Kerry/Colson cont"d Just before the event, on April 19, 1971, Colson fired off a memo expressing exasperation that more wasn't being done to undermine the organizers. He ordered administration officials to show that Vietnam Veterans Against the War was "a fringe group, that it is financed from questionable sources, that it doesn't represent a veterans movement, and that the guys involved are a pretty shoddy bunch. . . . There just must be more that we can be doing."
At a jammed Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on April 22, 1971, Kerry took his case to Congress. Television cameras lined the walls, and veterans packed the seats. Kerry was dressed in his green fatigues and wore his Silver Star and Purple Heart ribbons, although he said he left the medals at home. With his thatch of dark hair swept across his brow, Kerry sat at a witness table and delivered the most famous speech of his life, the speech that defined him and made possible his political career.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry asked. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Attacking the Nixon White House, he said, "This administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country."
Almost forgotten in that famous speech were Kerry's controversial assertions that Vietnam veterans had "personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephone to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."
To some veterans, including some of those who served alongside Kerry, this was too much. They thought they had served honorably, and they had seen Kerry as a gung-ho skipper who led the charge and didn't voice such opposition on the battlefield.
"I would go up a river with that man anytime. He was a great American fighting man," said Michael Bernique, a highly decorated veteran who served as a swift boat skipper alongside Kerry. But Bernique remains upset with Kerry's assertion that atrocities were committed, an assertion that Kerry has not backed away from. "I think there was a point in time when John was making it up fast and quick. I think he was saying whatever he needed to say."
In the Oval Office, President Nixon delivered a backhanded compliment to Kerry, whom he distinguished from the other "bearded weirdos."
The "real star" of the hearing was Kerry, Nixon told chief of staff H. R. "Bob" Haldeman and national security adviser Henry Kissinger the day after Kerry testified, according to the secretly taped White House recordings.
"He did a hell of a great job," Haldeman said.
"He was extremely effective," Nixon agreed.
"He did a superb job on it at Foreign Relations Committee yesterday," Haldeman said. "A Kennedy-type guy, he looks like a Kennedy, and he, he talks exactly like a Kennedy."
"Where did he serve?" Nixon asked.
"He was a Navy lieutenant, j.g., on a gunboat, and he used to run his gunboat up and shoot at, shoot babies out of women's arms," Haldeman said. (A member of Kerry's crew had shot and killed a Vietnamese child in an episode that occurred in a "free-fire zone," according to Kerry, but it is not clear whether Haldeman knew about the matter or was being jocular.)
"Oh, stop that," Nixon said. "People in the Navy don't do things [like that.]" With apparent sarcasm, Nixon turned to Kissinger, who assured him a naval officer would not shoot babies out of women's arms. But there was a seriousness to the statement as well; just three weeks earlier, a jury had convicted Lieutenant William Calley of killing 22 civilians in what became known as the My Lai massacre. Just days earlier, Nixon had ordered Calley released pending his appeal. The case had been more fuel for the antiwar movement.
Nixon seemed particularly incredulous that Kerry had won so many medals. "Bob, the Navy didn't have any casualties in Vietnam except in the air," Nixon told Haldeman, showing either a disregard for the high casualty rate of swift boat sailors or an extraordinary lack of knowledge about what had really happened during the war he oversaw as commander in chief.
The White House staff decided it needed to dig up dirt on Kerry, or at least undermine his effort. Three days later, Haldeman arrived in the Oval Office and announced to the president: "We've got some interesting dope on Kerry."
Nixon was interested.
"Kerry, it turns out, some time ago decided he wanted to get into politics," Haldeman said. "Well, he ran for, took a stab at the congressional thing. And he consulted with some of the folks in the Georgetown set here. So what, what the issue, what, he'd like to get an issue. He wanted a horse to ride."
The tape recording inexplicably ends at this point.
Kerry, meanwhile, was becoming a celebrity. Overnight, he had emerged as one of the most recognized veterans in America.
Kerry, who understood well the importance that the media placed on imagery, put an exclamation mark on events by lining up with veterans to return their medals to the military on April 23. Kerry said he suggested that veterans place their medals and ribbons on a table and return them. But he said other members of the antiwar veterans group wanted to throw the medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the Capitol, and Kerry went along with the idea.
Video footage of the scene shows hundreds of veterans angrily gathering in front of the Capitol, near a fenced-in bin with the large sign saying "Trash."
One by one, the veterans, most of whom had long hair and wore combat jackets, threw their medals into the makeshift trash bin.
Some press reports say that Kerry "threw his medals." But Kerry has long maintained he threw his own ribbons but someone else's medals.
In an interview, he said that he had previously met two veterans, one from the Vietnam War and another from World War II, who had asked Kerry to return their medals to the military. Kerry said he stuffed them into his jacket.
He said that when he prepared to throw his ribbons over the fence, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the medals from those two veterans. He said his own medals remained in safekeeping.
The week's events had unquestionable impact. At the beginning of the week, a band of 800 or so Vietnam veterans gathered to protest the war, followed by Kerry's April 22 testimony, then the medal-tossing ceremony on April 23. By the following day, the publicity helped draw at least 250,000 people to the Mall in a massive protest.
Kerry, wearing a blue button-down shirt under his combat jacket, addressed the rally from the Capitol steps. "We came here to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbaric war," Kerry told the cheering throng.
In one week, Kerry had gone from little-known former swift boat skipper to the face of the protest movement.
"The transformation was instant," said Kerry's friend George Butler. "Eight hundred people had turned into 250,000," said Kerry's then-brother-in-law, David Thorne, who stood beside Kerry during the rally. "That is what made it so spectacular."
A national figure
1971 Doonesbury cartoon about John Kerry
A few weeks later, Kerry was featured in a lengthy segment on the CBS television program "60 Minutes." Correspondent Morley Safer, in a segment titled "First Hurrah," portrayed Kerry as an eloquent man of turmoil who had a Kennedyesque future.
"Do you want to be president of the United States?" Safer asked Kerry.
"No," Kerry replied. "That's such a crazy question when there are so many things to be done and I don't know whether I could do them."
But Kerry's image as a self-promoter soon became the subject of parody, none more on-target than a Doonesbury comic strip penned by fellow Yale alumnus Garry Trudeau. A character in the strip is heard urging that they all attend John Kerry's speech. "He speaks with a rare eloquence and astonishing conviction. If you see no one else this year, you must see John Kerry!"
"Who was that?" another character asks.
"John Kerry," comes the response.
Another strip shows Kerry soaking up the adulation after a speech, smiling and thinking, "You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppie."
At the White House, the plotting against Kerry continued.
"The concern about Kerry was that he had great credibility as a decorated Vietnam veteran," Colson recalled in a recent interview. So Colson and his staff tried repeatedly to dig up dirt on Kerry. The effort failed.
"I don't ever remember finding anything negative about Kerry or hearing anything negative about him," Colson said. "If we had found anything, I'm sure we would have used it to discredit him."
Colson's memos, in storage at the National Archives, show that he tried mightily to discredit Kerry. On April 16, Colson noted that, "A number of tough questions have also been planted with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War questioners for `Meet the Press."'
Vice President Spiro T. Agnew briefly led the White House charge against Kerry. Appearing in the Bahamas, Agnew said that Kerry, "who drew rave notices in the media for his eloquent testimony before Congress, was later revealed to have been using material ghosted for him by a former Kennedy speechwriter, and to have spent most of his nights in posh surroundings in Georgetown rather than on the Mall with his buddies."
Both of Agnew's charges were false, according to Kerry and Walinsky, the former Kennedy aide to whom Agnew referred.
Kerry began traveling around the country to carry the antiwar flag. During Memorial Day weekend, he joined a throng of antiwar protesters on the green in Lexington, Mass., where he and hundreds of others were arrested. Kerry said the arrest, for which he paid a $5 fine and spent the night at the Lexington Public Works Garage, is the only arrest of his life. At the time, Kerry's wife, Julia, kept $100 under her pillow just in case she needed to bail out her husband on short notice.
In another iconic moment, Kerry appeared with former Beatle John Lennon at a protest in New York City. The White House found a better way to go after Kerry. Colson had seen a press conference featuring a young Navy veteran named John O'Neill, who served in the same swift boat division as Kerry shortly after Kerry left Vietnam. O'Neill, like many swift boat veterans, was outraged at Kerry's claim of US atrocities.
In short order, O'Neill became the centerpiece of the Nixon White House strategy to undermine Kerry. O'Neill, now a Texas lawyer, stresses that he did not receive any payment from the White House and was acting on his own because he thought Kerry's statements were unconscionable lies.
For weeks, Colson had been accusing Kerry of ducking a debate with O'Neill. On June 15, Colson wrote to another White House aide: "I think we have Kerry on the run, he is beginning to take a tremendous beating in the press, but let's not let him up, let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader. Let's try to move through as many sources as we can the fact that he has refused to meet in debate, even though he agreed to do so and announced to the press he would."
The next day, O'Neill arrived at the White House to meet with Nixon. The two men bonded; a brief "grip and grin" session turned into an hourlong meeting, with Nixon bucking up O'Neill for the fight against Kerry. |
