This just in from John Kerry:

[busybody..]

I'm inclined to believe you.
However, given the play Bush's military record received in 2004, when his records were available for access by the press and public via the Internet, no one in the media seemed at all interested in Kerry's records, which were not made available. Making the records available was a simple matter of signing a release.
Seems like with all the Swift Boat stuff going on, the NYT might show a little initiative and get to the bottom of this.
Why did no one in the mainstream media hound Kerry about his records?
Instead, just before the election, Rather goes on 60 Minutes and makes an ass of himself with some bogus documents about Bush's military service.

there were several papers, The Boston Globe and NY Sun to name two papers that did a great job of publishing info

of course THEY were dismissed as PARTISAN!

 

[Fagin]

How did there get to be 30 pages on Kerry not changing his known position? Is it because he wasn't for it before he was against it?

 

[busybody..]

Posting the same piece from the same source over and over again doesn't make it true.

I posted it cause you wanted to know WHY NO ONE COVERED IT

Indeed it was covered in 04, as it was in 1972 etc and thruout EVERY ONE OF HIS ELECTION RUNS

But it is always DISMISSED as YOU are doing now

You ask WHY wasnt it covered and when its pointed out it was you accuse the writed of BIAS

 

[Sean]

I posted it cause you wanted to know WHY NO ONE COVERED IT

Indeed it was covered in 04, as it was in 1972 etc and thruout EVERY ONE OF HIS ELECTION RUNS

But it is always DISMISSED as YOU are doing now

You ask WHY wasnt it covered and when its pointed out it was you accuse the writed of BIAS

So the FBI and the Secret Service must be controlled by the Dems, right? Because what other reason could there be for them not arresting Kerry for treason?

 

[busybody..]

you dont realize how divise the Vietnam war was

there could have been hundreds if not thousands of arrests for treason etc etc

to what end?

riots in the street?

the US has a history of being somewhat tolerant in these matters

for instance there were LAWS against US citizens going to Iraq, yet hundreds went and AIDED SH, only a mere handfuk were orosecuted

the fact that Kerry, Fonda et all were not prosecuted in NOT indicitive of anything!

 

[Sean]

you dont realize how divise the Vietnam war was

there could have been hundreds if not thousands of arrests for treason etc etc

to what end?

riots in the street?

the US has a history of being somewhat tolerant in these matters

for instance there were LAWS against US citizens going to Iraq, yet hundreds went and AIDED SH, only a mere handfuk were orosecuted

the fact that Kerry, Fonda et all were not prosecuted in NOT indicitive of anything!

We're not talking about an actress or a private citizen, we're talking about a US senator and presidential candidate.

 

[busybody..]

I cant speak for the FBI or anyone

the incidents were in the early 1970's, he should be prosecuted in 2004?

Let me point THOS out as well.

When this stuff all came out, the MSM made it seem that it was a Repo hit and the Swfties were Rovian agents

IGNORING the HISTORICAL EVENTS available to be seen by all

Evidence of 34 years

In fact Russert DID play the Meet The Press interview of 1971 and asked Kerry about it

Kerry on that show SAID HE IN EFFECT LIED

So everything was covered

????????????????????????????

Lemme say THIS

You ask why wasnt it covered? Indeed it was! NYSun covered it extensivly

But

in another thread I post the Sun's translation of the documents found in Iraq that SHOWS the WMDs were there and removed etc and you and OTHERS have said

HAHAHAH THE FUCKING SUN?????????HAHAHAHA!

SO on the one hand you ask, HOW COME

and when shown

you say

THEY DONT COUNT!

 

[busybody..]

What follows is information that should have been on the front page of every paper and the lead of every TV news program in October 2004. I knew about this then and it made me so mad I could hardly sleep at night and it still makes me mad every time I think of it. Even though there was a great effort to get the info into the media, only Thomas Lifson used it in a couple of editorials for the NY Post I think it was or perhaps it was the Sun–can’t remember which just now. Also keep in mind many of the people that were involved in the VVAW were actively campaigning for Kerry and are involved with the Iraq Veterans Against the War and other anti-war organizations. This information is also tied to the strong probability that Kerry had received a dishonorable dischange that was later forgiven by Carter with his amnesty proclamation. I was going to shorten it but it was all so important that I gave up on a cut-off point so here is the whole thing. God bless the swiftvet guys for hanging on to their website!

John Kerry and the VVAW: Hanoi’s American Puppets?
by Jerome R. Corsi and Scott Swett

Newly discovered documents link Vietnam Veterans Against the War to Vietnamese communists

Two recently discovered documents captured from the Vietnamese communists during the Vietnam War strongly support the contention that a close link existed between the Hanoi regime and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) while John Kerry served as the group’s leading national spokesman.

The Circular: International Coordination of Antiwar Propaganda

The first document is a 1971 “Circular” distributed by the Vietnamese communists within Vietnam. It discusses strategies to coordinate their national propaganda effort with their orchestration of the activities of sympathetic counterparts in the American anti-war movement. Specifically, the document notes that the Vietcong and North Vietnamese delegations to the Paris Peace talks were being used as the communications link to direct the activities of anti-war activists meeting with them in Paris. To quote from the document:
The spontaneous antiwar movements in the US have received assistance and guidance from the friendly ((VC/NVN)) delegations at the Paris Peace Talks.

– Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US. The reference to “VC” indicates the Vietcong; “NVN” is the North Vietnamese government.
This sentence is particularly important in light of John Kerry’s admission that he met with leaders of both communist delegations to the Paris Peace Talks in June 1970, including Madame Binh, foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government (PRG) of South Vietnam, also known as the Vietcong. FBI files record that Kerry returned to Paris to meet with the North Vietnamese delegation in August of 1971, and planned a third trip in November.

Prior to the discovery of the Circular, there was no direct evidence that Hanoi was actually steering the U.S. antiwar movement’s activities by conveying Hanoi’s goals and wishes to movement leaders during their frequent visits to Paris, though many investigators had assumed that to be the case. Further analysis of this document supports the contention that Madame Binh used her Paris meeting with John Kerry to instruct him on how he and the VVAW might best serve as Hanoi’s surrogates in the United States. In the spring and summer of 1971, a key strategy of Hanoi was to advance what was known as Madame Binh’s Seven Point Peace Plan.

The plan was cleverly constructed to force President Nixon to set a date to end the Vietnam War and withdraw American troops. According to the 7-Point Peace Plan of Madame Binh, the only barrier to Hanoi setting a date to release American Prisoners of War was President Nixon’s unwillingness to set a specific date for military withdrawal. Of course, accepting the full terms of the 7-Point Peace Plan would have amounted to an American capitulation, a virtual surrender that included the payment of reparations to the Vietnam communists as an admission that America was the wrongful aggressor in an immoral war.

A section of the Circular titled “PREPARATION FOR THE FALL ((1971)) ANTIWAR MOVEMENT” makes clear the importance the Vietnamese Communists placed on advancing Madame Binh’s 7-Point Peace Plan within the United States:
The seven-point peace proposal ((of the SVN Provisional Revolutionary Government)) not only solved problems concerning the release of US prisoners but also motivated the people of all walks of life and even relatives of US pilots detained in NVN to participate in the antiwar movement.

– Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US. “SVN” indicates the South Vietnam Provisional Revolutionary Government, i.e., the Vietcong. “NVN” refers to North Vietnam.
And again, highlighting how the Vietnamese communists viewed the activities of the US antiwar movement, US politics, and politics in South Vietnam as interconnected; all to be targeted by Madame Binh’s 7-Point Peace Plan:
The Nixon-Thieu clique is very embarrassed because the seven-point peace proposal is supported by the SVN people’s (( political struggle)) movement and the antiwar movements in the US. Therefore, all local areas, units, and branches must widely disseminate the seven-point peace proposal, step up the people’s ((political struggle)) movements both in cities and rural areas, taking advantage of disturbances and dissensions in the enemy’s forthcoming (RVN) Congressional and Presidential elections. They must coordinate more successfully with the antiwar movements in the US so as to isolate the Nixon-Thieu clique.

– Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US. “RVN” refers to the Republic of Vietnam, the government in South Vietnam supported by the US.
POW Families: Targets of the Vietnamese Communists

Late in 1970, a defecting Vietcong organizer described a communist plan to use Vietcong sympathizers in the US to recruit family members of American POWs held captive in North Vietnam. The following summary of his interview was provided to the House Foreign Affairs Committee:
The Viet Cong plan to continue their efforts to win worldwide opinion to their side and to solicit as much material support for the VC struggle as possible from other countries in order to create a favorable climate for the VC at the Paris Peace Conference.

The Viet Cong will continue to promote domestic unrest against the war in the United States in order to speed withdrawal of US troops and create pressure for an end to the war.

Efforts will be directed toward the US soldier in Vietnam to demand that they be returned to the US and be reunited with their families and wives.

The VC will strive to create anti-draft and anti-war attitudes in the US by organizing VC sympathizers in the US to contact families with sons in Vietnam and urge them to call their sons home. Also VC sympathizers in the US will be organized to distribute anti-draft leaflets to students and young people.
On February 1, 1971, at their Winter Soldier Investigation in Detroit, the VVAW released a statement by Virginia Warner , mother of American POW Jim Warner, urging President Nixon to “end the war so the prisoners of war can come home.” Jim Warner has accused John Kerry of exploiting his mother’s fears to obtain this statement.

On July 22, 1971, John Kerry held a press conference in Washington, DC, to call upon President Nixon to accept Madame Binh’s 7-Point Peace Plan. Kerry surrounded himself at the press conference with POW wives, parents and sisters who had been recruited to promote his message. The event was reported in The New York Times of July 23, 1971 and the communist Daily World of July 24, 1971. Each article included a photograph of Kerry surrounded by POW family members.

Kerry’s use of POW families directly advanced the North Vietnamese communist agenda as described by enemy defectors and in the newly discovered Circular, which suggests that Madame Binh had recommended the same course of action to antiwar activists meeting with her in Paris.

[Note: A number of POW families were contacted by a “liason” group headed by Cora Weiss, the daughter of Communist Party financier Samuel Rubin, with offers to provide mail and information about their husbands if the families agreed to publicly denounce the war. Most POW family members refused to cooperate with this extortion, even when promised better treatment for their husbands or sons in Hanoi. Four angry POW wives protested at Kerry’s July press conference, one of whom accused Kerry of “constantly using our own suffering and grief” to advance his political ambitions.]

The Directive: Supporting the US Domestic Insurgency

The second document , captured by US military forces in South Vietnam on May 12, 1972, is a communist Directive designed to motivate discussions within Vietnam about promoting the ongoing antiwar activities in the United States. The fifth paragraph of this document makes clear that the Vietnamese communists were utilizing for their propaganda purposes the activities of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The protest described as occurring from April 19 through April 22, 1971 coincides directly with the dates of Dewey Canyon III, the Washington, DC, protest led by John Kerry, during which John Kerry’s testimony before Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee was a televised centerpiece. The description of the protest activities in the Directive even include the “return their medals” ceremony in which John Kerry and other VVAW members threw their medals and/or ribbons toward the steps of the US Capitol, with several shouting threats of violence against their government as they did so.

The Connection: The People’s Committee for Peace and Justice

Another key discussion in the documents reveals the degree to which the Vietnamese communists were working with and through the PCPJ (People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. The Circular, immediately after disclosing how the communist delegations to the Paris Peace talks were being used to guide the US antiwar movement, stresses the importance of the PCPJ to these efforts:
Of the US antiwar movements, the two most important ones are: The PCPJ ((the People’s Committee for Peace and Justice)) and the NPAC ((National Peace Action Committee)). These two movements have gathered much strength and staged many demonstrations. The PCPJ is the most important. It maintains relations with us.

– Circular on Antiwar Movements in the US (emphasis added).
The House Internal Securities Committee in their 1971 Annual Report described the PCPJ as an organization strongly controlled by US communists: “There is no question but what members of the Communist Party have provided a very strong degree of influence, even a guiding influence, in the evolution and formation of policies of the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice.”

Recently released FBI surveillance reports establish a strong link between John Kerry, Al Hubbard, the VVAW, the PCPJ, and their trips to Paris to meet with Madame Binh. As discussed in Unfit for Command, Hubbard, the Executive Secretary of the VVAW and a hard-line radical with ties to the Black Panthers and the PCPJ, had directly recruited John Kerry into the VVAW’s Executive Committee, bypassing the organization’s election process. Al Hubbard’s own claim to have been a transport pilot wounded in combat was discredited when the Department of Defense released documents demonstrating that, though Hubbard had been in the Air Force, he was neither a pilot nor an officer, had never served in Vietnam and had never been in combat. John Kerry shared the stage with Al Hubbard during the Dewey Canyon III protest in Washington, D.C., and he appeared together with Hubbard on NBC’s Meet the Press on April 18, 1971. Hubbard also signed the People’s Peace Treaty, a PCPJ document that reiterated the positions of North Vietnam and the Vietcong, on behalf of the VVAW.

An FBI field surveillance report stamped November 11, 1971 reported that the FBI had learned at the Regional VVAW Convention in Norman Oklahoma, on November 5-7, 1971, that John Kerry and Al Hubbard were planning to travel to Paris later in the month to engage in talks with the Vietnamese communist peace delegations. While this document is heavily redacted, other FBI reports make it clear that the Communist Party of the USA was paying for Al Hubbard’s trips to Paris.
IT IS NOTED THAT THE “COMMUNIST PARTY” REFERRED IN RETEL IS PROBABLY THE COMMUNIST PARTY, USA, BECAUSE AL HUBBARD IS A MEMBER OF COORDINATING OF PEOPLES COALITION FOR PEACE AND JUSTICE (PCPJ), AS ARE GIL GREEN, MEMBER OF NATIONAL COMMITTEE, COMMUNIST PARTY, USA AND JARVIS TYNER, NATIONAL DIRECTOR, YOUNG WORKERS LIBERATION LEAGUE. HUBBARD, GREEN AND TYNER HAVE ATTENDED SAME NATIONAL MEETINGS OF PCPJ.

– Federal Bureau of Investigations, Field Surveillance Report, filed November 11, 1971. A copy of this report was air-mailed to the Boston FBI office in reference to John Kerry.
An FBI field surveillance report dated November 24, 1971 details Al Hubbard’s presentation to a VVAW meeting of the Executive and Steering committees in Kansas City, Missouri, during the weekend of November 12-15, 1971 –- the same meeting at which the VVAW considered, then rejected a plan to assassinate several pro-war US Senators. John Kerry is listed as present. Once again, Al Hubbard made clear the communist coordination involved in his recent trip to Paris:
[BLACK OUT] advised that Hubbard gave the following information regarding his Paris trip:

Two foreign groups, which are Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) and Peoples Republic Government (PRG) (phonetic), invited representatives of the VVAW, Communist Party USA (CP USA), and a Left Wing group in Paris, to attend meeting of the above inviting groups in Paris. Hubbard advised he was elected to represent the VVAW. An unknown male was invited to represent the CP USA and an unknown individual was elected to represent the Left Wing group from Paris. He advised at the meeting that his trip was financed by CP USA.

– Federal Bureau of Investigations, Field Surveillance Report, filed November 24, 1971.
A letter written by Al Hubbard on April 20, 1971 leaves no doubt about the strong coordination between the Vietnam Veterans Against the War and the People’s Coalition for Peace and Justice. Addressed from the offices of the VVAW in Washington, D.C., the letter is an appeal to VVAW members to provide assistance to the PCPJ. It discusses several ways in which the two organizations have worked closely together:
This is an appeal for help for the Peoples Coalition for Peace and Justice. Over the past months the Peoples Coalition has supported the Vietnam Vets Against the War in many ways. The Coalition has made office space available at no charge, and permitted the use of all necessary office equipment such as mimeograph machines, stencil-making machines, folders and typewriters. They have loaned us cars, bullhorns, and public address equipment. Their staff has taken messages for us and joined fraternally in building our progress. Now we can return this support.

Saturday, April 24, the Coalition needs help collecting money and selling buttons at the great march and rally. Collectors and sellers must be energetic and determined. Theree will be security problems in taking large amounts of money to banks. The Coalition needs people power, hundreds of workers.

I earnestly hope that you will come forward to support our friends in this emergency.

– Letter signed by Al Hubbard, addressed from the Vietnam Veterans Against the War office at Room 900, 1029 Vermont Ave. N.W., Washington, D.C., dated April 20, 1971. Found in the House Internal Security Committee subject files, Washington, D.C.
Two days after the letter was written, John Kerry gave his famous testimony to Senator Fulbright’s Foreign Relations Committee in which he likened the American military in Vietnam to the army of Ghengis Khan. The march and rally for which Hubbard was recruiting VVAW assistance was the PCPJ’s massive April 24 demonstration in Washington, which immediately followed the VVAW’s week-long Dewey Canyon III protest. The communist Daily world reported on April 27 that “Tributes were paid to the special role of the Vietnam Veterans” at the PCPJ rally, and went on to quote at length from John Kerry’s speech at that event.

Willing Partners: the VVAW and the Vietnamese Communists

Other examples of the VVAW’s advocacy of Vietnamese communist positions during the period of John Kerry’s leadership abound. The group issued a proclamation in February 1971 calling for mass civil disobedience and military mutiny if American forces entered Laos. After the war, North Vietnamese military leaders acknowledged that one of their greatest fears was that America would move significant forces into Laos to interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The VVAW’s eagerness to comply with the wishes of the Vietnamese communists even extended to its choice of nomenclature. The VVAW’s Executive Committee stated in a July 1971 meeting that the terms “Vietcong” and “North Vietnamese” were not to be used in VVAW press releases and communications. Instead, “PRG (Provisional Revolutionary Government)” and “DRV (Democratic Republic of Vietnam)”… “are to be used by us to reflect our acceptance of their designations.” And the VVAW’s unremitting insistence that American forces were mass-murdering Vietnamese civilians perfectly echoed the primary propaganda theme put forth by the Vietnamese communists, their international communist allies, and their Soviet sponsors.

Conclusion

The newly uncovered documents help clarify the relationship of the North Vietnamese, the Vietcong, the PCPJ, the Communist Party of the USA, and John Kerry’s VVAW. They indicate that these organizations worked closely together, using the Paris Peace Talks as a central point of communication, to employ the strategy and tactics devised by the Vietnamese communists to achieve their primary objective: the defeat of the United States of America in Vietnam.

– by Jerome R. Corsi and Scott Swett

———-
[Note 1: On October 22, 2004, Swift Veterans and POWs for Truth researchers Troy Jenkins and Tom Wyld located the two Vietnamese communist documents referenced above in the archives of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech University, in the Douglas Pike Collection. Douglas Pike was a leading authority on the Vietnam War who collected over 2 million pages of original documents now archived at the Vietnam Center. James Reckner, Ph.D., Director of the Vietnam Center at Texas Tech, verifies that the documents in the Pike collection are original and authentic.]

[Note 2: The authors wish to thank Max Friedman for making available two additional documents, first, Al Hubbard’s April 20, 1971 letter to the VVAW membership. The full citation is: National Peace Action Coalition (NPAC) and Peoples Coalition for Peace & Justice (PCPJ) Part I, hearings before the Committee on Internal Security, House of Representatives, 92nd Congress, First Session, May 18-21, 1971, p. 1796.] The second document, “Extracts from an interview with a Viet Cong returnee” comes from the American Prisoners of War in Southeast Asia 1971 hearings before the Subcommittee on National Security Policy and Scientific Development, House Foreign Affairs Committee, 92nd Congress First Congress, March 23-25, 30-31, April 1, 6 & 20, 1971, Testimony of Max P. Friedman, page 299.

http://www.swiftvets.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=14571

 

[Sean]

OK, I have never said the NY Sun isn't a credible source, I know nothing about it. The Sun from the UK is a comic book, and anything you source from there I will laugh at.
As for the first part, there is no statute of limitations on treason or conspiracy to commit murder as far as I know.

 

[busybody..]

the REAL crime of the 2004 campaign was the attacks of the Swift Boat guys

THEY were depicted as PAID for operatives of Repoz/Rove

THEY were made the bad guys

THEY were made to be seen as the LIARS and MANIPULATERS

when in fact, their story changed NOT one IOTA for 34 years!

they were a group of guys who served with Kerry and knew him for what he was

a manipulative lying bastard who slimed and libeled THEM and teir comrades and from 1971 THEY were telling anyone who would listen their version

a version that NEVER EVER changed

UNLIKE THAT OF KERRY

WHY HAS HE STILL NOT RELEASED HIS RECORDS!????!!???!??!?!?!

 

[busybody..]

I love this so much, Im repeating it, YOU ARE WELCOME

http://pajamasmedia.com/upload/2006/11/kerry.jpg

Kerry

driving to oblivian!

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/gm061026-thumb.jpg

 

[Sean]

No change there, you repeat yourself constantly.
And everyone but you seems to know that Kerry is a busted flush. Any slim chance he had of the '08 nomination is gone. But it's all the Reps have right now, so I suppose the obsession is understandable.

 

[Ham Murabi]

Kerry's not on the ballot.
We're been reminded of that repeatedly - many times by people who piped up a month ago about the GOP even though Foley isn't running for re-election.

 

[busybody..]

He is a scumbag

and his apolgy for shitting on the troops

WHICH HE DIDNT SAY

But rather was posted on HIS website

is INSULTING as well

John Kerry might have dropped out of public view, but that hasn't stopped him from defending his "joke" of last week.

On his homepage, he has links to the Washington Post, NY Times and Boston Globe editorials on the "joke" as well as a video clip of Keith Olbermann defending the Seator.

Kerry's blog is in full defense mode as well.

And in what should be a monument to political tone deafness, Kerry linked to his appearance on Imus last week as yet another example of why he was correct.

 

[busybody..]

Kerry's not on the ballot.
We're been reminded of that repeatedly - many times by people who piped up a month ago about the GOP even though Foley isn't running for re-election.

No he isnt

but since he IS campaigning for MANY Democrats, it means that those he campaigns for stand with him!

just as people say that THIS election is an election about Bush!

Its about IDEOLOGY!

The IDEOLOGY of Kerry and HIS ILK vs the other side!

 

[Sean]

No he isnt

but since he IS campaigning for MANY Democrats, it means that those he campaigns for stand with him!

just as people say that THIS election is an election about Bush!

Its about IDEOLOGY!

The IDEOLOGY of Kerry and HIS ILK vs the other side!

But this election IS about Bush. Or rather a curb on the executive who happens to be Bush.

 

[wazhazhe]

Kerry on that show SAID HE IN EFFECT LIED

Link?

 

[busybody..]

But this election IS about Bush. Or rather a curb on the executive who happens to be Bush.

yes

and it IS an election about the ALTERNATIVE

of which Kerry is a MAJOR part!

 

[Ham Murabi]

But this election IS about Bush. Or rather a curb on the executive who happens to be Bush.

For some people that's true. I'm still pissed that Republicans are spending like mad. And I think that's one of the real reasons a lot of Republican voters are going to stay home.

 

[busybody..]

Link?

look up

Meet The Press interview with Russert

among MANY!

 

[garbage can]

For some people that's true. I'm still pissed that Republicans are spending like mad. And I think that's one of the real reasons a lot of Republican voters are going to stay home.

True, I heard G Gordon Liddy say that he hopes the republicans lose, I think Pat Buchanon does too.......mostly because of their spending..... though Buchanon was anti war from the get go..... a lot of pubs are pissed off.

 

[wazhazhe]

look up

Meet The Press interview with Russert

among MANY!

I knew you didn't have one.

 

[busybody..]

I knew you didn't have one.

you can Google it yourself

I even gave you the SOURCE

Russert, interview

 

[busybody..]

on another note

POW Lawsuit Could Force Kerry To Come Clean
On Vietnam ‘War Crimes’ Charges
- by George "Bud" Day, Chairman, Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation

(10/15/2006)

Thirty five years ago John Kerry slandered an entire generation of men who fought in Vietnam branding them as a "war criminals." Today, much of the same thing is being said about our young men and women in Iraq.

Now, a lawsuit filed in Philadelphia’s Court of Common Pleas will test the very foundation of Kerry’s anti-war persona for the first time. It isn’t dubious medals or Kerry’s disputed service record in Vietnam that is being called into question. This time Kerry may finally be forced to answer for the events that launched his public career, one that made him an anti-war hero for many American liberals and a turncoat for millions of Vietnam veterans.

The lawsuit (Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, et al. v. Kenneth Campbell, et al.) challenges the basis, the factual accuracy of then-Lt. (j.g.) Kerry’s acrimonious testimony before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. It was there Kerry’s public career was catapulted with his now ubiquitous portrayal of American soldiers as murderers, rapists and torturers "who ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam . . . [and] razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

Kerry said then his accusations were based on the so-called "testimony" of "150 honorably discharged" Vietnam veterans who, like himself, claimed to have committed or witnessed "war crimes, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Many if not all were members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization led by Kerry and financed by Jane Fonda during the early 1970s. Now, a number of those "witnesses" will be required to testify, under oath for the first time ever, about what they really did and saw in Vietnam.

What these VVAW witnesses say could have implications reaching beyond Kerry’s veracity and reputation. Their lasting portrait of the American soldier as a blood-thirsty butcher, a baby killer, is also at stake. And that picture remains entrenched among their kind, "proof" that those serving in the U.S. military, even today, truly are a "horde of barbarians" capable of unspeakable brutalities. That is the underlying theme, the constant drumbeat from the mainstream media and others as they try to undermine the American military today.

For the anti-war, anti-American protesters, the American soldiers are the "terrorists," and the enemies are the victims of a barbaric U.S. military which tortures and murders defenseless civilians.

That false premise, one of the most vicious and enduring smears spawned by Kerry 35 years ago, will also be put to the test once Kerry’s true "Band of Brothers" are put under oath in a Philadelphia courtroom.

The background to this lawsuit is long and complex, but even a condensed version is rich in irony and poetic justice.

It had it roots in 2004 with the documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds that Never Heal. Many may recall the film, although it is probably best known for not being seen, suppressed after Sinclair Broadcasting Company courageously announced it was going to air the documentary in its entirety. Thanks to Kerry and his liberal colleagues in the Senate and their enablers in the mainstream media, Sinclair was browbeaten into withdrawing the film, its broadcast license threatened by a Kerry campaign manager in 2004.

Stolen Honor focused on Kerry’s venomous diatribe before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971 when he accused Vietnam veterans of "war crimes" on a genocidal scale. (A full transcript is available at http://ice.he.net/~freepnet/kerry/index.php?topic=Testimony. ) It examined the impact Kerry’s widely reported statements had on hundreds of Americans who were being held prisoners of war by the North Vietnamese communists. The film’s producer, Carlton Sherwood, a Pulitzer Prize and Peabody Award-winning investigative reporter, interviewed former POWs for the documentary.

I was among those whom Sherwood, a decorated Marine combat veteran himself, asked to participate in Stolen Honor. I was a POW for nearly six years, held in North Vietnam prison camps, including the notorious Hanoi Hilton, a place of unimaginable horrors -- torture, beatings, starvation and mind-numbing isolation. When Kerry branded us "war criminals," he handed our captors all the justification they needed to carry out their threats to execute us. Thanks to Kerry, Jane Fonda and their comrades in the anti-war movement, our captivity was prolonged by years. The communists in Hanoi and Moscow couldn’t have had a better press agent to spread their anti-American propaganda.

To guarantee Stolen Honor would never be seen by anyone – not even theatre-goers – the producer was slapped with a libel and defamation lawsuit. That lawsuit was filed by Kenneth Campbell, a University of Delaware professor, Kerry campaign aide, and long-time anti-war disciple of the Massachusetts Senator. Campbell co-founded the Philadelphia chapter of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and, in 1971, he was one of Kerry’s key war crimes "witnesses," one of several on whom Kerry claims he based his Senate testimony.

Campbell was and still is regarded by some as one of the VVAW’s most articulate and published "experts" on U.S. atrocities in Vietnam. He has "testified" before Congress, in Europe, and elsewhere that while in Vietnam he deliberately killed "dozens and dozens" of innocent civilians as a Marine artillery forward observer. He has written extensively about his and others’ atrocities in Vietnam and he even teaches a course on the Vietnam War that showcases his war crime accusations. Campbell, like Kerry, met with enemy delegations -- Vietcong and North Vietnam Communist officials -- in Paris in 1971 while he was still a U.S. uniformed reservist. He was also flown to Moscow that same year to meet with other Communist leaders, all expenses paid by the Soviets.

Campbell’s lawsuit put a unique spin on the definition of defamation: He claimed that Stolen Honor damaged the public reputations of himself, Kerry and others by questioning whether they truly were the baby-killers they claimed to be!

Ignored and censored by the mainstream news networks, Stolen Honor eventually aired on some small local cable outlets. The documentary managed to penetrate Kerry’s blacklisting in rural northern Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania and several other places. But, Campbell’s lawsuit against Sherwood continued in 2005, when he even added POWs who appeared in the film to the litigation!

The POWs and the wives of POWs who participated in Stolen Honor refused to abandon the facts conveyed in the film. For some of us, it was the first time since our release by the Communists in 1973 that we were able to have our voices publicly heard, to tell our stories about the consequences of Kerry’s treachery. In 2005, we formed a nonprofit organization, the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation (VVLF), to gather records, documents and other materials to form a fact-based, educational repository for students and scholars of Vietnam history and to tell the true story of the American soldiers in Vietnam. The VVLF’s mission is "to set the record straight, factually, about Vietnam and those who fought there."

For our efforts, we were promptly sued by Campbell and another long-time anti-war Kerry follower and VVAW member, Dr. Jon Bjornson. It was clear that Kerry not only wanted to punish us for Stolen Honor; he intended to use surrogates to sue us into permanent silence and financial ruin.

But in lawsuits, even defendants have an opportunity to question the accuser under oath in pre-trial depositions -- even when a lawsuit is filed solely to harass, intimidate and silence and when the legal system is abused for political vengeance, as these lawsuits clearly were.

Our chance came earlier this year when Kenneth Campbell was deposed. Among the first thing he disclosed was that this was the first time he had actually been put under oath in over 35 years of "testifying" about Vietnam "war crimes." Neither he nor any of his fellow "war criminals" – Kerry included – had ever been sworn in at any hearings, not before the Senate, the House of Representatives, or anywhere.

All of the so-called "testimony" the old mainstream media trumpeted for nearly four decades -- graphic, sickening and grisly "testimony" about savage atrocities committed by Vietnam veterans, "testimony" to which Congress and the media gave so much weight and credibility -- wasn’t "testimony" at all! Just propagandist speeches told without limitation or fear of consequences, least of all penalties for perjury. As for the "war crimes" Campbell claimed for years he committed and personally witnessed, he now conceded he didn’t actually see innocent civilians killed by his artillery barrages. In fact, if anyone had been killed or wounded, he admitted, they may not have been civilians at all! Concerning other atrocities Campbell identified in his lawsuits -- things like Marines massacring an entire village, killing surrendering enemy soldiers -- those incidents, too, failed to stand up under questioning. Some were things he said he had heard or assumed happened; others, he acknowledged, were simply "rumors."

That Campbell alleged personal knowledge of horrible atrocities in his complaints and then gave wholly different stories of hearsay and assumption at his deposition is detailed in the recently filed Philadelphia lawsuit, which repeatedly alleges that Campbell lied about supposed war crimes in 1971 and lied again when he claimed in 2004 that his war crime stories were true.

While hard evidence may have been in short supply during his sworn testimony, Campbell did offer the names of "witnesses" who would confirm his stories. Not surprisingly, the first two were Kerry State Veterans Campaign Coordinators and long-time VVAW organizers in Florida and Massachusetts.

Subpoenas were served on both men but, before either could be deposed, one checked himself into a hospital for elective back surgery and the other had himself arrested and committed to a mental institution. At last press reports, he was released from the psychiatric hospital and fled the country to Vietnam via Hawaii.

Both men clearly knew what was coming, as did Campbell. For the first time in nearly four decades they would be forced to answer for their alleged "war crimes," their slanderous accusations against their fellow soldiers finally examined, under oath.

It was just a matter of days before all the lawsuits were withdrawn, nearly two years of costly litigation abruptly ended, Campbell’s libel claims ground to dust under the weight of his own testimony.

Like their leader, John Kerry, his surrogates wanted no part of having to defend these despicable allegations, or for being held accountable for the great harm they and he continue to inflict on our men and women in uniform. They fled the moment the light of truth shined their way.

My fellow POWs and I who were the target of these lawsuits are not willing to quit or surrender. Kerry and his cowardly followers may have achieved their purpose of keeping the American people from seeing Stolen Honor in 2004, but we refuse to allow the truth about Vietnam to remain untold.

Forced to spend huge sums to defend ourselves from these frivolous lawsuits, we have filed a countersuit against these Kerry surrogates and intend to reveal the truth about the lawsuits and their sponsors. We believe that we can prove that the purpose of nearly two years of litigation was to cover up for Kerry’s treachery, to drain us financially and spiritually, and to prevent us from setting the record straight.

At stake is ultimately nothing less than the integrity of the American military in Vietnam, the honor of the men who served their country, the nobility of those who gave their lives, and the truth of America’s history in Vietnam. Until or unless we do correct the existing record, the American military may never be free of the myths and smears of Vietnam, its honor and integrity cleansed as it fights to defend freedom at home and around the world.

Our mission is hardly over. We hope you will join us in fighting this battle . . . for our soldiers, then and now.

Col. George E. "Bud" Day, USAF (Ret.,) was a POW in North Vietnam for five years, seven months and 13 days. He served in three wars (WWII, Korea, and Vietnam) and earned the Medal of Honor. He is the Air Force’s most decorated living veteran. He is the Director and President of the Vietnam Veterans Legacy Foundation, Inc., an organization created to better educate and inform the public about the Vietnam War, its events, its history, and the men and women who sacrificed to serve their country.

 

[busybody..]

SEAN

For YOU

it may answer YOUR questions

With antiwar role, high visibility


By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff, 6/17/2003

timeline


Events in Kerry's life


photo galleries


Kerry's life in pictures


the series


Part One:
A privileged youth, a taste for risk
Handwritten letter to his parents
Transcript of the letter


Part Two:
Heroism, growing concern over war
Kerry's journal from Vietnam
Where Kerry served in Vietnam


Part Three:
With antiwar role, high visibility
Clips from Watergate tapes
Transcripts of Watergate tapes
Doonesbury cartoon about Kerry

Part Four:
First campaign ends in defeat
Sampling of Lowell Sun coverage

Part Five:
Taking one prize, then a bigger one
Kerry took loss in tax shelter
Kerry's tax shelter documents
Freeze Voter '84 memo

Part Six:
With probes, making his mark


Part Seven:
At center of power, seeking summit A quest for the edge
Senator Kerry's voting record



pril 28, 1971, 4:33 p.m. President Richard M. Nixon takes a call from his counsel, Charles Colson.

"This fellow Kerry that they had on last week," Colson tells the president, referring to a television appearance by John F. Kerry, a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"Yeah," Nixon responds.

"He turns out to be really quite a phony," Colson says.

"Well, he is sort of a phony, isn't he?" Nixon says.

Yes, Colson says in a gossiping vein, telling the president that Kerry stayed at the home of a Georgetown socialite while other protesters slept on the mall.

"He was in Vietnam a total of four months," Colson scoffs, without mentioning that Kerry earned three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, and had also been on an earlier tour. "He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue."

"Yeah."

"He came back a hawk and became a dove when he saw the political opportunities," Colson says.

"Sure," Nixon responds. "Well, anyway, keep the faith."

The tone was sneering. But the secretly recorded dialogue illustrates just how seriously Kerry was viewed by the Nixon White House. Some of these conversations have not been previously publicized, and Kerry said he had never heard them until they were provided by a reporter.

Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat.

The White House feared him like no other protester.

Colson, in a secret memo, revealed he had a mission to target Kerry: "Destroy the young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

The effort by Nixon and his aides to undermine Kerry went much deeper than even Kerry realized. Yet it is this chapter in his life, as much as any other, that helped turn Kerry into a national political figure. By targeting Kerry, the Nixon White House boosted his stature in ways that still are having an impact.

But at the same time, many of the issues that Nixon and his aides raised more than 30 years ago about Kerry still remain. Echoes of Colson's words can still be heard in Washington: "He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue, a phony."

Yet even Nixon described Kerry as an articulate and impressive spokesman. The Nixon White House began an investigation of Kerry. Who was he, the Nixonites wanted to know. What was his real motivation? And how could they stop him?


Connecting with a cause





As an antiwar leader, John Kerry was arrested with hundreds of others after protesting on the green in Lexington, Mass., on May 31, 1971. The Nixon White House identified Kerry as the movement's most effective spokesman. (AP File Photo)


John Kerry returned from Vietnam in April 1969, having won early transfer out of the conflict because of his three Purple Hearts. He asked for a cushy assignment - service as an admiral's aide - and was given precisely that job in Brooklyn. Kerry had thought about running for public office long before he had gone to Vietnam. But when he returned from the war, he wasn't greeted as a hero, like the soldiers of his father's generation. Kerry found that being a veteran could be a drawback, especially in Eastern Massachusetts, where he hoped to run for the US House.


"I just came back really concerned about it and upset about it and angry about it," Kerry said. "It took me a little while to decompress. I saw someone who said, `What happened to you? Your eyes are sunk way back in your head.' The tension and the trauma in your life took its toll."


When Kerry returned to the United States, the country's troop strength in Vietnam was at its height - 543,000. To that date, 33,400 Americans had been killed, and the number of protests was surging. But during this time, Kerry was still a naval officer and not publicly protesting the war.


It was his sister, Peggy, who was involved in the antiwar movement. One day in October 1969, Peggy Kerry was working in the New York office of a Vietnam War protest group that was planning a "moratorium" peace rally in Washington, which would draw 250,000 protesters one month later. A leader in the New York protest, Adam Walinsky, a former speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, said he needed a pilot and plane to take him around the state on Oct. 15. Did anyone know a pilot?


Peggy Kerry said she would provide such a volunteer: her brother.


John Kerry flew Walinsky around New York to deliver speeches against the war. Kerry did not wear his uniform and did not speak at the events, but the experience helped convince him that he wanted to become a public leader of the antiwar movement. On Jan. 3, 1970, Kerry requested that his superior, Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr., grant him an early discharge so that he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform.


"I just said to the admiral: `I've got to get out. I've got to go do what I came back here to do, which is, end this thing,'" Kerry recalled, referring to the war. The request was approved, and Kerry was honorably discharged, which he said shaved six months from his commitment.


But for all his Vietnam heroics and patrician background, Kerry was, politically speaking, a nobody. He gave up on a three-month 1970 bid for Congress in Massachusetts' Third District, which at the time stretched from Newton to Fitchburg, when it became clear the Rev. Robert F. Drinan would instead get the Democratic Party nomination.


Some of Kerry's positions at the time sound naive in retrospect. He was quoted in The Harvard Crimson as saying he would like to "almost eliminate CIA activity" and wanted US troops "dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations."

Out of the Navy and with a political failure behind him, Kerry refocused on his personal life. In May 1970, he married the woman he had been dating for more than six years, Julia Thorne, the sister of his best friend, David Thorne. Kerry, whose upper-class image was already well established due to his Forbes and Winthrop roots, had a glittering wedding.


The New York Times described it this way: "Miss Julia Stimson Thorne, whose ancestors helped to shape the American republic in its early days, and John Forbes Kerry, who wants to help steer it back from what he considers a wayward course, were married this afternoon at the 200-acre Thorne family estate" on Long Island.


The article noted that Miss Thorne's cream-colored dress had been worn by her ancestor, Catherine Peartree-Smith, who married Elias Boudinot IV, who served as president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. "Alexander Hamilton was best man at that wedding and among those present was George Washington," the story noted.

"Whether today's wedding becomes a similar footnote to history may depend on the bridegroom, a graduate of Yale and a veteran of the Vietnam war, who is considering running for Congress from his native Massachusetts." (The article left unsaid that Kerry had just failed in that bid.)

For his honeymoon, Kerry chose a telling location: the Pershing family's Jamaica home. Richard Pershing, a close friend of Kerry's and a fellow member of Yale's Skull and Bones society, had been killed in Vietnam. Pershing's grandfather, General John Joseph "Black Jack" Pershing, had commanded US forces in Europe during World War I.


With Julia by his side, Kerry became more active in the antiwar movement. After working behind the scenes and making a few little-noticed appearances at rallies, Kerry joined a group called Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Some thought the group was marginal; others mocked its connection to Jane Fonda, who had earned enmity by visiting North Vietnam. In January 1971, the organization held a series of hearings in Detroit called the "Winter Soldier Investigation," but Kerry did not speak at the event, which received only modest press coverage. Kerry wanted a bigger stage, and he wanted the top role.


During private conversations with other group leaders, Kerry suggested that a veterans rally be held on the Mall in Washington, an effort Kerry hoped would refute Nixon's charge that the protesters were mostly college "bums."


"It was my sense that it wasn't going to be heard unless we went to a place where the issue was joined," Kerry said. "It was my idea to come to Washington. It was my idea to do the march. I floated that idea at the Detroit meeting. We all decided to make it happen. I became the unofficial coordinator-organizer."


Some members of the antiwar group viewed Kerry as an opportunist. He hadn't testified during the Winter Soldier hearings, hadn't organized the group, yet now he was seeking to become the coordinator and spokesman. But plenty of veterans also realized Kerry - erudite and clean-cut - was the ideal foil for those who viewed the group as hippie traitors or even communists.


So Kerry became the face of the organization, and a media sensation.


The protests were set for the week of April 20. Kerry spent some of his time at the Georgetown townhouse of his longtime friend George Butler, working the phones, trying to round up veterans. But the real problem was money. Kerry, who was not financially independent despite rumors to the contrary, was supposed to raise money to pay for buses that would transport the veterans.


He called his friend Walinsky, who had run unsuccessfully for New York attorney general and had excellent financial connections. Walinsky arranged a meeting of potential donors at the Seagram Building in New York City. Among those present were Seagram chief executive Edgar M. Bronfman Sr. and about 20 other New York businessmen who opposed the war. Kerry delivered a low-key speech about the importance of having veterans attend the protest. Then the businessmen were each asked to stand and declare how much they would contribute.


"We raised probably $50,000," Walinsky recalled. "It took an hour."


Face of the antiwar movement







In Lowell, Mass., the veteran and onetime antiwar activist, watches as President Nixon announces a Vietnam cease-fire in January 1973.

audio clips
April 23, 1971
Nixon, Haldeman, Kissinger
Hear the clip | Read transcript

April 23, 1971
Nixon, Rose Mary Woods
Hear the clip | Read transcript

April 26, 1971
Nixon, Haldeman, Ziegler
Hear the clip | Read transcript

April 27, 1971
Nixon, Rose Mary Woods
Hear the clip | Read transcript



Just before the event, on April 19, 1971, Colson fired off a memo expressing exasperation that more wasn't being done to undermine the organizers. He ordered administration officials to show that Vietnam Veterans Against the War was "a fringe group, that it is financed from questionable sources, that it doesn't represent a veterans movement, and that the guys involved are a pretty shoddy bunch. . . . There just must be more that we can be doing."

At a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on April 22, 1971, Kerry took his case to Congress. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats. Kerry was dressed in his green fatigues and wore his Silver Star and Purple Heart ribbons, although he said he left the medals at home. With his thatch of dark hair swept across his brow, Kerry sat at a witness table and delivered the most famous speech of his life, the speech that defined him and made possible his political career.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry asked. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Attacking the Nixon White House, he said, "This administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country."

Almost forgotten in that famous speech were Kerry's controversial assertions that Vietnam veterans had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephone to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, 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 in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

To some veterans, including some of those who served alongside Kerry, this was too much. They thought they had served honorably, and they had seen Kerry as a gung-ho skipper who led the charge and didn't voice such opposition on the battlefield.

"I would go up a river with that man anytime. He was a great American fighting man," said Michael Bernique, a highly decorated veteran who served as a swift boat skipper alongside Kerry. But Bernique remains upset with Kerry's assertion that atrocities were committed, an assertion that Kerry has not backed away from. "I think there was a point in time when John was making it up fast and quick. I think he was saying whatever he needed to say."

In the Oval Office, President Nixon delivered a backhanded compliment to Kerry, whom he distinguished from the other "bearded weirdos."

The "real star" of the hearing was Kerry, Nixon told chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger the day after Kerry testified, according to the secretly taped White House recordings.

"He did a hell of a great job," Haldeman said.

"He was extremely effective," Nixon agreed.

"He did a superb job on it at Foreign Relations Committee yesterday," Haldeman said. "A Kennedy-type guy, he looks like a Kennedy, and he, he talks exactly like a Kennedy."

"Where did he serve?" Nixon asked.

"He was a Navy lieutenant, j.g., on a gunboat, and he used to run his gunboat up and shoot at, shoot babies out of women's arms," Haldeman said. (A member of Kerry's crew had shot and killed a Vietnamese child in an episode that occurred in a "free-fire zone," according to Kerry, but it is not clear whether Haldeman knew about the matter or was being jocular.)

"Oh, stop that," Nixon said. "People in the Navy don't do things [like that.]" With apparent sarcasm, Nixon turned to Kissinger, who assured him a naval officer would not shoot babies out of women's arms. But there was a seriousness to the statement as well; just three weeks earlier, a jury had convicted Lieutenant William Calley of killing 22 civilians in what became known as the My Lai massacre. Just days earlier, Nixon had ordered Calley released pending his appeal. The case had been more fuel for the antiwar movement.

Nixon seemed particularly incredulous that Kerry had won so many medals. "Bob, the Navy didn't have any casualties in Vietnam except in the air," Nixon told Haldeman, showing either a disregard for the high casualty rate of swift boat sailors or an extraordinary lack of knowledge about what had really happened during the war he oversaw as commander in chief.

The White House staff decided it needed to dig up dirt on Kerry, or at least undermine his effort. Three days later, Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office and announced to the president: "We've got some interesting dope on Kerry."

Nixon was interested.

"Kerry, it turns out, some time ago decided he wanted to get into politics," Haldeman said. "Well, he ran for, took a stab at the congressional thing. And he consulted with some of the folks in the Georgetown set here. So what, what the issue, what, he'd like to get an issue. He wanted a horse to ride."

The tape recording inexplicably ends at this point.

Kerry, meanwhile, was becoming a celebrity. Overnight, he had emerged as one of the most recognized veterans in America.

Kerry, who understood well the importance that the media placed on imagery, put an exclamation mark on events by lining up with veterans to return their medals to the military on April 23. Kerry said he suggested that veterans place their medals and ribbons on a table and return them. But he said other members of the antiwar veterans group wanted to throw the medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, and Kerry went along with the idea.

Video footage of the scene shows hundreds of veterans angrily gathering in front of the Capitol, near a fenced-in bin with the large sign saying "Trash."

One by one, the veterans, most of whom had long hair and wore combat jackets, threw their medals into the makeshift trash bin.

Some press reports say that Kerry "threw his medals." But Kerry has long maintained he threw his own ribbons but someone else's medals.

In an interview, he said that he had previously met two veterans, one from the Vietnam War and another from World War II, who had asked Kerry to return their medals to the military. Kerry said he stuffed them into his jacket.

He said that when he prepared to throw his ribbons over the fence, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the medals from those two veterans. He said his own medals remained in safekeeping.

The week's events had unquestionable impact. At the beginning of the week, a band of 800 or so Vietnam veterans gathered to protest the war, followed by Kerry's April 22 testimony, then the medal-tossing ceremony on April 23. By the following day, the publicity helped draw at least 250,000 people to the Mall in a massive protest.

Kerry, wearing a blue button-down shirt under his combat jacket, addressed the rally from the Capitol steps. "We came here to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war," Kerry told the cheering throng.

In one week, Kerry had gone from little-known former swift boat skipper to the face of the protest movement.

"The transformation was instant," said Kerry's friend George Butler. "Eight hundred people had turned into 250,000," said Kerry's then-brother-in-law, David Thorne, who stood beside Kerry during the rally. "That is what made it so spectacular."

A national figure

1971 Doonesbury cartoon about John Kerry



A few weeks later, Kerry was featured in a lengthy segment on the CBS television program "60 Minutes." Correspondent Morley Safer, in a segment titled "First Hurrah," portrayed Kerry as an eloquent man of turmoil who had a Kennedyesque future.


"Do you want to be president of the United States?" Safer asked Kerry.


"No," Kerry replied. "That's such a crazy question when there are so many things to be done and I don't know whether I could do them."


But Kerry's image as a self-promoter soon became the subject of parody, none more on-target than a Doonesbury comic strip penned by fellow Yale alumnus Garry Trudeau. A character in the strip is heard urging that they all attend John Kerry's speech. "He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!"


"Who was that?" another character asks.


"John Kerry," comes the response.


Another strip shows Kerry soaking up the adulation after a speech, smiling and thinking, "You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie."


At the White House, the plotting against Kerry continued.


"The concern about Kerry was that he had great credibility as a decorated Vietnam veteran," Colson recalled in a recent interview. So Colson and his staff tried repeatedly to dig up dirt on Kerry. The effort failed.


"I don't ever remember finding anything negative about Kerry or hearing anything negative about him," Colson said. "If we had found anything, I'm sure we would have used it to discredit him."


Colson's memos, in storage at the National Archives, show that he tried mightily to discredit Kerry. On April 16, Colson noted that, "A number of tough questions have also been planted with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War questioners for `Meet the Press."'


Vice President Spiro T. Agnew briefly led the White House charge against Kerry. Appearing in the Bahamas, Agnew said that Kerry, "who drew rave notices in the media for his eloquent testimony before Congress, was later revealed to have been using material ghosted for him by a former Kennedy speechwriter, and to have spent most of his nights in posh surroundings in Georgetown rather than on the Mall with his buddies."


Both of Agnew's charges were false, according to Kerry and Walinsky, the former Kennedy aide to whom Agnew referred.


Kerry began traveling around the country to carry the antiwar flag. During Memorial Day weekend, he joined a throng of antiwar protesters on the green in Lexington, Mass., where he and hundreds of others were arrested. Kerry said the arrest, for which he paid a $5 fine and spent the night at the Lexington Public Works Garage, is the only arrest of his life. At the time, Kerry's wife, Julia, kept $100 under her pillow just in case she needed to bail out her husband on short notice.


In another iconic moment, Kerry appeared with former Beatle John Lennon at a protest in New York City.

The White House found a better way to go after Kerry. Colson had seen a press conference featuring a young Navy veteran named John O'Neill, who served in the same swift boat division as Kerry shortly after Kerry left Vietnam. O'Neill, like many swift boat veterans, was outraged at Kerry's claim of US atrocities.


In short order, O'Neill became the centerpiece of the Nixon White House strategy to undermine Kerry. O'Neill, now a Texas lawyer, stresses that he did not receive any payment from the White House and was acting on his own because he thought Kerry's statements were unconscionable lies.


For weeks, Colson had been accusing Kerry of ducking a debate with O'Neill. On June 15, Colson wrote to another White House aide: "I think we have Kerry on the run, he is beginning to take a tremendous beating in the press, but let's not let him up, let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader. Let's try to move through as many sources as we can the fact that he has refused to meet in debate, even though he agreed to do so and announced to the press he would."


The next day, O'Neill arrived at the White House to meet with Nixon. The two men bonded; a brief "grip and grin" session turned into an hourlong meeting, with Nixon bucking up O'Neill for the fight against Kerry.


'We've got to change'



Kerry's 1971 book later became the focus of controversy because of the cover photo which showed of veterans hoisting an upside-down US flag.







Two weeks later, on June 30, the much anticipated debate took place. Kerry, who had been studying debate since he was about 14 years old, appeared with O'Neill on "The Dick Cavett Show." At 6 feet 4 inches, Kerry towered over Cavett and O'Neill. With his thick dark hair, dark blue suit, and lean features, he cut a striking figure.


O'Neill came out swinging. Visibly angry from the start, wearing a light suit, short hair, and white socks, O'Neill used words seemingly intended to taunt his opponent.


"Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on war-weariness and fears of the American people," O'Neill said. "This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, `crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.' Who was quoted in a prominent news magazine in May as saying, `War crimes in Vietnam are the rule, not the exception."'


Where O'Neill was red-hot, Kerry sought to look calm and intellectual, toting a hefty briefing book. He said the veterans weren't trying to tear down the country, but instead say to the country: "Here is where we went wrong, and we've got to change. What we say is, the killing can stop tomorrow."


"On the question of war crimes, it is really only with the utmost consideration that we pose this question," Kerry said. "I don't think that any man comes back to say that he raped, or to say that he burned a village, or to say that he wantonly destroyed crops or something for pleasure. I think he does it at the risk of certain kinds of punishment, at the risks of injuring his own character, which he has to live with, at the risk of the loss of family and friends as a result of it. But he does it because he believes intensely that people have got to be educated about the devastation of this war. We thought we were a moral country, yes, but we are now engaged in the most rampant bombing in the history of mankind."


Again and again, the question was asked: Did Kerry commit atrocities or see them committed by others? Kerry stuck to his script.


"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty. But we are not trying to find war criminals. That is not our purpose. It never has been."


O'Neill for years has declined to talk about the experience, partly because he says he became disillusioned with politics and government after the fall of Saigon in 1975.


But in a telephone interview from Texas, where he is a trial attorney, O'Neill made it clear he still harbors resentment at the way Kerry accused veterans of atrocities.


"The primary reason I got involved was I thought the charges of war crimes were irresponsible and wrong," O'Neill said. "I thought they did a real disservice to all the people that were there. I thought they were immoral."


The bitterness remains. Asked whether he agrees with the view of some observers that Kerry was forever altered by the war, O'Neill responded: "The war didn't change [Kerry]. I think he was a guy driven tremendously by ambition. I think he was that way before he went and is that way today."


Some Vietnam Veterans Against the War leaders also viewed Kerry as a power-grabbing elitist, a source of internal friction within the antiwar movement. "There was no question but that the rift existed," said Butler, who was with Kerry at the time and remains a close friend. "A wing of the VVAW were pushing so hard to the left that they were almost Maoist. Every time John did something useful like raise money or speak in front of the Foreign Relations Committee or give an interview, he was criticized for being a media whiz."


Scott Camil, a former group leader, said Kerry "was not as radical as some of the rest of us. He was a pretty straight shooter, and he came under criticism for things that weren't fair."


Still, Camil recalled that Kerry's patrician image was derided by others in the group, which was mostly composed of working-class veterans. Camil said Kerry showed up in ironed clothes, while most of the others were rumpled. Camil said a member had tried to reach Kerry by telephone and was told by someone, presumably a maid, that "Master Kerry is not at home." At the next meeting, someone hung a sign on Kerry's chair that said: "Free the Kerry Maid."


Kerry left the organization after about a year of participation and about five months after assuming a leadership role. Kerry says he quit partly to focus on a new organization that emphasized veterans' benefits; others say Kerry was forced out.


In fact, Kerry once again was thinking of running for the US House from Massachusetts. But unlike in 1970, when Kerry was barely known, the antiwar movement had turned him into a national figure and taught him how to campaign, how to organize, how to raise money, how to use the media, even how to debate on national television.


Kerry had battled the Viet Cong, the Nixon White House, and the extremes of the antiwar movement. Now all he had to do was persuade mostly working-class voters north of Boston to vote for him.


Michael Kranish can be reached by email at kranish@globe.com