Kerry should have heeded his own advice
Sen. John F. Kerry should have listened to his own admonishment to the first President Bush: "The race for the White House should be about leadership, and leadership requires that one help heal the wounds of Vietnam, not reopen them." Bush, a World War II veteran of 58 carrier-launched combat missions, including one in which he was shot down, heeded the advice.
Former Sen. Bob Dole also focused on a campaign of issues, despite a truly compelling record; he was critically injured and expected to die after crawling out of his foxhole in the face of a Nazi machine gun to rescue an injured radioman. After nine agonizing hours, he was evacuated to an Army hospital. Three years and nine operations later, he regained very limited use of his right arm. Yet he remained humble about his service.
For his own campaign, Kerry hypocritically changed the rules. Terry McAuliffe, the Democratic Party chairman, stated, "I look forward to that debate with John Kerry, a war hero with a chest full of medals, standing next to George Bush -- a man who was AWOL." Kerry repeatedly questioned Bush's service during television interviews in April and made his four months in Vietnam the centerpiece of the Democratic National Convention. Sen. John Edwards challenged us: "If you have any question about what he's made of, just spend three minutes with the men who served with him then."
The issue backfired when a group of his fellow swift boat veterans signed a letter demanding that Kerry stop using their picture in a commercial. According to "Unfit for Command," the book by the Swift Boat vets, only one of the 19 veterans in the picture with Kerry supported him, 12 opposed him, two were deceased and four were neutral. The movement has since exploded in size to include more than 250 fellow swiftees, a detailed best-selling book and an advertisement campaign.
Sen. Kerry's former operational commander, Coast Guard Capt. Adrian Lonsdale, told me, "Kerry has distorted his record and the records of those who served with him." Retired Capt. Lonsdale of Mattapoisett is no partisan attack dog, having earned credibility by supporting Kerry against charges of war crimes in 1996.
Kerry is now crying foul. It seems that the door he opened has exposed some skeletons in his own closet. His response is to demand that President Bush condemn the veterans groups, even though the Democrats have been much larger beneficiaries of outside "independent" advertising. NewsMax, a Web news site, has documented close links between the Kerry campaign and Moveon.org's $63 million Bush-bashing ad campaign.
According to Mr. Lonsdale, the Kerry campaign is "calling us all kinds of names, threatening lawsuits, intimidating publishers and booksellers, doing their damnedest to link us with the Bush campaign and complaining to government agencies, everything except to disprove a single account of any incident in the book 'Unfit for Command.'"
One of the problems for Sen. Kerry is that much of the evidence against him comes from his own contradictory statements.
The Kerry campaign has retracted his claim of Christmas in Cambodia "seared into my memory." He has not reconciled the differing accounts about giving back his medals. His testimony about war crimes before the Senate has been completely undermined by his performance in a 1971 debate on the Dick Cavett Show when he could not cite a single atrocity he that had personally witnessed.
Kerry also undermines his own credibility by claiming "two tours in Vietnam." He counts his assignment to the USS Gridley, which was home ported in California. The Gridley spent five weeks operating off the coast of Vietnam, never in combat.
To many, the wounds that Kerry reopened still burn. Retired Col. Bud Day, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war, described to me a typical day in Hanoi and the pain he still feels. Mr. Day is the most heavily decorated person ever to serve in the Air Force; he earned 50 combat awards, including the Medal of Honor and four Purple Hearts. His roommate in the Hanoi Hilton, Sen. John McCain, has credited Bud Day for saving his life with his extraordinary emotional strength.
Many other POWs have recalled horrific torture while they were taunted with Kerry's Senate testimony. According to Bud Day, "the Kerry Vietnam anti-war movement directly encouraged the vicious torture I received as a POW in the Hanoi Hilton, was demoralizing for other POW's and their families, and provided aid and comfort for North Vietnam to continue the war. I can think of no action more despicable than false public condemnation of warriors on the field of battle, as John Kerry made under oath."
As Sen. John Edwards challenged me to do, I have asked those who served with John Kerry. I have found that he served four months in Vietnam and received three Purple Hearts for combat injuries, yet spent no time in a hospital.
His own accounts are contradictory. While the war was still in progress, Kerry met with a delegation from North Vietnam in 1970 in Paris. Our returning servicemen who were POWs bitterly feel that he falsely accused them of systematic war crimes and caused their mistreatment to be even greater.
Worst of all, John Kerry is now exploiting his service in the war he helped to undermine and he is attempting to silence his critics. What John Kerry might be starting to realize is that he should have heeded his own advice and not called attention to these embarrassing details.
Peter Friedman of Dartmouth writes "The Conservative Corner" column for The Standard-Times. His e-mail address is conservativecorner@hotmail.com
This story appeared on Page A14 of The Standard-Times on September 2, 2004.
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