SwiftVets.com

[fortdixlover]

Nixon Aide Colson: Kerry a 'Complete Opportunist'

http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/16/103907.shtml

In 1971, President Richard Nixon launched a pre-emptive strike against John Kerry when Kerry came back after his four months in Vietnam and took front and center in the anti-Vietnam War movement.

White House tapes revealed by NBC News showed that Nixon viewed Kerry as a clean-cut and articulate spokesman for anti-war forces typified by unkempt and unshaven veterans and fake "veterans" glorying in their grunginess.

Moreover, Nixon clearly recognized what aide Bob Haldeman saw as Kerry’s obvious political ambitions, which were, Haldeman recognized, Kerry’s motivations for leading the protests against the war.

When Kerry came to Washington in April 1971 to protest, lobby Congress - even to return medals and service decorations, which were thrown into a heap over a fence on Capitol Hill - NBC News' Brian Williams said Nixon targeted Kerry for anti-war views.

Williams, however, failed to note that the medals Kerry threw over the fence were not his – they belonged to someone else. Kerry quietly kept his medals to display later in his Senate office.

On the tapes, Nixon is heard calling the ragtag assemblage of alleged veterans "horrible" and "bastards." Haldeman called them "ratty-looking," and Kissinger said they were "inarticulate."

But Nixon and his advisers saw the Yale-educated scion of a Boston Brahmin family, he told aide Charles Colson, as a "sort of a phony," a different breed of Vietnam veteran, who must be discredited.

Here, according to NBC News, is an excerpt from a tape recorded on April 23, 1971, the day after Kerry’s Senate testimony in which he accused American soldiers of committing war crimes against the Vietnamese people.

Nixon: Apparently, this fellow, uh, that they put in the front row, is that what you say, the front [unintelligible] the real stars — Kerry.

Haldeman: Kerry. He is, he did a hell of a great job on the, uh –

Nixon: He was extremely effective.

And Haldeman concluded: "I think you’ll find Kerry running for political office."

Kerry ended his week in Washington with a speech to a huge anti-war rally at the U.S. Capitol, again pointing the finger at the Nixon administration for its conduct of the war and its reaction to the veterans’ protests.

"This is a government that cares more about the legality of where men sleep than the legality of where we drop bombs and why men die," Kerry declared.

Seeing Kerry as a threat to the administration’s Vietnam War policies, Nixon set out to discredit him and infiltrate his organization.

The week after the protest rally, Nixon is heard discussing Kerry with White House aide Charles Colson:

Colson: This fellow Kerry that they had on last week –

Nixon: Yeah.

Colson: – hell, he turns out to be, uh, really quite a phony.

Nixon: Well, he is sort of a phony, isn't he?

Colson: Well, he stayed, when he was here –

Nixon: Stayed out in Georgetown, yeah.

Colson: – was out at the best restaurants every night and, uh –

Nixon: Sure.

Colson: – you know, he's just the complete opportunist.

Nixon: A racket, sure.

Colson: We’ll keep hitting him, Mr. President.

Williams explained that Colson was Nixon’s point man against Kerry, and said he found a weapon in another Vietnam veteran: John O’Neill, a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace, which backed Nixon administration policy in Vietnam.

Said Williams: "Fresh out of the Navy like Kerry, O’Neill was angry at Kerry for saying U.S. servicemen in Vietnam routinely committed war crimes. The weekend before the Washington protests, Kerry made the accusations on NBC’s 'Meet the Press,' saying, 'I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed, in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones.'"

And, Kerry claimed, "I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All this is contrary to the laws of warfare."

O’Neill hit back at Kerry with administration-orchestrated press appearances of his own, including a news conference that June. O’Neill asked rhetorically, "Shall Mr. Kerry and his little group of one thousand or twelve thousand embittered men be allowed to represent their views as that of all veterans, because they can appear on every news program? I hope not, for the country’s sake."

After the news conference, O’Neill met with Charles Colson at the White House, where the attack on Kerry was seen as a public relations coup.

The White House encouraged O’Neill to challenge Kerry to a debate. Kerry agreed, and before the event President Nixon called O’Neill into the Oval Office for a pep talk. "It’s a great service to the country," declared the president.

Nixon: Give it to him, give it to him. And you can do it, because you have a pleasant manner, too, because you’ve got — and I think it’s a great service to the country. [edit]

Nixon: You fellows have been out there. You’ve got to know, seeing the barbarians that we’re up against, you’ve got to know what we’re doing in that horrible swamp that North Vietnam is. You’ve got to know from all our faults of what we have in this country that, that what we’re doing is right. You’ve got to know, too, people are critics. Critics of the war, critics of ... run America down. You’ve gotta know that you’re on the winning — that, that you’re on the right side.

Two weeks later, Williams reported, the two veterans squared off on the then popular "Dick Cavett show":

O’Neill: Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war weariness and fears of the American people. This is the same little man who, on nationwide television in April, spoke of, quote, "crimes committed on a day to day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Kerry: We believe as veterans who took part in this war we have nothing to gain by coming back here and talking about those things that have happened except to try and point the way to America, to try and say, here is where we went wrong, and we’ve got to change.

Later that year, even as the war continued, Kerry left the increasingly radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War. But the Nixon White House kept after John Kerry.

It’s said that when Kerry ran for Congress in 1972, as Haldeman had predicted, Nixon stayed up late on Election Night until he knew for sure that Kerry had been defeated.

Appearing later on Chris Matthews' "Hardball," Pat Buchanan, who was Nixon’s communications chief, told Matthews that the "idea of throwing those medals over the fence was awful, and frankly the idea of calling the American soldiers as war criminals and basically mad dogs in Vietnam was an outrage ... that simply was a lie, it was not true.”