much of what John Kerry said in his brief career as a war protester was palpably true. American soldiers were placed in an impossible position in Vietnam, defending the "freedom" of people who often regarded them as occupiers rather than liberators. Young Americans continued to be dispatched to Vietnam and to die there long after the folly of U.S. policy was apparent to leaders of both parties, demonstrating, for neither the first nor the last time, that wars can be easier to enter than to exit. Whether any of these truths are pertinent to the current situation is an open question, but neither party is willing to risk that debate. And if the Democrats won't risk it now, with a medal-laden veteran as their candidate, one wonders if they ever will.
Authors' email:dbuckalo@coe.edu
james_t_campbell@brown.edu
Derek Buckaloo is an assistant professor of history at Coe College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. James Campbell is an associate professor of American Civilization, Africana Studies and History at Brown University.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
lukpac wrote:Tapping into a well-established populist vein, he asserted that American soldiers had been stabbed in the back by "bureaucrats," weak-willed politicians and, most importantly, by an irresponsible antiwar movement spearheaded by hippies and spoiled college students. The implication, as inescapable as it was historically inaccurate, was that the war had been lost by the Democrats and their followers.
Bolding mine.
America Votes | A new anti-Kerry ad may strike chord with conservatives.
By Dick Polman
Inquirer Staff Writer
When John Kerry accepted the Democratic presidential nomination 26 days ago, jauntily saluting his Vietnam vet buddies on a stage festooned with American flags, he chose not to mention his role in the antiwar movement that had angered so many comrades.
So his enemies in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have decided to fill in that biographical gap, in an effort to turn the election of 2004 into a replay of 1971. By doing so, they might provide a valuable service to the Bush campaign, which is seeking to strip Kerry of his patriotic imprimatur.
The anti-Kerry vets - bankrolled by Texas Republican Bob Perry (a donor cultivated during the '90s by Bush strategist Karl Rove) - are entering phase two. Until now, they have argued that Kerry isn't really a war hero, that he didn't deserve his medals. Now, with a new TV ad, they're trying to paint Kerry as a long-haired youth, spouting incendiary remarks in grainy black and white.
The ad is expected to be aired in several key states starting today - including central Pennsylvania - despite President Bush's request yesterday that the "Swifties" cease and desist (although he didn't knock their ad content). And the small ad buy actually understates its potential impact, because the political TV shows will continue to air it and discuss it as a news item.
Whether undecided swing voters in key states will spurn Kerry because he protested the Vietnam War is open to question - recent national polls generally show that most Americans today, by landslide margins, believe Vietnam was a mistake - but maybe this issue isn't aimed at those voters at all.
Maybe it's really aimed at galvanizing conservative voters.
The liberal base already hates Bush; potentially, Bush would benefit if the conservative base can be persuaded to hate Kerry. In a polarized nation, the 2004 race may well hinge on which side is more fired up.
John Zogby, an independent national pollster, said yesterday: "Even though most Americans now think Vietnam was wrong, this issue is red meat for the Bush base. The overwhelming majority of potential Bush supporters believe that Vietnam was the right thing to do. Refighting the Vietnam War goes directly to the Bush base's most visceral feelings about 'my country, right or wrong, and my president, right or wrong.' "
The new ad, which shows the young Kerry telling a Senate committee about alleged atrocities committed by U.S. troops, could strike a nerve among older, socially conservative voters - "people who still disdainfully remember the long-haired protesters," in the words of political analyst Stuart Rothenberg. And these folks vote heavily in a number of key states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, and Iowa.
"This issue is not just about what Kerry said in 1971," Rothenberg said yesterday. "The Vietnam War is a surrogate for all kinds of cultural divisions in society. War protests, drugs - all that '60s stuff, and the Republicans are very good at tapping into that as a way to mobilize conservatives."
It's also clear that the Kerry campaign is now taking this threat seriously, judging by the fact that it put ex-Kerry crewmate Del Sandusky on the Pennsylvania Turnpike yesterday, so he could denounce the Swifties in Philadelphia and Harrisburg, in advance of that new ad.
"John isn't necessarily worried," he said yesterday, barking into his cell phone on the turnpike. "It's just that these guys were doing all the talking, and all their talking was lies. John had wanted to run a clean campaign, but now he's decided that we have to take the safeties off our weapons."
So Sandusky fired back: "In their ad, they have taken everything out of context. When Kerry made his [Senate] statements about our soldiers cutting off ears, he was just telling the stories he had heard from other guys, at the hearing in Detroit," a reference to the soldiers who spoke about atrocities during an investigation sponsored by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Sandusky is correct, in the sense that Kerry's unexcerpted Senate statement makes it clear that he was relaying the Detroit testimony; in other words, he wasn't personally charging his comrades with war crimes, as the Swifties' TV ad clearly implies.
However, the full testimony also indicates that Kerry, by repeating those stories, was essentially vouching for them, because his larger purpose that day was to indict the war as "a mistake."
And that frames Kerry's current conundrum: How can he persuade skeptical voters that his stint as an antiwar activist is not inconsistent with his earlier stint as a warrior?
Sandusky took a stab at it: "It was such an unpopular war, and it was important that somebody who had fought in the war should come back and raise a voice against it. Somebody had to stand up and make America wake up. John did that, and... in the long run, his Senate speech will be seen as a turning point in our history."
Well, there was nothing like that in Kerry's acceptance speech. He tried to dispense with the events of 1971 during an appearance last April on Meet the Press (when he rebuked himself for have used words such as atrocities during his Senate testimony), but mostly he has studiously avoided framing his antiwar stint as an act of moral courage.
He has largely stayed silent on this chapter of his biography because, as several Democrats privately remarked yesterday, his advisers believe the antiwar era is still a hot button for too many voters, and selling protest as a virtue is therefore too risky - particularly in the first election after 9/11, when unreflective patriotism seems to be the best asset.
The problem for many restive Democrats, however, is that Kerry, by failing to spin his protests as a good thing, has potentially allowed the Swifties to fill the vacuum, and spin his protests as a bad thing. Maybe he can recoup on this issue, but the Swifties clearly have a head start in winning more conservative hearts and minds.
"So much of the time, Kerry has tried to finesse everything," said analyst Rothenberg. "At some point, you've got to stop walking a fine line. If your own message isn't compelling, somebody else's message will be."
Contact staff writer Dick Polman at 215-854-4430 or dpolman@phillynews.com.
-
lukpac
- Top Dog and Sellout
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- Joined: Wed Apr 02, 2003 11:51 pm
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Patrick M wrote:The problem for many restive Democrats, however, is that Kerry, by failing to spin his protests as a good thing, has potentially allowed the Swifties to fill the vacuum, and spin his protests as a bad thing. Maybe he can recoup on this issue, but the Swifties clearly have a head start in winning more conservative hearts and minds.
"So much of the time, Kerry has tried to finesse everything," said analyst Rothenberg. "At some point, you've got to stop walking a fine line. If your own message isn't compelling, somebody else's message will be."
Bingo.
We just got a flyer from GWB to be sure to vote. One of the "Kerry is bad" statements was a quote saying "I'm liberal and proud of it." Why should anyone think that's a *bad* thing? When did "liberal" become a 4 letter word?
Michael Moore had 5 tips for Kerry in the latest Rolling Stone:
Michael Moore wrote:1. Show some spine. Kerry needs to realize the majority of Americans who've suffered under Bush's economic plan or have seen their sons and daughters go to war are already with him. Don't break faith; don't be afraid to say things that need to be said. Being a wimp or trying to straddle the fence is a sure recipe for defeat.
2. Come out against the war. You have the luxury of being with the majority of Americans on this issue. You supported the war in the beginning, and now you no longer do. You need to display leadership here and say that people of good heart and good conscience can change their minds.
3. Do not move toward the center. People who are leaning toward Bush already have a candidate: George W. Bush. Why would they go with an imitation version when they can get the real thing with Bush? Do not make the mistake that Al Gore made in 2000, where during the second debate he agreed with Bush thirty-nine times.
4. Forget the undecided voters. Win over the nonvoters. Undecided voters made up only five percent of the electorate. You should concentrate on the fifty percent of the public that doesn't vote. These people are not the wealthy and the elite. You need to inspire them to come out on Election Day. If you pull your punches and speak in abstract sentences, it will just be that much more work for the rest of us to make sure you don't lose.
5. Don't count on Bush to lose it for you. It would be easy for you to sit back and let George Bush do all your work. In part, you're right: He has created a lot of people who will vote for you, but they're not necessarily the ones who'll be energized and committed. Just being smarter than George W. Bush does not necessarily win a debate. Ask Al Gore about that. Don't get hung up on nuance. Ask questions that go to the heart of the matter: "Would you, Mr. President, send your two daughters to fight in Fallujah? If Jenna and Barbara had died there, would America be a safer place?"
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
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lukpac
- Top Dog and Sellout
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Sunday, Aug. 29, 2004
What the Swifties Cost Us
Campaign 2004 gets mired in the Mekong Delta
By JOE KLEIN
On the day that the swift boat controversy reached a rabid apogee—that would be the day a Bush campaign lawyer resigned because of his ties to the Swifties, and Max Cleland made the stagy delivery of a protest letter to the Bush ranch—a woman named Elba Nieves stood at a town meeting in Philadelphia and told John Kerry that she had recently been laid off. The candidate proceeded to ask her a series of questions. She answered with quiet dignity. She had worked in a ribbon factory for four years. She said the company was having trouble keeping up with foreign competitors and was forced to close when it was refused a new bank loan. She was given no notice of termination, no severance package. Her shift—about 300 people—was simply called together at the end of a workday and dismissed. "They were changing the locks even before we left," she added. The audience, composed mostly of trade unionists, gasped and groaned.
I called Nieves the next day to check the details of her story, and, as it happened, there were some complicating factors. First, she admitted that her question had been precooked—her union had asked her to come to the event and tell the story. Kerry turned to Nieves immediately; her question was the first. This, in itself, isn't a terrible thing: George Bush constantly manages to "find" small-business people at his town meetings whose companies are booming because of his tax cuts. But Nieves went on to tell me that she recently had been called back to work at the ribbon factory and refused to return, on the advice of her union, because the company wouldn't continue her health insurance. Hmm, I thought: If I were a coldhearted political operative, I could get some rich friends to finance a group of Nieves' fellow employees—perhaps those who had returned to work without health insurance—call them Ribbon Workers for Truth and make this poor woman's life a trial. (As it is, I've acted as a Not-So-Swift Columnist for Truth by revealing some of the more problematic details of her story.) Ribbon Workers for Truth would be a nasty bit of business. It would purposely elide the most important fact—the larger truth—of Nieves' story: that she was laid off, and in a particularly brutal way. As she left the factory on Aug. 4, she had no idea how she would support her three children. She still doesn't know. And the uncertainty of her fate is a question with enormous political ramifications: What do we, as a nation, do about the downside of economic globalization? In fact, the real reason why Ribbon Workers for Truth would exist would be to divert attention from that question. The Ribbies would also turn Nieves' refusal to return to work without a health plan into a "character" issue—and thus evade the essential ridiculousness of a health-insurance system that would usually provide Nieves care (through Medicaid) if she were on welfare but doesn't if she is working a full-time job for an employer without a health plan.
But we're not talking only about Elba Nieves here, are we? Now that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have turned out to be anything but—the only "lies" they've turned up are a mistaken date or a mild Kerry exaggeration about operating in Cambodia and a Purple Heart received for a minor wound—we are told their real gripe is that Kerry protested the war after he came home and sullied their service by testifying to atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam.
These are heartfelt gripes, perhaps, but wrong on the merits. Kerry's protest was not only honorable, it was accurate. The war in Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster, entered into under false pretenses—the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident—and fought because of a mistaken intellectual theory: that the Vietnamese national liberation movement was part of an international communist conspiracy to overwhelm Asia. (The subsequent war between Vietnam and China put a crimp in that one.) And, yes, there were atrocities aplenty. I spent three years in the 1980s writing about a platoon of former Marines, men I consider heroes, and several unburdened themselves of awful memories before we were done: tossing a Vietnamese prisoner out of a helicopter, shooting an obviously innocent woman civilian in the back, collecting the ears of enemy dead. It was a meaningless, despicable war, and insane brutality was not an uncommon reaction.
But we're not really talking about Vietnam here, are we? We are talking about the politics of misdirection, about keeping John Kerry on the defensive by raising spurious questions about his "character."
We may also be talking about Iraq—and limiting Kerry's ability to question the President's decision to go to war. If so, the Swifties need not have bothered. Kerry hasn't shown much inclination to raise the real question about Iraq: Was it the right thing to do? And Bush hasn't shown much inclination to talk about the mixed, confusing effects of globalization on people like Elba Nieves. Which means there are nondebates on the two most important issues facing the nation. Not-So-Swift Columnists for Truth is appalled.
Copyright © 2004 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
What the Swifties Cost Us
Campaign 2004 gets mired in the Mekong Delta
By JOE KLEIN
On the day that the swift boat controversy reached a rabid apogee—that would be the day a Bush campaign lawyer resigned because of his ties to the Swifties, and Max Cleland made the stagy delivery of a protest letter to the Bush ranch—a woman named Elba Nieves stood at a town meeting in Philadelphia and told John Kerry that she had recently been laid off. The candidate proceeded to ask her a series of questions. She answered with quiet dignity. She had worked in a ribbon factory for four years. She said the company was having trouble keeping up with foreign competitors and was forced to close when it was refused a new bank loan. She was given no notice of termination, no severance package. Her shift—about 300 people—was simply called together at the end of a workday and dismissed. "They were changing the locks even before we left," she added. The audience, composed mostly of trade unionists, gasped and groaned.
I called Nieves the next day to check the details of her story, and, as it happened, there were some complicating factors. First, she admitted that her question had been precooked—her union had asked her to come to the event and tell the story. Kerry turned to Nieves immediately; her question was the first. This, in itself, isn't a terrible thing: George Bush constantly manages to "find" small-business people at his town meetings whose companies are booming because of his tax cuts. But Nieves went on to tell me that she recently had been called back to work at the ribbon factory and refused to return, on the advice of her union, because the company wouldn't continue her health insurance. Hmm, I thought: If I were a coldhearted political operative, I could get some rich friends to finance a group of Nieves' fellow employees—perhaps those who had returned to work without health insurance—call them Ribbon Workers for Truth and make this poor woman's life a trial. (As it is, I've acted as a Not-So-Swift Columnist for Truth by revealing some of the more problematic details of her story.) Ribbon Workers for Truth would be a nasty bit of business. It would purposely elide the most important fact—the larger truth—of Nieves' story: that she was laid off, and in a particularly brutal way. As she left the factory on Aug. 4, she had no idea how she would support her three children. She still doesn't know. And the uncertainty of her fate is a question with enormous political ramifications: What do we, as a nation, do about the downside of economic globalization? In fact, the real reason why Ribbon Workers for Truth would exist would be to divert attention from that question. The Ribbies would also turn Nieves' refusal to return to work without a health plan into a "character" issue—and thus evade the essential ridiculousness of a health-insurance system that would usually provide Nieves care (through Medicaid) if she were on welfare but doesn't if she is working a full-time job for an employer without a health plan.
But we're not talking only about Elba Nieves here, are we? Now that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have turned out to be anything but—the only "lies" they've turned up are a mistaken date or a mild Kerry exaggeration about operating in Cambodia and a Purple Heart received for a minor wound—we are told their real gripe is that Kerry protested the war after he came home and sullied their service by testifying to atrocities committed by American troops in Vietnam.
These are heartfelt gripes, perhaps, but wrong on the merits. Kerry's protest was not only honorable, it was accurate. The war in Vietnam was an unnecessary disaster, entered into under false pretenses—the fabricated Gulf of Tonkin incident—and fought because of a mistaken intellectual theory: that the Vietnamese national liberation movement was part of an international communist conspiracy to overwhelm Asia. (The subsequent war between Vietnam and China put a crimp in that one.) And, yes, there were atrocities aplenty. I spent three years in the 1980s writing about a platoon of former Marines, men I consider heroes, and several unburdened themselves of awful memories before we were done: tossing a Vietnamese prisoner out of a helicopter, shooting an obviously innocent woman civilian in the back, collecting the ears of enemy dead. It was a meaningless, despicable war, and insane brutality was not an uncommon reaction.
But we're not really talking about Vietnam here, are we? We are talking about the politics of misdirection, about keeping John Kerry on the defensive by raising spurious questions about his "character."
We may also be talking about Iraq—and limiting Kerry's ability to question the President's decision to go to war. If so, the Swifties need not have bothered. Kerry hasn't shown much inclination to raise the real question about Iraq: Was it the right thing to do? And Bush hasn't shown much inclination to talk about the mixed, confusing effects of globalization on people like Elba Nieves. Which means there are nondebates on the two most important issues facing the nation. Not-So-Swift Columnists for Truth is appalled.
Copyright © 2004 Time Inc. All rights reserved.
"I know because it is impossible for a tape to hold the compression levels of these treble boosted MFSL's like Something/Anything. The metal particulate on the tape would shatter and all you'd hear is distortion if even that." - VD
Matt wrote:http://www.mediaresearch.org/BozellColumns/newscolumn/2004/col20040824.asp
John Kerry’s Soldier-Smearing
by L. Brent Bozell III
August 24, 2004
It’s late August and someone in America decided it’s time to scrutinize John Kerry’s life story on television. For a week in Boston, John F. Kerry wrapped himself around a war effort he had spent decades denouncing, and Dan, Peter, and Tom sat around and nodded. No one even considered the possibility that Kerry could be – should be – challenged on any point of his self-serving history.
Except that, atrocities *certainly* took place in Vietnam, and they weren't rare....which points Bozell does not refute. Even as recently as last year, reports of systematic atrocities committed by an elite team of soldiers (Tiger Force) during hte Vietnam War surfaced, and won a Pulitzer Prize.
It was a filthy, stupid war, and John Kerry was right to protest it, after having served honorably in it ...as opposed to, say, GW Bush.
"I recommend that you delete the Rancid Snakepit" - Grant