Swiftvets Rock the Campaign

Four months ago, I wrote a column suggesting that critics of John Kerry who disparaged his service in Vietnam might be barking up the wrong tree. “Kerry’s problem isn’t whether he deserved the medals he was awarded,” I wrote.



Instead, I noted that “his vulnerability is his record after the war — especially his involvement with the radical group Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and his role as an apologist for the communists we were fighting in Vietnam.”

At the time, almost no one had heard of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the organization now at the center of a storm of controversy over John Kerry's record in Vietnam. The group held a press conference May 4 that received almost no media attention.

Boy, what a difference a few months and a half million dollars make. The Swiftvets are now all the rage — thanks to a low-budget ad campaign (a small buy in only a tiny handful of states) that has dominated news coverage of the presidential campaign in recent days. The group has unhinged the Kerry camp, which has tried to censor the ads, threatened television stations that might air them, attempted to intimidate bookstores from carrying Unfit for Command, a new, best-selling, anti-Kerry book by Swiftvets John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi, and fired back with its own ad claiming the Bush campaign is behind Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

The latter charge is blatantly false. The Bush campaign has been in the forefront of trying to shut down so-called “527s,” unsuccessfully challenging the legality of the groups at the Federal Elections Commission this year. Most 527s are on the Left and have spent more than $60 million trying to defeat the president. Bush campaign officials are scrupulous in avoiding even the appearance of coordination with independent groups. The best way to ensure that your phone calls not be returned by anyone in the Bush campaign or the Republican National Committee is to be involved with a 527. The mere mention of a 527 sends the lawyers rushing in and campaign officials scurrying for the doors.

Yet the mainstream media seem far more interested in chasing down false leads about alleged ties between the Swiftvets and Bush-Cheney '04 than they do exploring the substance of the group's charges against Kerry, especially his dubious record in the anti-Vietnam War movement and its influence on his Senate career. The latest Swiftvets ad uses snippets from Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in which he said American soldiers “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads,…cut off limbs, blown up bodies [sic], randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan….”

Kerry based his statements not on his own knowledge but on the fabricated testimony of a group of anti-war activists at “hearings” sponsored by VVAW and paid for by Jane Fonda. Some of those who testified to witnessing atrocities later proved not to have served in the military, much less in Vietnam. Congressional and military investigations into these allegations found no substantiation of the specific charges — which is not to say that atrocities did not sometimes occur. Just two months before Kerry testified before the Senate, Lt. William Calley was convicted by a military tribunal of killing 22 innocent men, women and children in the Vietnamese village of My Lai in 1968, which made Kerry's unsubstantiated charges all the more believable.

Why hasn't the media investigated Kerry's anti-war activities more closely or spent time tracking down the veracity of the allegations he made about atrocities? Why haven't enterprising reporters asked Kerry why he went to Paris in 1970 to meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong during the Paris Peace Talks, or why he has never criticized the communist government of Vietnam in the years since the fall of Saigon? Why haven't journalists called him on his claims to have taken his boat into Cambodia during Christmas 1968 — an uncorroborated assertion he has made at least eight times since 1979, including once on the floor of the U.S. Senate in 1986, according to research by Dr. Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute? News organizations spent considerable effort to investigate George W. Bush's National Guard service, devoting hundreds of stories to the issue, but they show almost no interest in getting to the bottom of whether Kerry made up stories about his involvement in what would have been an illegal incursion into Cambodia.

These are the real leads the media ought to be tracking — not the obvious distraction of the Swiftvets' purported ties to Republicans.

Linda Chavez is CEO and President of the Center for Equal Opportunity. And the author of Betrayal: How Union Bosses Shake Down Their Members and Corrupt American Politics . You can email her at comment@ceousa.org.

To find out more about Linda Chavez, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page.

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Linda Chavez is the author of “An Unlikely Conservative: The Transformation of an Ex-Liberal.” To find out more about Linda Chavez, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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