The fact of the matter is that O'Neill is a politician and hence what he says has political flavor. Jim Rassmann who served directly with Kerry has no political motive...O'Neill is someone with political motives.
According to the Boston Globe article posted below, it does not appear that John O'Neill has led a particularly "political" life since the early 1970s. As for his support of the Vietnam War, I would suggest that he was just as passionate about his beliefs at that time as was Kerry was. Anything wrong with that?
As for his motives, of course he has political motives, just as Jim Rassmann does. John O'Neill does not want Kerry elected President, Jim Rassmann does. Anything wrong with that?
We know that Nixon was a crook and he was surrounded by crooks like John O'Neill.
Are you suggesting that John O'Neill is or was a crook? Care to share a link?
Yesterday American Spirit suggested that all of the SwiftVets should be in jail. A nice reading of the First Amendment from a quasi-official representative of the Kerry campaign.
boston.com
Former sailor is drawn into battle
Archfoe reemerges to condemn Kerry
By Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | May 5, 2004
WASHINGTON -- Thirty-three years ago, a young sailor named John O'Neill was sitting in the Oval Office, talking with President Nixon and his counsel, Charles Colson, about an effort to take on an antiwar leader named John F. Kerry. For nearly an hour, Nixon sought to buck up O'Neill, recalling how he, Nixon, had taken on the communists and suggesting it was now up to O'Neill to take on the antiwar protesters.
O'Neill took the advice and soon engaged Kerry in a series of televised debates at which he charged that Kerry was making up allegations of Vietnam atrocities.
Yesterday, it was as if things had hardly skipped a beat. Here was O'Neill, at the National Press Club, standing before the television cameras and declaring that Kerry had made up stories about atrocities in Vietnam. Except this time, O'Neill was acting as the public relations man for a group of Kerry's former commanding officers who said the Massachusetts senator was not fit to be president.
O'Neill and Kerry, who both commanded Navy swift boat No. 94 in Vietnam but did not serve together, have not engaged each other in the intervening years. A successful lawyer in Texas who no longer cared to be in the public eye, O'Neill for years refused efforts by Kerry's political opponents in Massachusetts to speak out against Kerry. Although he gave an interview to The Boston Globe last year for a series of stories on Kerry's life, O'Neill said at the time that he hoped to fade back into anonymity.
But earlier this year, O'Neill recalled in an interview, he was sitting in a hospital recovery room when he saw Kerry's image on television. O'Neill had just donated a kidney to his wife, and Kerry had just won the Iowa caucuses.
Feeling pensive, O'Neill said, he decided that he had to speak out against Kerry.
After recovering from surgery, O'Neill had a phone conversation with the man who once commanded all of the swift boats in Vietnam, a legendary retired rear admiral named Roy Hoffmann. Hoffmann, too, was bristling with anger about Kerry -- still upset about Kerry's 1971 claims about atrocities and war crimes -- and wanted to speak publicly about it. Hoffmann contacted all of Kerry's commanding officers to see whether they wanted to speak out.
So it was that yesterday O'Neill stood beside Hoffmann and some of Kerry's other commanding officers, declaring, "We believe that based on our experience with him that he is totally unfit to be commander in chief."
It was O'Neill's second shot at his archrival. O'Neill made his points against Kerry in those 1971 debates, but he looked ill at ease in the most famous encounter, on "The Dick Cavett Show." Kerry, at 6 foot 4 inches tall, towered over O'Neill, who nonetheless taunted Kerry as "little man." Kerry had a thick file of documents, using his years of experience on the Yale debate team to say calmly in a Kennedyesque accent that he "personally didn't see atrocities" but that he took part in actions that he later learned were contrary to the Geneva Conventions.
Then O'Neill gradually faded into history, appearing at the Republican National Convention in 1972 on behalf of Nixon, clerking for Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist, and returning to Texas to become a lawyer, where one of his law partners was the late Harold Lezar, who in 1994 ran for lieutenant governor on a ticket with George W. Bush.
It took the prospect of John Kerry as president, he said, to get him back in the arena.
Michael Kranish can be reached at kranish@globe.com
© Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company. |
