Good "inside the mansion" from the Boston Globe.
Senator believed allegations could no longer be ignored
By Patrick Healy and Michael Kranish, Globe Staff | August 20, 2004
For nearly two weeks, Senator John F. Kerry had refrained from commenting directly on the crescendo of attacks on his Vietnam War record. The work was being left to campaign aides, who were scrambling to control the escalating damage being done by a television ad and a book that alleged that Kerry had lied about his combat service and did not deserve his medals.
Then, Wednesday night, Kerry told his aides that he had to act. As he sat down inside his Louisburg Square home on Beacon Hill, Kerry scrawled two phrases on a yellow legal pad about his antagonists, a group called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. The group, Kerry wrote, was "a front for the Bush campaign" and "he wants them to do his dirty work."
Overnight, this new strategy by Kerry resulted in a hastily produced ad defending his war record and a speech in which the Massachusetts senator responded in detail to the group's charges. The question, however, is whether Kerry acted too late, letting the attacks grow on the Internet and talk-show circuit to such a degree that some swing voters think one of Kerry's core characteristics has been undermined.
"He had to do it," said former senator Bob Kerrey, who was tapped by the Kerry campaign to write an opinion column in The Washington Post defending the record of the Massachusetts senator.
"It was gathering a life of its own, and he had to respond. He couldn't do it through surrogates. He had to confront it himself with facts and passion."
Kerry had made Vietnam a centerpiece of his campaign, surrounding himself with crewmates at the Democratic National Convention and portraying his combat experience as preparation for being commander in chief.
Kerry's come-from behind victory in the Iowa caucuses early this year was due in no small part to the support of the Vietnam-era "band of brothers" who campaigned with him.
Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, which first emerged at a May 4 news conference in Washington, had been dogging Kerry throughout the summer with accusations that he lied about aspects of his service in Vietnam. But the group gained widespread publicity earlier this month, with the simultaneous release of the ad and a highly critical book, "Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry."
The TV ad began airing Aug. 5. It quoted some of Kerry's former commanding officers and fellow skippers, but none of his crewmates,-edit: the Globe KNOWS this is not true.- as saying that Kerry lied about what happened in Vietnam. The book, meanwhile, became the number one bestseller on Amazon. com because of publicity about allegations that Kerry did not deserve his medals.
Aides to Kerry said he did not want to respond immediately to the swift boat group's television advertisement because he was in the middle of a cross-country campaign tour that featured a positive, introductory message emphasizing his biography. That trip ended last Saturday, followed by four days of vacation in Idaho; he returned to the campaign trail Wednesday for a speech to the VFW, where he did not want the controversy over his Vietnam record to detract from his new attack on Bush's plan for redeploying 70,000 troops from Asia and Europe, aides said.
At first, some of Kerry's allies thought that a response from the candidate would merely prolong the publicity.
"I personally miscalculated," said Paul Nace, who has worked closely with Kerry in his campaigns since 1970. "There were a number of us who were following it closely and trying to measure it and you don't want to react and give a story more legs than it is entitled to. But when it became clear the story did have legs -- once I reached the conclusion it wasn't going to blow over -- I did express the opinion that we have to respond."
So Nace began talking with a small group of Kerry friends known as the dog hunters.
It was in 1984 that the dog hunters first organized. Kerry's Democratic primary opponent, James Shannon, had said during a televised debate that if Kerry, who became a leading critic of the war after he returned from Vietnam, "felt that strongly about the war, you would not have gone." Kerry responded that Shannon was insulting veterans, adding, "That dog won't hunt." A group of Vietnam veterans rallied to Kerry's side and became known as the dog hunters, helping Kerry in subsequent races, including in 1996, when questions were firest raised about Kerry's Silver Star.
Now the dog hunters, including Nace, were mobilized for another battle at Kerry's side.
As Kerry stepped from his car Wednesday night outside his Beacon Hill home, the senator turned to a group of aides in the motorcade and asked them to come upstairs. He had some new language for his firefighters' speech that he wanted to talk over.
Inside, Kerry informed his traveling communications team that he wanted to make his firest attack on the Swift Boat critics. After two weeks of listening to them question his Vietnam War record, Kerry was sick of it -- "not angry, but disgusted," said communications director Stephanie Cutter, who was at the Wednesday meeting.
Kerry faced more than a decision about whether to respond to the attack by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth; he also had to decide whether to link the group to the Bush campaign. Kerry decided to make the link after reading reports that the group had received a second $100,000 from Texas Republican Robert J. Perry.
"They're a front for the Bush campaign. And the fact that the president won't denounce them tells you everything you need to know -- he wants them to do his dirty work," Kerry told firefighters in Boston.
The group and the Bush campaign denied any linkage, which would be illegal. But Kerry had settled upon a strategy that he says he firest learned in Vietnam.
"When you're under attack," Kerry said in his speech yesterday, "the best thing to do is turn your boat into the attack." |
