SwiftVets.com

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JOHN FUND ON THE TRAIL

'The Last Mission'
The Swift Boat Veterans gather to assess their impact on the campaign.

Monday, November 15, 2004 12:01 a.m. EST

BOCA RATON, Fla.--"The last mission of Vietnam War veterans ended on Nov. 3, at 2:08 p.m. Eastern Time, when John Kerry conceded the presidential race to George W. Bush," announced James Warner, a lawyer who was a Marine pilot in Vietnam and spent five years and five months in Hanoi as a prisoner of war. On Saturday night, Mr. Warner gave a "debriefing" on the role that two controversial groups of veterans played in raising doubts about John Kerry's fitness to serve as commander in chief. His audience consisted of attendees at Restoration Weekend, an annual gathering of political activists organized by David Horowitz, a former left-wing radical who fought to undermine the Vietnam War effort as an editor of Ramparts magazine, but who has now changed sides and become a leading conservative writer.

As the evening proceeded and one Vietnam veteran after another shared the story of how veterans felt compelled to attack Mr. Kerry for his 1971 testimony branding fellow veterans as war criminals, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg leaned back in his chair in amazement. "I think some of them are too intense," he told me. "But screwing with these guys by accusing them of atrocities was one of the biggest mistakes John Kerry ever made. Thirty years later he woke a sleeping giant."

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Indeed he did. John O'Neill, a Houston lawyer who took over command of Mr. Kerry's swift boat in 1969, organized Swift Boat Veterans for Truth in a matter of a few weeks earlier this year when it became clear Mr. Kerry would be the Democratic nominee. Mr. O'Neill hadn't planned a return to the national stage he left after he clashed with Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971. But in February, Mr. O'Neill decided to act.

He was in intensive care after having donated a kidney to his wife, Anne. He had always believed that Mr. Kerry would make a terrible commander in chief, and now he reached out to fellow veterans. In May they held a press conference to tell reporters how Mr. Kerry had hurt Vietnam veterans by telling the Senate in 1971 that they had committed war crimes "on a day-to-day basis" and acted in a "fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan."

They also accused Mr. Kerry of embellishing his war record and receiving undeserved medals. To the dismay of the veterans, the broadcast networks and most national newspapers ignored their story.

Mr. O'Neill renewed his offensive by publishing a book, "Unfit for Command," which made a splash because it was released only a week after the Democratic Convention, which had showcased the nominee a war hero. Mr. Kerry deployed lawyers to try to block the book and the TV ads that were based on it, but otherwise he publicly ignored the charges. His poll numbers dropped significantly. According to political consultant Dick Morris, the controversy "ate up a month of a campaign in which the challenger had to make a compelling case against the incumbent."

In the end, the Swift Boat Veterans tapped an army of 140,000 contributors and raised an astonishing $27 million, equaling George Soros's contributions to anti-Bush groups. When picketers surrounded the house of Texas homebuilder Bob Perry because he had donated $250,000 to the Swift Boat cause, he pronounced himself amused and eventually gave a total of $7 million for their ad campaign.

Regnery Publishing sold 900,000 copies of "Unfit for Command." Over 1.5 million visited the publisher's Web site in the first few days after the book came out. The Swift Boat Veterans eventually signed up six in 10 of the men who had served on the boats in Vietnam, including Adm. Roy Hoffman, their commanding officer. He and the other swift boat veterans eventually did more than 4,000 interviews attacking Mr. Kerry.

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Other veterans were watching. One was Wally Nunn, a former Army helicopter gunner who later became chairman of the Delaware County, Pa., county council. "We saw the Swifties being beaten up and decided to open a second front," he says. He and 12 other Pennsylvania veterans raised $250,000 to produce "Stolen Honor: Wounds That Never Heal," a 45-minute documentary that featured POWs such as Mr. Warner who believed that Mr. Kerry's antiwar statements had made their captivity more brutal.

"The [North Vietnamese] interrogator went through all of these statements from John Kerry," recalls Mr. Warner, who earned a Silver Star and two Purple Hearts in Vietnam. "He starts pounding on the table. 'See, here, this naval officer. He admits that you are a criminal and that you deserve punishment.' I didn't know what was going to come next." Mr. Warner also says that Mr. Kerry played a role in convincing his own mother to make an antiwar statement that was inserted into the Congressional Record. "I was devastated and will never forgive him for that," he told me.

"Stolen Honor" made such an impact on executives of the Sinclair Broadcast Group, which owns network affiliates in 25% of U.S. TV markets that they made an agreement with Carlton Sherwood, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Vietnam veteran who produced the film, to show it on all their stations. After relentless attacks from the Kerry campaign ("You better hope we don't win the election," a Kerry spokesman said to a Sinclair executive on national television) and the threat of shareholder lawsuits, Sinclair retreated and aired a 60-minute panel discussion on the controversy that documentaries can stir up in presidential campaigns. A total of five minutes of "Stolen Honor" was shown during the program.

When Sinclair caved in, Chris Ruddy picked up the challenge. His NewsMax.com site raised $1.7 million to run the complete film over the last weekend before the election on Pax, a family cable network that reaches 90% of U.S. homes. The film aired 10 times and was seen by more than five million people. Mr. Sherwood says he is astonished by the outpouring of support he received, as well by as the lengths to which Kerry supporters went to suppress his film. "Veterans had rented out parts of theaters to show the film to friends, and there were threats and even a near-riot by protestors at one Pennsylvania theater," he told me.

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Liberals remain bitter about the role the Swift Boat veterans and former POWs played in raising questions about Mr. Kerry's character. On the Saturday before the election, actor Paul Newman and filmmaker George Butler appeared at Ohio State University to lead a panel discussion on Mr. Butler's documentary "Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry," a pro-Kerry account of his Vietnam service.

Mr. Newman bitterly attacked Mr. Kerry's Swift Boat critics, while Mr. Butler sang Mr. Kerry's praises. He said he had first met the future senator In 1964 and was convinced he was the right man to lead the country. "If he were elected president, he would be everything that John Kennedy wanted to be, but didn't have the chance," he told the Ohio State audience.

One Swift Boat veteran scoffs at Mr. Butler's suggestion. "I met John Kennedy," he said. "I know John Kerry. The two men were very different in how they handled the military, despite John Kerry's attempts to create a Kennedy aura around him. I think the American people rendered the right verdict this month. They concluded that John Kerry was no Jack Kennedy."

WSJ OpinionJournal

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