Why Kerry's War Record Matters

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Why Kerry's War Record Matters
3
Mon, 08-23-2004 - 8:51pm
Why Kerry's War Record Matters

 

He has made it a central claim of his fitness for the Oval Office. However, his looseness with the truth is a poor job recommendation



oth Kerry and Bush were honorably discharged, and now, after such a length of time, no forensic examination of attendance rosters or after-combat reports can ever be likely to establish any variety of truth that's hard and fast. As the polls show, with the exception of an undecided 7% or so, minds and voting intentions are set. So for most, the question of whether a scratch on the arm deserved a Purple Heart will remain forever academic.


THE TRUTH SHADED. Yet Kerry's conduct in that long-ago war remains relevant -- and not just because he has made his time in uniform both centerpiece and touchstone of his campaign, nor even, as the Swift Boat Veterans assert, because he painted his personal history in the false colors of faux heroics .


If Kerry did shade the truth, he sure wouldn't be the first politician to do so. Only last week, voters were treated to the spectacle of Kerry point man and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fulminating about the Swift Vets' ads. Yet Harkin is himself an exposed fabulist, having once claimed to have jousted in his F-4 Phantom with North Vietnamese MiGs.


The truth? He never saw combat, spent his war ferrying military planes from Japan to the Philippines for routine servicing, and apologized for his fictions when subsequently exposed by fellow Senator Barry Goldwater.


CHRISTMAS IN CAMBODIA. So why pick on Kerry? Only this: Harkin doesn't want to be President. While voters will never know -- can never know -- if Kerry deserved those medals and his early ticket home, they can be absolutely sure that he did worse than merely embroider his exploits in the years that followed.


Kerry threw his medals over the White House fence -- except he didn't. He slept out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., with anti-war protesters -- except he didn't, having actually bunked down in a borrowed townhouse with Newsweek reporter Robert Sam Anson, according to an investigative story in the New York Observer.


And most troubling of all, Kerry has said he spent the last days of 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia, under fire and listening to President Nixon deny that Kerry or any other U.S. servicemen were operating on the wrong side of the border. In one version, it was the Khmer Rouge doing the shooting. In another, drunken South Vietnamese troops celebrating Christmas, which isn't even a good fable, since Buddhists generally don't get too excited about the birth of the Christians Messiah.


Oh, and another thing: It was President Lyndon Johnson Kerry would have been listening to, not Nixon, since the Republican was still four weeks away from his inauguration.


DECORATED REPUTATION. Kerry's handlers have hedged and qualified those assertions. No, they say, their man wasn't actually in Cambodia, just on its "watery borders." Well, he wasn't there, either, his own journals say. He wrote at the time that he spent Christmas, 1968, at the Sa Dec naval base, a good 50 miles away from the Cambodian border, thinking of "sugar plums...and stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires," and quite possibly, a future in politics.


Cynics might be inclined to argue that all of the above is inconsequential, that politicans lie because falsehood is the stump's stock in trade. Such a glib dismissal doesn't wash, and the reason is a lesson of history.


In 1944, another politician of vaulting ambition scored a Silver Star from an obliging Douglas MacArthur after riding as an observer aboard a U.S. bomber. It was the only mission he ever flew and, according to at least one of the surviving crewmen, an uneventful one at that, with no sight of the enemy nor even the slightest whiff of danger, according to author Robert Caro. Yet back in Washington, the former passenger regaled reporters like Time's Hugh Sidey, with tall tales of marauding Zeros "and how the bullets came zinging through the fuselage," according to Sidey's written recollections on the Web.


TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. That politician was Lyndon Johnson -- the President whose escalation of the war saw Kerry and so many others obliged to fight a conflict that geopolitical constraints doomed to failure, even as the force of U.S. arms never failed to triumph in the field.


Might a Johnson who was less keen to gild his reputation as a man of action been more wary of Indochina's swamp? Might he have thought twice about misrepresenting what happened -- or rather, didn't happen -- in the Gulf of Tonkin as his excuse to escalate a war that should never have been fought?


The world will never know. But with the benefit of hindsight, people can be absolutely sure that, then as now, one truth really does matter in Presidential politics: Boasts and a talent for self-serving fiction are no recommendations for a lease on the Oval Office.


 

Renee ~~~

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 05-21-2004
Mon, 08-23-2004 - 10:19pm
I think the only reason Kerry's war record matters is b/c he made it that way. It's the only thing he has, an inflated, fuzzy account of his *heroism* in Vietnam over 30 years ago. He was hoping that the American public wouldn't notice or care about the facts...

He knows his voting record won't help him as he is the most inconsistent senator there ever was, voting on each side of every issue.

He played his cards too soon on this one. There is too much at stake to not question a candidate's resolve and integrity. Even his actions that long ago.

The Democrats fail to realize that this goes beyond the 2004 election. This is about the future of our country. They have run this place down with their class warfare, social welfare state, politically correct, "sensitive" agenda. They have underestimated the American people and they will see that come November. We see the truth, and it isn't coming out of their mouths!

iVillage Member
Registered: 06-17-2004
Mon, 08-23-2004 - 11:14pm

I thought this essay was interesting. It would have been fitting for Kerry to finally bring the country together over Vietnam and finally provide closure on it given his unique position, but barring that, he should have observed the tacit truce that has held for 30 years and left

Renee ~~~

iVillage Member
Registered: 08-07-2004
Tue, 08-24-2004 - 12:03am
So when did SWBT start their organization? Was it before or after the dem convention?