by Robert Coram
But neither could the former Marine. One of Sherwood’s closest friends was Bob McMahon, another Vietnam combat veteran who was a Democrat and the mayor of Media, Pennsylvania. McMahon told Sherwood to stop talking and to do the job himself.
Sherwood’s ideas revolved around television; nothing else reached so many people so quickly. Perhaps a documentary. But who would be in it? Someone who had not only a military background but a background that included the credentials to speak the truth about Kerry. Participants had to be highly decorated officers whose records were so exemplary that whatever they said would have ecclesiastical weight. They had to be men whose place in the pantheon of military heroes was such that their words simply could not be questioned.
There was only one such group. A documentary exposing Kerry inevitably would be seen as Republicans versus Democrats. Only the NAM-POWs had the moral authority to say that this was a matter of principle, that it was personal and not political.
But the POWs, as a group, do not get involved in politics. Nor are they the sort of men a former Marine sergeant could call on the telephone and say, “Hey, buddy, want to go on television?”
Through McMahon, Sherwood was able to post a notice on the NAM-POW Web site. He gave a brief synopsis of who he was and what he wanted to do, and he asked the old warriors if they would be willing to march one more time.
He was overwhelmed by their response.
SOON Sherwood had a list of POWs who would talk on camera. Bud Day and Leo Thorsness, both MOH recipients, were at the top of his list. For three weeks in July and August, Sherwood crisscrossed the country from Pennsylvania to California to Florida, driven by a seemingly impossible deadline: if it were to make a difference, the documentary had to be edited and ready to go on the air by early September.
Sherwood had no money and there was no time to organize a fund-raising effort. He maxed out his credit card, bumped up the limit, maxed it out again, bumped it up again, and kept taping. His life was airports and taxis and hauling heavy equipment. He was rumpled and exhausted, and several times he fell asleep during interviews. It was no schedule for a man who had a pacemaker implanted three months earlier. Sherwood did not have time to review the tapes between flights, and every time McMahon called to ask how things were going, he replied, “I don’t know. We may have a dozen hours of nothing.”
When Sherwood came to Bud Day’s house, Day took one look at him and said, “Pal, I think you need to get some rest.”
The interview with Day galvanized Sherwood. Immediately afterward, he called McMahon and said, “Colonel Day had his war paint on.”
“War paint? What are you talking about?”
“The medal. He’s wearing the medal. And if you saw the steel in his eyes, the controlled resolve in his voice. It is unmistakable. This is a warrior locked again in mortal combat, no quarter expected or given. I almost pity John Kerry.” He paused. “We have a documentary.”
IN the middle of the taping, Sherwood gave in to numerous requests to put up a Web site. Throughout his professional career Sherwood had gauged response by circulation and by how many faces were in front of a television set. It was impossible to quantify the Internet, and he was lukewarm toward the idea. But on August 4, www.stolenhonor.com was up and running.
Almost from the moment the site became active, dozens of military sites began linking to it. In less than a week, the site was recording a thousand hits per day, then two thousand, then three thousand.
The reaction fell into two distinct categories. The biggest group consisted of those born after 1971 and who were thus unaware of Kerry’s antiwar activities. In this group there was genuine surprise and anger that a man campaigning as a war hero had gone so far in his denunciation of Vietnam veterans. The second, older group vaguely remembered what Kerry had done but were unaware of the consequences and the significance of his activities as an international spokesman for the antiwar movement and that he was such a major author of the image of the Vietnam soldier as a criminal.
While the Web site took off like a rocket, the documentary was running into serious problems. Hollywood, which usually falls all over itself providing film clips to almost anyone who wants them, would give him nothing. C-SPAN would give him nothing. Even local television stations would not send him old Vietnam footage. He eventually found some generic footage. But interviews would comprise most of the documentary, and “talking heads” were considered deadly dull. Plus, a significant part of the American population had not been born, or were infants, in 1971. So Sherwood had to do a lot of filling in, a lot of background, which is even more dull than talking heads.
Once finished, Sherwood’s documentary would have been ridiculed by a freshman in a broadcasting class. The production was as simple as it was primitive — just a bunch of old men sitting there talking of things that happened to them back in 1971, of the effect John Kerry’s Senate testimony had on them as POWs, of why they believed he should not be commander in chief. To a man, they were calm and soft-spoken.
It was near the end before Bud Day appeared. With his Medal of Honor around his neck, he looked straight into the camera and said of John Kerry, “This man committed an act of treason. He lied, he besmirched our name, and he did it for self-interest. And now he wants us to forget? I can never forget. Treason is a crime that can never be forgiven.”
Sherwood called the documentary Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal. Broke, Sherwood transferred the forty-three-minute documentary to DVD format, produced a few thousand copies, and put them for sale on his Web site.
The first showing of the documentary was at the Military Officers Association of America building in Washington on September 9. The large ballroom was packed with former officers and their families, POWs, and a smattering of congressional staffers. Reporters lined the back wall and clogged the doorways.
After the documentary was over and the credits had rolled, there was a period of silence. Sherwood thought his documentary had bombed.
Then the room exploded in applause. Almost everyone in the room stood up and continued the ovation.
A former Vietnam combat officer walked up to Sherwood and said, “After seeing this, one thing is certain. No one who has ever served in uniform, in war or in peacetime, could ever pull the lever for John Kerry. He might not vote for Bush. But he cannot, will not, vote for Kerry.”
It seemed that as soon as it debuted, the documentary was knocked out of the news cycle by hurricanes in Florida and then by the presidential debates.
But the documentary that in theory was primitive and dull and flat was, in practice, electrifying. This was a view of history, a view of the Vietnam War, a view of John Kerry, that many people had never seen. And it was deeply disturbing. People who had never been in the military sent Sherwood e-mails saying, “I don’t want to believe that this is true. But those men, the POWs, are real. I believe them.” Bud Day was receiving upwards of three hundred e-mails daily about the documentary. Wherever he went around Fort Walton Beach, he was stopped by people who wanted to talk about the documentary. “I did not know that about John Kerry,” they said.
Almost all the buzz was below the media’s radar, although Frank Rich, a columnist for the New York Times, did write about the documentary. He dismissed it as “a hatchet job.” On September 21, Alessandra Stanley reviewed the documentary in the Times and said it was a “histrionic, often specious, and deeply sad film . . . ,” but — and this was a crucial bit of insight — it will “help viewers better understand the rage fueling the unhappy band of brothers who oppose Mr. Kerry’s candidacy and his claim to heroism.”
Except for Stanley’s review, however, the documentary was virtually ignored by networks and major dailies. They gushed over Fahrenheit 9/11, Michael Moore’s emotional polemic against George Bush, as significant social commentary but considered Stolen Honor insignificant or a cheap shot financed by ultrapartisan Republicans.
Before he retired, Sherwood was one of those people described as a “disting
uished member of the Washington press corps.” In addition to winning a Pulitzer and a Peabody, he wore the reporter’s ultimate badge of honor: he had been jailed for refusing to name his sources. Now his old colleagues either ignored him, reported false information about his production company, or were indignant that he was picking on their candidate.
The reporters who did call Sherwood were openly contemptuous of him as a Republican lapdog, and all they wanted to know was who financed the DVD. They would not accept that it was a solo effort on his part. A reporter for the Los Angeles Times called three or four times and was so adamant in insisting that the NRA was behind the DVD that a frustrated Sherwood finally said, “I haven’t taken a dime from the NRA. I haven’t heard from the NRA. I don’t know anyone at the NRA. But if the bastards want to write a check, I’ll take it.”
In the flurry of the presidential race, it was easy to think of the documentary and the Swift Boat campaign as one and the same. There was some cross-fertilization, but they were two separate groups. While the Swifties were organized as a Section 527 organization, Sherwood’s production company was incorporated as a for-profit Pennsylvania S corporation. He did this for two reasons: First, while raising money as a Section 527 organization or a 501 (c) (3) nonprofit would have been much easier, to do so would have put the documentary in the political category. Second, Sherwood did not want what he described as a “historical news documentary” to be subject to federal election restrictions. The Swifties and Sherwood, until they combined forces in October, not only were separate groups but had separate agendas: the Swifties went after Kerry’s medals and combat records while the documentary went after his 1971 Senate testimony.
In late September, the Swifties were still wallowing. But they were sitting on millions of dollars. Sherwood’s documentary had no traction, and he was broke.
Then, in quick succession, came a series of events that turned everything around.
The Sinclair Broadcast Group, a company with sixty-two television stations, announced it was going to run Stolen Honor in mid-October. Meanwhile, the Swifties talked to the POWs about joining forces. The truth is that while the Swifties’ attack on Kerry’s military record and his medals had hurt the Democrat, it also had backfired — the Navy will not retract medals — then stalled out. The media lost interest. Now, in an effort to regain momentum, the Swifties asked the POWs who had appeared in Stolen Honor to join them. On October 2, the two groups met in a Washington, DC, studio to tape a series of television ads.
Several in the room outranked Day. But he took charge and set the tone of the gathering. Today, there will be many who will laugh when they hear what Day said: “We have no choice in this battle. This is something each of us must do. But I want it understood by all of you that this is not political. This is a matter of principle. And it must not be tainted with politics. We will simply tell of our own experiences. No one in this room must gain anything from the administration. And to prove that it is not political, we must continue this battle after the election. No matter how the election goes, we must stay together to see that Vietnam veterans get the respect they deserve. At bottom, that is what this is all about, the truth of Vietnam — regaining the honor of those who fought in Vietnam.”
There is a story about British admiral Lord Nelson that, even if apocryphal, is relevant here. The story has it that during a cold night at sea, one of Nelson’s subordinates offered him a cloak against the cold. He refused, saying his zeal for king and country kept him warm. Nelson, because he was Nelson, could utter such lofty beliefs with absolute sincerity. So could Bud Day. And he could sound so old-fashioned, so nineteenth century, in a way that resonated with his comrades but which utterly baffled the Frank Riches of the media world.
The format of the television ads was simple and doubtless was influenced by Sherwood’s documentary. Again, the old men simply told their stories — gut-wrenching stories that often brought them to tears.
One of the most powerful commercials shot that weekend was one in which Bud Day, Medal of Honor around his neck, looked straight into the camera and asked John Kerry, “How can you expect our sons and daughters to follow you when you condemned their fathers and grandfathers?”
The day after the ads were taped, the Sinclair plans to air the documentary leaked. The Kerry campaign immediately made the documentary an FCC issue — that is, if it ran, they would challenge Sinclair’s broadcasting license. When eighteen Democratic senators stood on the floor of the U.S. Senate and denounced the documentary, Sinclair backed off and said it would run only part of Stolen Honor inside a broader program.
Since the Garden of Eden, people have wanted forbidden fruit. And now, in the second week of October, not only were the new Swift Boat ads appearing but Stolen Honor was picking up steam.
Orders for the DVD flooded into Sherwood’s Web site. His site, which had been getting around three thousand hits per day, experienced a jump to around a million hits per day. In the next few weeks, Sherwood said, he recorded fifty-one million hits. And Sherwood, the man who thought he knew and understood the media, realized he knew nothing. The Web site had tapped into something he did not understand. The more the old media attacked Sherwood and the documentary, the more the new media wrapped their arms around him.
On October 16, Kerry loyalists filed two lawsuits against Sherwood. The intent was to completely shut down distribution of the documentary. Kerry loyalists made it clear they would sue anyone who aired the program. Movie theaters canceled plans to exhibit it.
When a theater just outside Philadelphia announced it would show the documentary, Kerry loyalists responded with threats of violence and civil unrest. The theater canceled the showing. Two other theaters in a Philadelphia suburb canceled showings for security reasons. The Kerry campaign even threatened to sue those who showed the documentary in private clubs or organizations.
Then Sherwood did something remarkable: he put the documentary on his Web site, where it could be watched for free. He announced he would grant full rights, without fee or restriction, to anyone who wanted to show Stolen Honor. Unlimited free usage.
It was the tipping point.
Through phone lines and cable modems and DSL wiring, Stolen Honor went underground. Suddenly it was being shown widely in Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Iowa, all crucial states in the election. The documentary was aired in private homes or hastily organized packed houses in movie theaters. Local Republican clubs all around America were showing it. It was being watched in firehouses and in city halls. In Fort Walton Beach, Bud Day’s Lutheran minister and church officials stood on street corners and passed out flyers telling when Stolen Honor would be aired. They packed the local civic center.
The traditional media either knew nothing of this or dismissed the showings as insignificant gatherings of Republican zealots. All the while, Kerry loyalists darted all over the country, threatening lawsuits anywhere Stolen Honor was aired. But it was like trying to stop a virus; it was showing everywhere, but they rarely heard about it in time to do anything. The more that Democrats complained about how underhanded and unfair and unethical it was to air the documentary, the more people wanted to see it. And now, in addition to the documentary, the Swifties were back — and the POWs were with them.
George Will, the nationally syndicated columnist for the Washington Post, saw a copy of the DVD and later said he had thought that “it was deeply powerful; that it would be — as it was — deeply and properly injurious to Kerry; that it would have a difficult time getting the mainstream media to credit it as a legitimate part of the campaign.”
He was right on every count.
Conventional wisdom has it that in a presidential campaign there are too many special interest groups and too many issues to isolate any group or any issue and say it was the deciding factor in the campaign. Nevertheless, both Time and Newsweek said Kerry’s inability to deal with the Swifties and the POWs ultimately cost him the election. A top Kerry campaign official later said on nationa
l television that the campaign’s biggest mistake was underestimating the Swifties.
There was much gloating over the Internet in the days after the election. Had mainstream media or Kerry loyalists read the postings, they would have dismissed them as mawkish conservative ramblings. To do so would be to miss the point that these were the sentiments of untold thousands. For his part, Day fired off a long e-mail saying veterans had done something unprecedented in political history: they had turned around a presidential election. He ended with “We had the right message: Hanoi John and Hanoi Jane.” Russ Vaughn, a member of the fabled 101st Airborne Division who had served in Vietnam, published a widely circulated poem that told how the Swifties had won the “last battle of Vietnam.” The poem ended with “To our Brothers, forever, on that long black wall / You’ve been vindicated now, one and all.”
But the most poignant posting was from a proud Vietnam vet. “Kerry’s defeat,” he said, “was the parade we never got.”
Epilogue
THE life of those men whose time on earth justifies a biography follows a necessary pattern: birth, early years and education, followed by the reason for the story — the man’s personal or professional accomplishments — and then his death, which offers the opportunity to put the span of his years in perspective.
With Bud Day, such a progression is impossible. In 2006, he turned eighty-one and was still as active in his law practice and as involved in military-related events and as outspoken about public and political affairs as he had been at seventy-one. Or sixty-one. Or fifty-one.
So perhaps the best way to end the story of a life that is far from ending is a series of vignettes — small stories that, like stitches in a tapestry, comprise the ongoing saga of Bud Day.
DAY is in Washington for a NAM-POW reunion and is annoyed that McCain has not showed up. He called McCain several times before the reunion and McCain said he would be there. The hotel where the reunion is held is about five minutes from the Capitol and no more than ten minutes from McCain’s condominium.