Campaign 2004: Group behind anti-Kerry ads has deep Bush connections (despite Mcclelland's denials and assertion kerry is losing his cool)
By KATE ZERNIKE AND JIM RUTENBERG
THE NEW YORK TIMES
After weeks of taking fire over veterans' accusations that he had lied about his Vietnam service record to win medals and build a political career, Sen. John Kerry shot back Thursday, calling those statements categorically false and branding the people behind them tools of the Bush campaign.
His decision to take on the group directly was a measure of how the group that calls itself Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has catapulted itself to the forefront of the presidential campaign. It has advanced its cause in a book, in a television advertisement and on cable news and talk radio shows, all in an attempt to discredit Kerry's war record, a pillar of his campaign.
How the group came into existence is a story of how veterans with longstanding anger about Kerry's anti-war statements in the early 1970s allied themselves with Texas Republicans.
Kerry called them "a front for the Bush campaign." A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.
Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family -- one a longtime political associate of Rove's, the other a treasurer of the George H.W. Bush Library Foundation.
A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael Dukakis in an oversized tank helmet when he and Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.
The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the "baby killer" and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.
Several of those now declaring Kerry "unfit" had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.
In an unpublished interview in March 2003 with Kerry's authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, provided by Brinkley to The New York Times, Roy Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral and a leader of the group, allowed that he had disagreed with Kerry's anti-war positions but said, "I am not going to say anything negative about him." He added, "He's a good man."
In a profile of the candidate that ran in The Boston Globe in June 2003, Hoffmann approvingly recalled the actions that led to Kerry's Silver Star: "It took guts, and I admire that."
George Elliott, one of the Vietnam veterans in the group, flew from his home in Delaware to Boston in 1996 to stand up for Kerry during a tough re-election fight, declaring at a news conference that the action that won Kerry a Silver Star was "an act of courage." At that same event, Adrian Lonsdale, another Vietnam veteran now speaking out against Kerry, supported him with a statement about the "bravado and courage of the young officers that ran the swift boats."
"Sen. Kerry was no exception," Lonsdale told the reporters and cameras assembled at the Charlestown Navy Yard. "He was among the finest of those swift-boat drivers."
Those comments echoed the official record. In an evaluation of Kerry in 1969, Elliott, who was one of his commanders, ranked him as "not exceeded" in 11 categories, including moral courage, judgment and decisiveness, and "one of the top few" -- the second-highest distinction -- in the remaining five. In written comments, he called Kerry "unsurpassed," "beyond reproach" and "the acknowledged leader in his peer group."
How the group came together
It all began last winter, as Kerry was wrapping up the Democratic nomination. Lonsdale received a call at his Massachusetts home from his old commander in Vietnam, Hoffmann, asking if he had seen the new biography of the man who would be president.
Hoffmann had commanded the swift boats during the war from a base in Cam Ranh Bay and advocated a search-and-destroy campaign against the Vietcong -- the kind of tactic Kerry criticized when he was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971. Shortly after leaving the Navy in 1978, he was issued a letter of censure for exercising undue influence on cases in the military justice system.
Both Hoffmann and Lonsdale had publicly lauded Kerry in the past. But the book, Brinkley's "Tour of Duty," while it burnished Kerry's reputation, portrayed the two men as reckless leaders whose military approach had led to the deaths of countless sailors and innocent civilians.
The two men were determined to set the record, as they saw it, straight.
"It was the admiral who started it and got the rest of us into it," Lonsdale said.
Hoffmann's phone calls led them to Texas and to John O'Neill, who at one point commanded the same swift boat in Vietnam, and whose mission against Kerry dated to 1971, when he had been recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."
O'Neill, who pressed his charges against Kerry in numerous television appearances Thursday, had spent the 33 years since he debated Kerry building a successful law practice in Houston, intermingling with some of the state's most powerful Republicans and building an impressive client list.
O'Neill said during one of several interviews that he had come to know two of his biggest donors, Harlan Crow and Bob Perry, through longtime social and business contacts.
Perry, who has given $200,000 to the group, is the top donor to Republicans in the state, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. He donated $46,000 to Bush's campaigns for governor in 1994 and 1998. In the 2002 election, the group said, he donated nearly $4 million to Texas candidates and political committees.
Rove, Bush's top political aide, recently said through a spokeswoman that he and Perry were longtime friends, though he said they had not spoken for at least a year.
Crow, the seventh-largest donor to Republicans in the state according to the Texans for Public Justice, has donated nowhere near as much money as Perry to the swift-boat group. His family owns one of the largest diversified commercial real estate companies in the nation, Trammell Crow Co., and has given money to Bush and his father throughout their careers. He is listed as a trustee of the George H.W. Bush Library Foundation.
One of his law partners, Tex Lezar, ran on the Republican ticket with Bush in 1994, as lieutenant governor. Lezar, who died last year, was married to Merrie Spaeth, a powerful public relations executive who has helped coordinate the efforts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Spaeth had been a communications official in the Reagan White House, where the president's aides invited her to help prepare George H.W. Bush for his vice-presidential debate in 1984.
When asked if she had ever visited the White House during Bush's tenure, Spaeth initially said that she had been there only once, in 2002, when Kenneth Starr gave her a personal tour. But this week Spaeth acknowledged that she had spent an hour in the Old Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex, in the spring of 2003, giving Bush's chief economic adviser, Stephen Friedman, public speaking advice. Asked if it was possible that she had worked with other administration officials, Spaeth said, "The answer is 'no,' unless you refresh my memory."
"Is the White House directing this?" Spaeth said of the organization. "Absolutely not."
About 10 veterans met in Spaeth's office in Dallas in April to plot their campaign against Kerry. Lonsdale, who did not attend, said the meeting had been planned as "an indoctrination session."
"How to conduct yourself when you're being interviewed," he added.
What might have been loose impressions about Kerry began to harden.
"That was an awakening experience," Spaeth said. "Not just for me, but for many of them who had not heard each other's stories."
The group decided to hire a private investigator to probe Brinkley's account of the war -- to find "some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents," O'Neill said.
But the investigator's questions did not seem neutral to some.
Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Kerry, said he initially thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group, and happily gave a statement about the night Kerry won his first Purple Heart. The investigator said he would e-mail it to him for his signature. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.
"It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire," he said. "He made it sound like it was a normal operation. It was the scariest night of my life."
By May, the group had the money that O'Neill had collected as well as additional veterans rallied by O'Neill, Hoffmann and others. The expanded group gathered in Washington to record the veterans' stories for a television commercial.
Each veteran's statement was written down as an affidavit and sent to him to sign and have notarized. But the validity of those affidavits soon came into question.
Elliott, who was in charge of the process of awarding medals in Vietnam, had signed one affidavit saying Kerry "was not forthright" in the statements that had led to his Silver Star. Two weeks ago, he told The Boston Globe that in retrospect he felt he should not have signed the affidavit. He then signed a second affidavit that reaffirmed his first, which the Swift Boat Veterans gave to reporters. Elliott has refused to speak publicly since then.
Riled by anti-war statements
As serious questions about its claims have arisen, the group has remained steadfast and adaptable.
What drives the veterans, they acknowledge, is less what Kerry did during his time in Vietnam than what he said after. Their affidavits and a new television commercial introduced yesterday focus mostly on those anti-war statements. Most members of the group object to his using the word "atrocities" to describe what happened in Vietnam when he returned and became an anti-war activist. And they are offended, they say, by the gall of his running for president as a hero of that war.
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