| "Americans have never accepted that a record of service, however honorable, should forever entitle a man to deference on matters of war and peace. (Ask George McGovern.) And the political uses to which Mr. Kerry would later put his Vietnam experience are certainly fair game for criticism. Which brings up Mr. Kerry's claim -- repeated in at least three different decades, and on the floor of the Senate -- that he spent Christmas Eve of 1968 not in Vietnam but in Cambodia. He obviously considered it a point of some significance, since he used it to impugn the integrity of those who waged the Vietnam War. ... Trouble is, the person who appears to have been wrong here about Mr. Kerry's location was not the president -- who was Lyndon Johnson, not Nixon, by the way -- but Mr. Kerry himself. His commanding officers all testify to this fact, as do men who were on his boat at the time. And so now, reluctantly, does the Kerry campaign. Last Wednesday Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan sent me a statement saying that 'During John Kerry's service in Vietnam, many times he was on or near the Cambodian border and on one occasion crossed into Cambodia. ... On December 24, 1968 Lieutenant John Kerry and his crew were on patrol in the watery borders between Vietnam and Cambodia deep in enemy territory.' I asked for clarification as to whether the 'one occasion' was Christmas Eve 1968. 'No,' was the reply. 'Watery borders' is something of an evasion, intended to imply that Mr. Kerry's 'seared' memory might have been easily confused. ... In any case, Mr. Kerry's own journal, as cited in Douglas Brinkley's biography, records him being 50-some miles from the border at Sa Dec on that day contemplating visions of 'sugar plums.' ... So the would-be commander-in-chief can hardly complain of being subject to scrutiny, especially since he's joined in criticism of Mr. Bush's war record and made his own a campaign centerpiece. Never mind the anti-Kerry swiftees. So far the veteran whose testimony is doing John Kerry the most damage is...John Kerry." --The Wall Street Journal |
