by John Kerry
More surprises were on the way. A few days later, on August 5, as we were caravanning through the country with spotty cell phone reception and limited internet connectivity, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (SBVT) came back with a television advertisement accusing me of lying about everything I had lived through in the war.
The words in the ad were stark. “John Kerry has not been honest about what happened in Vietnam.” “He is lying about his record.” “I know John Kerry is lying about his first Purple Heart because I treated him for that injury.” “John Kerry lied to get his Bronze Star. . . . I know, I was there, I saw what happened.” “John Kerry has not been honest.” “John Kerry is no war hero.” “John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with in Vietnam.”
All of this was hard enough to hear and rebut, but the floodgates opened when a book appeared to accompany the ad, authored by none other than John O’Neill, an operative from 1971 whom Chuck Colson and the Nixon White House recruited to debate the VVAW, and Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy theorist who would later go on to accuse Hillary Clinton of being a lesbian and Barack Obama of being a closeted Muslim. We heard that the book, published by a conservative imprint and leveraged by the right-wing network, would debut at number one on the New York Times bestseller list.
Money, lies and television—and more money—are a toxic combination.
As our bus rumbled through the countryside, we sensed a new danger building. Our opponents had created an entirely new medium—dozens of outright lies adding up to one big lie, all footnoted and backed by signed affidavits to strike the pose of being meticulously researched.
I remember standing with our press secretary behind the reception desk at a tiny motel. Page by page, a faxed version of the book, titled Unfit for Command, was coming in to us.
I’d pull each page off the fax machine before it cascaded into the paper tray. The book was filled with lies. The primary author, John O’Neill, implied to have known me from Swift boats; in fact, he had appeared on the scene long after I’d left. Nothing about his reappearance was a coincidence.
People who weren’t there were polluting the airwaves with lies, trying to undermine the service of every one of us who was. I was seething. I called my campaign manager. She believed that the advertising buy was minimal, but we were tracking it. John Edwards said the Republicans were just trying to get us to “chase a rabbit.”
None of this reassured me. I had lived through too much during the Nixon years to forget what Mark Twain said: “A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth pulls its boots on.” But the campaign made sure the truth started to kick back. The so-called affidavits from SBVT members began to fall apart when the press questioned them. Incredibly, the only member of the SBVT who was there on February 28, 1969, testified the exact opposite of what they alleged. Larry Lee, a crewman on PCF-23, told a reporter, “I have no problems with [Kerry] getting the Silver Star.”
And yet the ads stayed on the air.
Bill Rood, a Republican and a reporter for the Chicago Tribune for decades, was the skipper of PCF-23. He was awarded the Bronze Star with a “V” device to wear with the medal, recognizing his valor in combat and for his leadership that day. Each member of his crew won the Navy Commendation Medal. For years, Bill had stayed out of politics, but he felt compelled to write down exactly what happened that day and rebut the smears. It ran as a front-page story.
But the ads stayed on the air.
The Republican smear book alleged that the only enemy combatant that day was a kid in a loincloth, but when investigative reporters looked at the official Navy after-action report, based on the debriefing of all present, submitted by the senior officer on the Coast Guard cutter, they discovered proof that there was “heavy small arms fire” and three confirmed enemy dead even before the troops were landed and the enemy was overrun.
But the lies continued.
Confronted by the media, the SBVT’s stories changed. If the Navy records contradicted the lies of their book, they’d say I must have written the records. When confronted by our superior officer’s signature on the records, they’d say it must have been forged. When reporters confronted members of SBVT who themselves had received military decorations for events they now claimed never happened, they’d just go to ground and stop returning phone calls. John McCain denounced them, but they continued.
And still the ads stayed on the air.
Admiral Zumwalt, commander of all naval forces in Vietnam, had stated that what happened that day in 1969 “stood out among heroes as acts of total heroism.” But Admiral Zumwalt, who had defended me in 1996, was dead. Now these men were discrediting his words and his legacy. The investigative journalists did a brilliant job of pushing the truth to the surface.
But the ads continued.
Then the ultimate debunking: the media discovered Captain Hoffmann’s 1969 message that went up and down the chain of command praising me and my crew, stating,
1. The extremely successful raid and land sweep conducted along the Rach Dong Cung which demonstrated superb coordination and aggressive tactics stands as a shining example of completely overwhelming the enemy. 2. The tactic of attack and assault thoroughly surprised the enemy in his spider holes and proved to be immensely effective in rousting him into the open. This devastating application of the firepower of the Swifts may be the most efficacious method of dealing with small numbers of ambushers. . . . 3. This operation did unrepairable [sic] damage to the enemy in this area. Well done.
Imagine that—a contemporaneous “attaboy” from the man who was now conspiring with the Republicans to destroy me and my reputation.
It was extraordinary. They were lying about me, lying about themselves, lying about history—a history they knew was documented, in some cases by themselves, but always by the Navy they purported to love and respect.
But still the lies continued.
We kept fighting back with the facts in the national newspapers. The New York Times, Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, Wall Street Journal and others all ran front-page stories laying out Navy documents, service records, medical records and more. Every member of my crew who had engaged in any of the actions contradicted the reports about the attacks.
While the investigative journalists told the truth on the front pages, the pundits on cable ran everything through the prism of politics. They debated whether it had been a campaign blunder to tout my military service as a qualification for the presidency. Had we brought this on ourselves? It was absurd. It was a little bit like saying that because voters in 2000 respected John McCain’s years as a POW, it was okay for smear tactics to be used in South Carolina insinuating that he was the “Manchurian candidate.” Didn’t the truth matter?
Voters in August were watching the news, looking at the ads, seeing this book with its scary title, Unfit for Command, on the bookshelves and in storefront windows, and their conclusion was “I’m uneasy about this guy.”
Winning the argument didn’t matter much. This was a fight for public hearts and minds—and guts. The SBVT disgraced themselves, were exposed as liars, but they were creating a question mark for voters. The presidency is about character. These lies had created a question about mine.
I was champing at the bit to answer the lies on television. Everything in my gut told me that when a lie is being repeatedly exploited on TV, it must be refuted on TV. But one plain and simple fact was that because we were operating within campaign finance reform limits, we had limited money. If we spent it in August, we wouldn’t have enough money to run a national campaign for president in October—if we made it that far. Spend it now and we might have to pull out of Ohio or Florida.
Once I decided to stay within the finance system, I was always going to be fighting with one arm tied behind my back, especially when I faced a calculated attack machine of the combined Republican apparatus and right wing.
Within the leadership of the campaign there was a stro
ng view that the lies had been exposed. Some argued that there was no need to “waste” money on ads regarding something the public wasn’t concerned about. “It’s not showing up in the polling data” was a phrase I heard several times when I called in to ask why we weren’t on the air.
One night in a hotel late in the campaign, I couldn’t sleep. We were in Ohio, and I was restless. I turned on the television and there was the Swift boat ad blatantly lying about me. If I were a citizen watching that ad, if that was my principal frame of reference, I wouldn’t vote for me.
I called our headquarters and again made my argument. Again, I was told we needed that money. “It would be dangerous for the campaign and irresponsible to waste it now” was the sentiment. Some of the things going through my mind were admonitions I had received early in the lead-up to the campaign. “Don’t be your own campaign manager,” people warned me. “You’ve got to trust the professionals.”
“You need to think about this in a cold-blooded way,” I was told by a very well-intentioned campaign staffer. He didn’t like that I was raising my voice about it.
“I lived this—if I can’t get hot about this, what the hell can I get mad about?” I barked back.
“The press doesn’t believe the lies, they know this is about 1971,” my press aide told me.
I sighed. I knew, of course, that a lot of guys came home from Vietnam and hated the anti-war movement. No parades, no thank-you for their service—it all had become one big feeling of having been mistreated. The irony is that I understood that undercurrent of resentment. Much of what brought VVAW together was that feeling of alienation. It’s just that we blamed the politicians and the war, not our fellow veterans. But no resentment of protests gave anyone fair license to lie about me and to lie even about themselves.
No matter what the campaign’s polling was showing, I was sure the lies were having an effect. I’d pull into a campaign rally and see “Hanoi John” signs lining the motorcade path. Something ugly had been unleashed. We talked about sending John Edwards out to defend me, but somehow it seemed that the speech would be diluted by the vice presidential candidate himself and delivered without passion or conviction. My team started to ask whether Edwards was capable of carrying only a positive message. My communications director, Stephanie Cutter, wanted me to fight back myself, as did the staff there who knew me best.
In the end, when I look back, I have no one to get mad at but myself—and I’ve kicked myself many times. It was my campaign. These experts gave me their best judgment as to what they thought I should do. In the final analysis it was my decision—no one else’s—to overrule them or not.
What I should have done was stop the campaign, stand up with my crew and answer every lie in detail and create and air ads to run in every market where theirs ran.
I should have delivered a thoughtful, personal speech about the war, taken people back to that period, put the war into context as Barack Obama had with his personalized speech about the Reverend Wright controversy in 2008.
But even as I write these words, a part of me wonders if the speech would have been anything but cathartic. The year 2004 was a time of division and confusion, and I wonder if such a speech could have been digested in that time after 9/11, with troops in the field fighting two wars, one of which seemed at times eerily like Vietnam.
I can still hear Ted Kennedy’s old saying that “if you’re explaining, you’re losing,” but the better part of me still feels I should have given that speech. I should have put it all in context, not just to win the campaign, but to try to end the war over the war.
Time is the one resource you can never get back. It’s truly finite. No one takes sick days in presidential races. Sleep is allowed only after the election, and you sleep a whole lot more soundly if you’ve just won. It’s also true that if you’re not hammering away at your message, if you’re spinning your wheels explaining why the other side’s message isn’t accurate, well, then you’re on the defensive, and defense isn’t how you win a race. There’s a reason both of those axioms apply approximately 99 percent of the time. This was the 1 percent of the time when they didn’t.
It turns out that sometimes you can lose by not explaining, and sometimes, like it or not, you have to address something that’s too big and too important to become just another firefight between campaigns.
Bill Clinton told me that no one wants to hear about a war thirty years ago. I understood what he was saying. He was looking at the same polling we were, that voters said they wanted to know more about the economy and wanted less bickering between the campaigns. But it was easy for Clinton to say. This issue wasn’t seminal to who he was, but it was personal to me and hit all the raw nerves in my body.
At its core, it was a matter of honor. The friendship of the men I’d served with on PCF-44 and PCF-94 told the truth, but I didn’t want anyone anywhere to doubt that the truth really was the truth. It came back to what my mother had told me before I’d begun the journey of the campaign and before she’d passed away: integrity.
I couldn’t rationalize how good men could make things up about another veteran when they knew the truth. Shortly before August turned into September, I called one of them, Bob Brandt. I’d seen his name on the list of the SBVT. Bob was a character, a big, burly man whose call sign in Vietnam was “Friar Tuck.” I liked him. He served his whole career in the Navy until he hung up his spurs as a commander. I’d seen him in 2003 at our Swift boat veterans’ reunion in Norfolk, Virginia, not long after my cancer surgery. We had hugged and laughed together. There was a warmth in the room, as we had all just watched the film that Don Droz’s daughter, Tracy, had made about her search for her father’s story—the father she had known only as an infant, the little girl Don had told to “be good, smile pretty.” So it was a punch to the gut when I saw Bob Brandt’s name on the list of vets discrediting my service, and I called him from my living room in Boston late one night.
The booming voice at the other end of the line was instantly familiar. “Is that Friar Tuck?” I said. He realized right away it was me. I told him I’d heard he might be getting involved with the SBVT and that I wanted to call him and talk to him because he knew that what they were saying wasn’t true. Bob cut to the chase: he told me he had been mad at me for thirty years over what I said about the war. It wasn’t a long conversation. I asked him to separate how we felt about the war from how we felt about each other, about Swift boats and about our service. I offered to get together, man-to-man—privately. I could tell he wanted to get off the line. About an hour later, my campaign called me because the Drudge Report had flashed one of its tantalizing headlines, saying that I was calling around pressuring veterans to change their stories about the SBVT. It posted an inflammatory mischaracterization of our conversation. How quickly word of a private conversation had made its way to the big Republican news megaphone at Drudge. The smear machine was in full throttle, and it wasn’t going to stop.
There’s a lot that revolted and angered me about the SBVT smears and their effect on my campaign. What still sticks in my craw is the way these men who served on Swift boats themselves turned the words “Swift boat” into a pejorative. It is an insult to the 3,600 men—3,000 enlisted and 600 officers—who served as Swifties.
After the campaign, I started hearing political operatives use “Swift boat” as shorthand for smears and lies about someone’s core character. It rankled me, because to all who served with distinction on those rivers, who risked their lives every day, and for the families of men like Don Droz who died on those rivers, it was horrific to think of their units and their divisions becoming a synonym for “to lie.”
The unavoidable fact was that August had knocked us on our butts. It began with the Swift boat assault and ended with the Republican convention. I needed to get off the mat and back into the fight.
• • •
“YOU CAN ASK a focus group whether they’d vote for a candidate who farts in public, and they’ll say no. It may st
ink, but it sure is effective at clearing the room. What voters tell a focus group they want and what works aren’t always the same thing.”
It was an observation from former president Clinton at his folksy best. He’d asked what the campaign’s polling showed about our best options fighting back against President Bush. The research showed that voters said they were turned off by negative campaigning and it would backfire. Only President Clinton could reduce that nonsense to one colorful expression. Howell Heflin, eat your heart out.
President Clinton was lying in bed in a New York hospital room, awaiting heart surgery to clear a blockage. I was lying on a hotel bed a thousand miles away looking for ways to clear what had become a blockage in my path to the presidency.
I’d called Clinton earlier in the day to wish him well as he entered the hospital, and we’d quickly ended up talking about the campaign. His love of politics was visceral. He generously offered to connect again later that night and even invited some of my campaign team to dial in as well and compare notes.
The polls confirmed what Clinton had said, not that we needed much reminder at this point. We were all wearing the scars of an August in which the airwaves and cable television had been chockablock full of lies about my military record, a month when the Republican convention crowds thought it was clever to wear purple camouflage Band-Aids on their cheeks to mock the severity of the wounds I received in Vietnam. It was amazing how low their party stooped. I had volunteered to go to Vietnam. Bush didn’t. Cheney didn’t. I didn’t control who shot when or where and what kind of wound I received. The same shrapnel that went into an arm or leg of any number of our crew could just as easily have penetrated the brain or an eye. It was stunning to see a party of a war of choice in Iraq mocking the consequences of combat. Politics had clearly entered a dark, new chapter.
The bottom was falling out in several states that had been competitive coming out of the Democratic convention. August had badly damaged our campaign. All the numbers were down. States like Missouri and Virginia, which we had fought so hard to make newly competitive, were falling fast, possibly irreparably. But most alarmingly, we were hemorrhaging in Ohio, Florida and places we needed to win the presidency.