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Politics : Liberalism: Do You Agree We've Had Enough of It? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: American Spirit who wrote (2410)	5/27/2006 10:56:19 PM
From: Ann Corrigan	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 224704

Is your John-boy planning to run again? May 28, 2006 Kerry Pressing Swift Boat Case Long After Loss John Kerry starts by showing the entry in a log he kept from 1969: "Feb 12: 0800 run to Cambodia." He moves on to the photographs: his boat leaving the base at Ha Tien, Vietnam; the harbor; the mountains fading frame by frame as the boat heads north; the special operations team the boat was ferrying across the border; the men reading maps and setting off flares. "They gave me a hat," Mr. Kerry says. "I have the hat to this day," he declares, rising to pull it from his briefcase. "I have the hat." Three decades after the Vietnam War and nearly two years after Mr. Kerry's failed presidential bid, most Americans have probably forgotten why it ever mattered whether he went to Cambodia or that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of making it all up, saying he was dishonest and lacked patriotism. Some of the principals behind the Swift boat group continue to press their claims. John O'Neill, the co-author of the group's best-selling manifesto, "Unfit for Command," criticizes Mr. Kerry on television talk shows and solicits money for conservative causes and candidates. In a South Carolina newspaper, William Schachte recently reprised his allegation that he was aboard the small skimmer where Mr. Kerry received the injury that led to his first Purple Heart, and that Mr. Kerry actually wounded himself. Swift boat message boards and anti-Kerry Web sites still boil with accusations that Mr. Kerry fabricated the military reports that led to his military decorations. Mr. Kerry, accused even by Democrats of failing to respond to the charges during the campaign, is now fighting back hard. His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat. While it would be easy to see this as part of Mr. Kerry's exploration of another presidential run, his friends say the Swift boat charges struck at an experience so central to his identity that he would want to correct the record even if he were retiring from public life. Mr. Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. "I'm moving on," he says several times. But he can also barely resist prosecuting a case against the group that his friends now refer to as "the bad guys." "Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer." He shows a photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others. "The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn't there and will tell you he wasn't there," he said. "We know he wasn't there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it." Mr. Kerry has signed forms authorizing the Navy to release his record — something he resisted during the campaign — and hired a researcher to comb the naval archives in Washington for records that could pinpoint his whereabouts during dates of the incidents in dispute. Another former crew member has spent days at a time interviewing veterans to reconstruct every incident in question. Members of the Swift boat group have not seen Mr. Kerry's newly gathered evidence. But they seem unwilling to cede much. Mr. O'Neill said he "would be thrilled to look at anything he wants to send." Still, he added, "I'm sorry he never apologized for his 1971 speech," referring to Mr. Kerry's testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which he told other soldiers' accounts of ravaging Vietnamese villages and citizens. "I think it would have been a very positive thing to do in terms of the many thousands of people who survived Vietnam and felt that was very hurtful." Mr. Schachte said that he held "no animus," but that "if they crank this thing up again, I'm not going to be quiet." One of the two men who say they were on the boat — he does not recall which — might have been there, Mr. Schachte said, "but I was in that boat with Kerry." The veterans group, led by Mr. O'Neill, a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971, began its campaign in early 2004 by criticizing Mr. Kerry's protests against the Vietnam War. Some of Mr. Kerry's friends and former Swift boat crew members made advertisements during the race to try to shoot down the group's charges. But the campaign declined to air them widely because some strategists said that directly challenging the charges would legitimize them.