CHRISTMAS IN CAMBODIA ROUNDUP
Junk Yard blog
Historian Doug Brinkley--who is starting to deserve scare quotes around his title--is going to bat for not-JFK. Old story, told over several decades: Not-JFK spent Christmas 1968 in Cambodia, an event which was seared--seared--into his memory. New story: It was actually January and February 1969, and was evidently not seared--not seared--into not-JFK's memory.
Captain Ed notes the convenience of the new version: It takes Kerry boatmate and critic Steve Gardner off the table, since he was no longer on Kerry's boat in January and February of 1969. Convenience angle #2, not mentioned elsewhere, is that when not-JFK began circulating the Cambodia tale some years back he used it to blast Reagan Central America policies (policies that have resulted in the democratization of that region, incidentally), referring to presidential lies about non-involvement Cambodia. He blamed President Nixon by name several times, though Nixon wasn't in office until January 1969. Which just happens to fit the new version of events. So it's a two-fer: Cut your critic off at the knees, and shift blame for the clandestine missions (and the "lies" surrounding them) from Democrat LBJ to Republican RM Nixon. Nicely done. It's still a lie, and an unconvincing lie at that, but it achieves its aims.
See InstaPundit for more, including the observation that the press has not engaged in a feeding frenzy even though a major presidential candidate has been caught lying about his war record, and that lie was formulated to affect national policy from 1986 forward. Can you imagine similar treatment accorded George W. Bush? Not bloody likely.
My lone unique angle to this story is on the credibility of Douglas Brinkley, historian, so allow me to flog that for a moment. Brinkley wrote the 2004, election season hagiography of not-JFK, Tour of Duty. I haven't read the book, but to pull an Eric Muller and judge by its title and cover, it's about not-JFK's four month stint in Vietnam. Big surprise. But Brinkley failed to mention the Cambodian cruise, now cruises, at all. In today's attempt to rehabilitate not-JFK's credibility--shot full of holes like a Swift boat running around the Mekong delta--Brinkley cites entries from not-JFK's diaries that have heretofore been unmentioned in all these years. And they just happen to give not-JFK this convenient two-fer with Gardner and Nixon. Are you buying that? I'm having a hard time with it. If Brinkley is just making this up to help his friend not-JFK, he's searing--searing--his own credibility as a historian. We need paperwork--military records, not-JFK's actual journal with the entries, something. Otherwise, it looks to me like Brinkley is giving his friend a big boost with a big whopper. Historians aren't supposed to do that.
MORE: I've had a minute to sit and think about the New Cambodia Tale--complete with Green Berets, SEALs and CIA--and it's full of holes. 1) In 1986 Kerry claimed that the reason the event was seared--seared--into his memory was that the President of the United States was lying about his presence in Cambodia. But, not-JFK now claims to have been on covert missions into Cambodia. Think about that word--covert. Did he expect the president to tell the world about it? Wouldn't that sort of negate the whole covert thing? Just askin'.
2) There are about a hundred better ways to insert covert--there's that word again--operators into action than a slow, 50-ft boat that rattles loud enough to wake the dead as it moves upriver. I'm not saying that covert operators never used Swift boats, just that it seems unlikely at first blush. I'd think a disguise and a sampan would have been better transport than an obviously American coastal patrol boat.
3) Not-JFK is starting to look like Walter Mitty, in a big way. First there's the whole JFK stuff, there's the marrying rich women stuff, and now we have him cruising upriver with all manner of Special Forces and intel operators--services that didn't work together in the Vietnam era in quite the way they work together now. There was a bit more inter-service rivalry back then. I seriously doubt the Army would put Green Berets on a Navy patrol boat for insertion into Cambodia back then. Especially when the Army could just procure other means of independently inserting its SF troops into action. I'm not saying not-JFK's version is impossible. It just doesn't seem likely.
4) Why didn't he brag about all this stuff in his bio? Doug Brinkley isn't looking like much of historian. He didn't chase any of this stuff down for that book of his.
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