Dupes

by Paul Kengor

  Really, the old salts at CPUSA had done a much better job of duping than these amateurish revolutionaries of the ’60s. With the Weathermen trumpeting their plans for violent revolution, even the most delusional LSD droppers could recognize that the leaders’ objectives were far different from their own.

  Many of the Weathermen, however, would not end up paying for their mistakes—or for their crimes. Aside from Kathy Boudin, David Gilbert, and Judy Clark, most of the comrades eluded prison time. Ultimately, Bernardine Dohrn and Bill Ayers avoided jail because of charges dropped due to prosecutorial problems. That escape from due justice has since prompted Ayers to celebrate: “Guilty as hell, free as a bird! America is a great country!”85

  Free as a bird to pursue what? Ayers and others may have received the answer to that question as early as 1967, at a pre-Weatherman SDS conference held in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Ayers's academic home. The conference, held July 14–16, 1967, was staged by SDS's Radical Education Project and titled “Radicals in the Professions.”86 Dr. Quentin Young, the “SDS doctor” who would turn congressional hearings into a circus the following year, spoke on the importance of radicals entering the field of health care. But at the conference, the student radicals paid particular attention to the American educational establishment, especially higher education—and specifically departments of education, where they could train the future teachers of America.

  Bill Ayers would eventually follow the Deweyan tradition of ushering in social and political change through education rather than politics—the latter of which had failed him and his fellow Marxist-Leninists. He and Dohrn both sought out the ivory tower again. They believed they had a lot to impart to America's youth and its future. Rudd, too, eventually ended up in education, teaching and lecturing at colleges.87 Basically, almost all of them would take that path.

  And the contacts they would make in that capacity are nothing short of awe-inspiring. One of them, yet another product of Columbia University, would—forty years after that conference in Ann Arbor—become a political rallying point for the suddenly reborn SDS and Weather Underground “progressives.” He was a beacon for Ayers, Dohrn, Rudd, Hayden, Klonsky, Machtinger, Jones, and more. They would again come to Chicago, this time with a very different take on the man the Democrats were looking to send to the presidency. In 2008 they would organize yet again, this time working within the system, to help make this man—Barack Obama—president of the United States of America.

  To achieve that goal, they would need to be very careful in publicly expressing their true feelings and motivations. Otherwise they would risk driving away the masses, especially traditional Democrats, moderates, and crossover voters. They had made that mistake in the initial SDS split, losing the support of a huge number of non-Communists. In 2008 they would be vigilant not to repeat the error.

  But that was still decades down the road. For now, they would need to wait. The twentieth century was far from finished.

  17

  JOHN KERRY—AND GENGHIS KHAN

  Lest anyone doubt that the USSR and its satellites manipulated the anti–Vietnam War movement in the United States, consider the testimony of one of the Soviet bloc's highest-ranking propagandists, Lieutenant General Ion Mihai Pacepa, a top Romanian intelligence official who worked closely with the KGB.

  “During the Vietnam War,” said Pacepa (who, as noted, ultimately defected to the United States), “we spread vitriolic stories around the world, pretending that America's presidents sent Genghis Khan–style barbarian soldiers to Vietnam who raped at random, taped electrical wires to human genitals, cut off limbs, blew up bodies and razed entire villages. Those weren't facts. They were our tales.” Nonetheless, said Pacepa, millions of Americans “ended up being convinced their own president, not communism, was the enemy.”1

  According to Pacepa, it was the odious Yuri Andropov, then head of the KGB (and later the Soviet supreme leader), who conceived this dezinformatsiya war—disinformation campaign—against the United States. The Soviets devoted exorbitant spending to the cause. Andropov told Pacepa that “people are more willing to believe smut than holiness.” Certainly that was often the case for the emotional Left.

  “As far as I'm concerned,” Pacepa said elsewhere, “the KGB gave birth to the antiwar movement in America.”2

  Pacepa probably gave too much credit to the KGB and not enough to LBJ. The Johnson administration's mismanagement of the war (and, of course, the draft) was what sent those college kids into the streets in the first place. That said, the KGB exacerbated the discontent as much as possible, and received a helping hand from American Communists.

  What the Soviet propagandists needed was American suckers, and they got them in spades from the non-Communist left—from those peace-loving liberals who yet again were far more suspicious of the anti-Communists than of the Communists.

  Most of the Vietnam War protesters recoiled at the thought of donning a military uniform for their country at the time. Some of them came to hate America as much as they hated the war, literally spitting on returning men in uniform. Others, like the Weathermen, went further, hatching plans to kill GIs.

  But one of America's most famous war protesters actually put on the uniform and stood for America in Vietnam. Because of that, his denunciations of the war carried far more credibility than did those of the pampered radicals at Columbia.

  His comments, offered during well-publicized hearings in the U.S. Senate, must have thrilled Moscow—for in condemning the U.S. handling of the war, the Vietnam veteran inadvertently repeated the Soviets’ disinformation line. He used language strikingly similar to Pacepa's.

  This Vietnam vet and headlining war protester was, oddly enough, another twenty-first-century Democratic Party presidential nominee. Like Barack Obama, this figure—John Kerry—provides a fascinating link between the past and present.

  John Kerry Testifies

  On April 22, 1971, John Kerry, who had returned from his tour of duty in Vietnam the previous year, testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Helping to arrange the testimony was Senator Ted Kennedy, whose 1962 campaign had included a young volunteer named John Kerry. Kennedy introduced Kerry to Democratic senator J. William Fulbright at a private fundraising event at the home of antiwar Democratic senator Philip A. Hart of Michigan.3 Fulbright was chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

  Kerry's appearance came at a pivotal moment in the war. At the time, Congress was considering at least seven legislative proposals relating to Vietnam.4 In other words, continued funding for the war hung in the balance. Whether that funding was increased or decreased would signal whether the United States tried to win or opted for withdrawal, and whether the troops in the field got more or fewer weapons to fight the enemy and defend themselves.

  The day Kerry testified, the Senate hearing room was packed with reporters and clicking cameras. The lieutenant, who was still in the U.S. Navy Reserve at the time, went before Fulbright's committee and dumped a flaming supply of verbal napalm on American troops.

  Presenting himself as a representative of a small organization known as Vietnam Veterans Against the War—and “of a very much larger group of veterans in this country”—Kerry stated:

  I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.…

  They told stories [of how] they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones 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 p
articular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country.5

  Kerry's testimony hit Vietnam vets like carpet bombing. He had claimed that some American soldiers had acted as brutally as Genghis Khan—widely considered one of the worst beasts in all of history, the very embodiment of tyrants. It was a damning indictment of U.S. troops and what they were fighting against in Southeast Asia.

  Kerry's blistering claims made headlines across America and throughout the world. Overnight, his face was everywhere. He was inundated with media requests, which he unhesitatingly accepted, speaking to the likes of Meet the Press and being profiled by 60 Minutes.6 He was an instant celebrity, discussed at NBC, CBS, the Washington Post—and even the White House.

  President Richard Nixon was soon discussing Kerry with aides, as we now know from the released “Nixon Tapes.” In a meeting with Chief of Staff H. R. Haldeman and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, Nixon gave Kerry a backhanded compliment, distinguishing him from the other “bearded weirdos” in the antiwar movement, and conceding that he had been “extremely effective” in his Senate appearance.7 At the same time, the president doubted not only Kerry's medals for his service but the very war crimes that Kerry alleged. When Haldeman spoke of “shoot[ing] babies out of women's arms,” Nixon, a Navy veteran himself, said dismissively, “Oh, stop that. People in the Navy don't do things [like that].” Also, in a telephone call with aide Charles Colson, the president called Kerry a “phony.”8

  The young John Kerry had made a huge impact. When the long-haired, grungy hippies leveled such nasty accusations against American boys, it had little effect on Joe Sixpack and Mom and Pop; they expected the radicals to make radical statements. But to hear an actual veteran say such things? A decorated veteran? This was a serious wake-up call.

  Undeniably, Kerry's reports upset America's troops abroad. His words badly hurt their morale and mission. And the testimony must have delighted the enemy, from Ho Chi Minh City to Moscow.

  Had John Kerry spoken the truth—or, more precisely, what he thought was truth? That was the rub, as Kerry's claims were immediately disputed.

  Firing Back

  One of the most dramatic challenges to Kerry's testimony came two months later, during the nationally televised Dick Cavett Show on June 30, 1971. The high-profile veteran appeared on the program against John E. O'Neill, who had taken command of Swift Boat PCF-94 after Kerry. O'Neill vigorously countered his predecessor's allegations—and has never stopped.

  So incensed was O'Neill that more than thirty years later he and roughly two hundred other Swift Boat veterans organized to publicly challenge Kerry's claims. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, as the group called itself, held a press conference in Washington, D.C., on May 4, 2004. That summer, while Kerry campaigned as the Democratic presidential nominee, O'Neill wrote a best-selling book laying out at great length where he and the other Swift Boat veterans judged that Kerry had erred. In fact, the book, Unfit for Command, called Kerry “a liar and a fraud, unfit to be the commander in chief of the United States of America.”9 These “swifties” believed that a grave injustice had been made against their honor, that Kerry had impugned the very character and humanity of American troops with vicious falsehoods.

  The goal here is not to try to resolve whether, and if so where, John Kerry lied or manufactured abuses by fellow soldiers; whether he was simply mistaken on certain points, reporting false claims by others without knowing they were false; or the merits of John O'Neill's counterclaims. Rather, the interest here is in dupery. Was John Kerry duped, unwittingly repeating disinformation from the Communist propaganda machine?

  According to General Pacepa, the high-level Soviet-bloc intelligence official, Kerry probably was a dupe. Pacepa, of course, affirmed that the Soviets created malicious lies intended to dishonor American servicemen and undermine the U.S. position in Vietnam. But he went deeper, zeroing in on Kerry's “Genghis Khan” claim:

  The exact sources of that assertion should be tracked down. Kerry also ought to be asked who, exactly, told him any such thing, and what it was, exactly, that they said they did in Vietnam. Statutes of limitation now protect these individuals from prosecution for any such admissions. Or did Senator Kerry merely hear allegations of that sort as hearsay bandied about by members of antiwar groups (much of which has since been discredited)?

  To me, this assertion sounds exactly like the disinformation line that the Soviets were sowing worldwide throughout the Vietnam era. KGB priority number one at that time was to damage American power, judgment, and credibility. One of its favorite tools was the fabrication of such evidence as photographs and “news reports” about invented American war atrocities. These tales were purveyed in KGB-operated magazines that would then flack them to reputable news organizations. Often enough, they would be picked up. News organizations are notoriously sloppy about verifying their sources. All in all, it was amazingly easy for Soviet-bloc spy organizations to fake many such reports and spread them around the free world.

  As a spy chief and a general in the former Soviet satellite of Romania, I produced the very same vitriol Kerry repeated to the U.S. Congress almost word for word and planted it in leftist movements throughout Europe.10

  Pointing to some of the international “peace” organizations that the KGB loaded with mendacious anti-American propaganda on the Vietnam War, Pacepa stated: “The quote from Senator Kerry is unmistakable Soviet-style sloganeering from this period. I believe it is very likely a direct quote from one of these organizations’ propaganda sheets.”

  The Usual Suspects

  General Pacepa rightly suggested that the sources of John Kerry's 1971 assertions should be tracked down. But in fact, Kerry cited a source in his testimony: a 1971 gathering in Detroit by Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

  As Pacepa suggested, this antiwar veterans’ group has been discredited. Vietnam Veterans Against the War became notorious in part for an event known as Dewey Canyon III, held shortly before Kerry's Senate testimony. Representatives of the group, including Kerry himself, marched all the way to the White House and Congress to deliver petitions. This display included the striking scene of veterans tossing their medals over a fence outside the Capitol building. Kerry, too, hurled medals, although controversy has since ensued over whether they were his own.11

  The group's Detroit gathering had been held three months earlier, in January 1971. The organizers of this antiwar event included actress Jane Fonda (Kerry attended at least one antiwar rally with Fonda),12 comedian Dick Gregory, and Mark Lane, the JFK-assassination conspiracy theorist.13 The Winter Soldier Investigation, as it was called, claimed precisely the crimes that Kerry would later share with the Senate. And of course, Kerry, at the outset of his Senate statement, cited the Detroit gathering as the basis for his remarks.

  And that, in essence, was the fatal flaw of the testimony.

  Mackubin Thomas Owens, a professor at the Naval War College who led a Marine infantry platoon in Vietnam in 1968–69, puts it bluntly: “In fact, the entire Winter Soldiers Investigation was a lie.”14

  The investigation had been inspired by Mark Lane's 1970 book Conversations with Americans, which claimed to relate atrocities committed by Vietnam soldiers.15 Owens notes that the book was panned by no less than James Reston Jr. and Neil Sheehan, both ultra-liberals who were not exactly known as supporters of the war. Sheehan was especially hard on Lane's book, maintaining that many of Lane's “eye witnesses” had not actually served in Vietnam or not in the capacity they had claimed.

  That did not prevent Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon—the most commonly duped Republican of his era—from inserting the transcript of the Winter Soldier testimonies into the Congressional Record. Hatfield also requested that the Marine Corps commandant investigate the alleged war crimes.16

  But investigations did not produce the results that Hatfield probably expected. The Naval Investigative Service tried to interview the supposed witnesses but discovered, as Owens reports, “th
at some of the most grisly testimony was given by fake witnesses who had appropriated the names of real Vietnam veterans.”17

  Owens, like Pacepa, notes that John Kerry's 1971 testimony included “every left-wing cliché about Vietnam and the men who served there. It is part of the reason that even today, people who are too young to remember Vietnam are predisposed to believe the worst about the Vietnam War and those who fought it.”

  Unfortunately, the American press, already decidedly against American policy in Vietnam, was predisposed to believe people like John Kerry. When Kerry alleged savagery, liberal journalists jumped for the bait.

  Honoring John Kerry as a “Hero”—in Vietnam

  Even with knowledgeable sources like General Pacepa and Professor Owens raising doubts about the sources and legitimacy of Kerry's testimony, one can debate where and when Kerry got his information, and the validity of his claims. What is undeniable, however, is the value of his testimony to the Vietcong. Indeed, to understand how it outraged American soldiers, one need only consider this question: how valuable was John Kerry's testimony to the Vietnamese enemy?