Kerry On
Early on in this election season there were charges made that John Kerry was having an affair with a female reporter. After receiving a couple of days of media attention, the story was exposed to be entirely untrue. Then there was the photo which showed John Kerry attending a 70’s peace rally along with Jane Fonda. The photo was later proved to have been altered and completely false.
In the latest adventures of campaign smear against John Kerry, attacks have ranged from maligning his military service record, questioning the validity of his actions in Viet Nam, to accusations that he may have shot himself in some grand scheme to earn medals and get out of the service early.
Sadly, despite the fiction, such stories have been receiving a lot of attention in the media. Fortunately, there are still a few reporters that actually explore the truth, and one by one the accusations and the accusers are being exposed for what they really are.
In recent days, I’ve heard various news-channel analysts suggest that some of these veterans aren’t upset with Kerry because of anything he did in Viet Nam, but rather they are angry by what he said upon his return from Viet Nam. These charges are usually followed with a 1971 clip of Kerry speaking with the United States Senate Committee on Foreign Relations. While Kerry’s testimony was two hours long, the same clip that is often shown is a short sound-bite that has Kerry speaking about atrocities committed in Southeast Asia. Although the clip is misleading by itself, the media seldom points out the context in which those statements were made.
During his testimony, Kerry and the senators discussed a variety of topics. However, the underlining theme of his testimony was that young Americans were dying needlessly, that occupying Viet Nam was a mistake, and that the war itself was threatening the fabric of what America stands for. We now know through taped conversations that have since been released, that both Presidents Johnson and Nixon had made similar assessments in private, and former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara recently expanded on those same themes in the film The Fog of War.
Kerry’s testimony is also an indictment of the media, which measures the entertainment factor of each potential news story, an indictment of a political system that uses war as a means to ignore political problems at home, an indictment of Washington, which allows powerful groups to halt legislation intended to serve the public, and an indictment of the government hawks, which eagerly sent young men to war and then turned their backs on the care of these veterans.
I can’t find anything in Kerry’s testimony that is offensive or damning to veterans. It seems obvious that this is another false claim against John Kerry, and yet another attempt to smear. It’s apparent that these individuals have not listened to the content of Kerry’s testimony, nor have they read the entire transcript.