Kerry and Cambodia
Senator Kerry put his Vietnam War service to America front and center during the Democratic convention. The message seemed almost to be that the foundation of Mr. Kerry’s qualification for the presidency is his service in Vietnam.
So it is natural that some are now asking questions about precisely what Mr. Kerry did during his four months in Vietnam. One issue that strikes us as particularly puzzling is whether young Lieutenant Kerry spent Christmas Eve, 1968, in Cambodia.The topic has been brought to the fore by a new book,“Unfit for Command,” written by John O’Neill and Jerome Corsi and published by Regnery, and it has gained traction on a number of sites on the World Wide Web.
Mr. Kerry has repeatedly claimed he was in Cambodia.In the October 14,1979, issue of the Boston Herald-American, Mr. Kerry wrote,“On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in ‘Apocalypse Now,’ took my patrol boat into Cambodia. In fact, I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas. The absurdity of almost being killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real.”
Speaking in the Senate on March 27, 1986, Mr. Kerry said, “I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the president of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia. I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me.”
A June 16, 2003, dispatch in the Boston Globe recounts the Christmas Eve action and reports, “To top it off, Kerry said, he had gone several miles inside Cambodia, which theoretically was off limits.”
A June 1, 2003 profile in the Washington Post has Mr. Kerry carrying around, in a secret compartment of his briefcase, what the candidate described as, “My good luck hat,Given to me by a CIA guy as we went in for a special mission in Cambodia.”
Yet the more-or-less authorized history of Kerry in Vietnam, Douglas Brinkley’s 2004 book “Tour of Duty,”puts Mr.Kerry’s action on Christmas Eve in Vietnam “as they were approaching the Cambodian border”and “not far from the Cambodian border” and “only miles from the Cambodian border” and “getting close to Cambodia.” “Tour of Duty” never places Mr. Kerry in Cambodia during the young lieutenant’s four-month tour in Vietnam. The book says that in October of 1968,the U.S. Navy “took great pains” to observe the border.
And Mr. Kerry’s reference in the Herald-American to “President Nixon” is strange. On Christmas Eve of 1968, the president of America was Lyndon Johnson. Nixon’s secret bombing of Cambodia did not begin until after he took office in early 1969.
As to whether even President Johnson was “telling the American people” that Mr. Kerry or other Americans were not in Cambodia, there are indications he was not doing that. At Christmas of 1968, Johnson was celebrating the release of 11 American servicemen who were captured in Cambodia in July of that year. A frontpage report in the December 20, 1968, Washington Post reported that the released Americans had been captured “when their landing craft crossed the Cambodian border during a trip on the Mekong River.”
The Washington Post article went on to report that in announcing the release of the Americans, the Cambodian prince, Norodom Sihanouk, “expressed anger at not receiving a requested personal message from either President Johnson or President-elect Nixon giving assurance that efforts would be made to stop violations of Cambodian territory by U.S. and South Vietnamese troops. It was because of these alleged violations that Sihanouk broke diplomatic relations with the United States in May, 1965.”
The Kerry campaign’s response to all this has been to call one of the authors of “Unfit for Command,” Mr. Corsi, an “anti-Catholic bigot” and to criticize President Bush for his handling of the economy, but to refrain from addressing the substantive questions of whether Mr. Kerry stands by his assertion that he was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 while President Nixon supposedly denied he was there.Is it asking too much for Mr. Kerry to bring his story up to date? Does he still claim he was in Cambodia? How often was he there? When? Was it on purpose or by accident? Was it on military or CIA orders or in violation of them? What did he mean when he spoke of the president’s denial?
Mr. Kerry seems to want voters to think he’s fit to lead in the current war because he fought in Vietnam. He says the president lied to America about Vietnam, and, similarly, he has accused President Bush of misleading America into war in Iraq. He vowed Friday to “get our troops home where they belong.”
It is this connection between the past war and the present one that makes the issue worth pursuing.Mr. Kerry returned from Vietnam, after all, to join with an anti-war movement that made wildly exaggerated, shameful claims of American war crimes and that described American actions in Southeast Asia as imperialist aggression. Cambodia — America secretly invading a supposedly neutral country without democratic authorization — was part of those exaggerations and distortions, a new round of which America’s efforts in the war on terror are now subject to from a new anti-war movement with its roots in Mr. Kerry’s political party.
Mr. Kerry did the right thing in going to Vietnam as a young man. He fought for a noble cause, and we have seen no evidence so far that his service there was anything less than honorable.All of which is why his reluctance to clarify the facts on the Cambodia issue is so puzzling, and why the point strikes us as worth pressing.
daily.nysun.com. |
