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llano
Seaman
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 157
Location: Llano Estacado
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 Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 4:57 am Post subject: "John O'Neill & John Kerry" inspiring... |
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I have to admit that I got goosebumps reading this.
A fellow Vietnam Vet talks about O'Neill and tells how the VVJP really got started.
http://www.augustafreepress.com/stories/storyReader$25485
SNIP
| Quote: | | The John O'Neill I knew in 1971 was a humble, sweet, decent guy. It was not until recently that I even found out he'd been tops at Annapolis, and came from a distinguished Naval family. He slept in my mother's roach-infested slum apartment in Brooklyn without any comment (probably a little better than the digs we had in Vietnam). John O'Neill, today, still seems the guy I knew then. |
SNIP
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Home in Lubbock Texas, home of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University. A place visited frequently by Navy Chief. |
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llano
Seaman
Joined: 11 Aug 2004
Posts: 157
Location: Llano Estacado
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 5:14 am Post subject: |
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Sorry for answering my own post but I'm going to post the complete article.
| Quote: | John O'Neill and John Kerry
Guest View
Bruce Kesler
Special to The Augusta Free Press
How did we get into this catfight today about John Kerry's war and protest record from 35 and 33 years ago?
A New York Times reporter just called me to ask that. I responded that what happened in 1971 was put behind us by those of us who argued against John Kerry then. We wouldn't be raising it now if John Kerry had not continued to now to misrepresent his service and downplay his protests, touting his short service 35 years ago as his major qualification to lead the U.S. and world in these most perilous times.
It was made by John Kerry, for us Americans, a core issue of integrity.
On May 13, John Kerry responded to the question by Alan Colmes of Fox News "What is your slogan, like 'It's the economy stupid?' " with "I'm going to bring truth and responsibility back to the White House."
When your hopefully esteemed editor invited me to write, I said that I would write about what I personally experienced.
In the spring of 1971, John Kerry and a small group of purported and real Vietnam veterans camped out in Washington to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They received extensive publicity to their vastly overblown charges of pervasive brutality and war crimes by U.S. forces. The antiwar chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. William Fulbright, featured Kerry at a televised hearing. This one-sided protest publicity demoralized many citizens, and lastingly blackened the reputation and sacrifices of other Vietnam vets that made our reentry into peaceful civilian life unwelcome and harsh.
At the time, I had recently returned to civilian life after service with the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Several years before, graduating college and beginning graduate school, out of patriotism and belief in our mission in Vietnam, I had volunteered. I was now living with my mother, working for a relative in a fabric store in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, awaiting the restart of graduate school in the fall of 1971. I was outraged and hurt by Kerry's grandstanding falsehoods. I wrote a long letter of protest about it to the then editor of The New York Times op-ed page, Harrison Salisbury (a respected journalist and historian, and an opponent of the war). Without contacting me, Mr. Salisbury edited my letter and published it as a New York Times op-ed on May 13, 1971.
In it, I wrote:
" ... the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans and Americans bitterly resent the charge from the left that they are all war criminals. ... It is not a crime to be American and young, but it is if one adds to that ignorant, foolish or irrational dialogue as citizens of a democratic government. The antiwar veterans are not ignorant of the facts; they merely use them to form an army of young people marching to their drums, exploiting issues, fears and people for their own ends. That is the crime."
I started getting supportive phone calls from many other Vietnam vets, saying let's do more to clear our reputations. A letter was forwarded to me from a Vietnam veteran who had been a river-boat commander in the same unit as John Kerry, John O'Neill, who was to soon leave the Navy and who had been denied an opportunity by Sen. Fulbright to rebut Kerry. Other Vietnam veterans represented many thousands of Vietnam veterans in student and local veterans clubs around the country. We formed the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. I borrowed money for airline tickets and some double-up rooms at the YMCA in Washington and for a bargain-basement sport jacket and tie for myself, rented a space at the National Press Club, sent out amateurish press-conference invitations and sat in a phone booth at the Y for 24 hours begging newspaper and TV reporters to come to our meeting on June 1, 1971.
Many did. At the last minute, a representative from the VFW, its reputation hurting for neglecting Vietnam veterans, joined us. We received national press for our rebuttal to Kerry and his gang. John O'Neill effectively debated and rebutted Kerry on Dick Cavett's late-night TV show. Around this time, O'Neill was invited to meet President Nixon. As O'Neill entered the Oval Office, he wisecracked that he had actually voted for Humphrey in '68!
On March 16 of this year, MSNBC aired a review of that time, in which a Nixon Oval Office transcript has Haldeman saying that Colson claimed credit for finding O'Neill and for creating the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. He, nor the White House, absolutely did not.
This lie, repeated in the current press, denigrates a true band of brothers fighting for our reputations against the false war criminal charges made by Kerry that slandered us and our country, and whose lasting negative impressions denied us honor and ease in rebuilding our civilian lives.
Haldeman and Colson may have been trying to curry favor with an intemperate Nixon for their failure to counter Kerry and other anti-Vietnam protestors. Haldeman and Nixon are now dead, and Colson has refused to respond to requests to come clean. The fact is that prior to my New York Times op-ed, virtually no one was defending the reputation of Vietnam veterans.
MSNBC did an extensive investigation of the events in 1971 for an hour special aired on July 25. MSNBC reviewed all and presented many clips from the Nixon Oval Office tapes. MSNBC also conducted many extensive interviews with almost all involved. In one tape, Nixon and advisors are discussing some time in June, after our press conference, that they'd like to help us. Whether they did help get any of the interviews and TV/radio shows we appeared on in the following months, I have no knowledge. Dick Cavett this past week on TV said that he chose O'Neill, and he wasn't at the time aware of any Nixon White House touting. I only know that we only had a very few mainstream appearances, and that I succeeded in raising only about $2,000 from $10 donations from average Americans around the country. Hardly the stuff of purported White House power!
The same night, July 25, CNN also aired an hourlong documentary on Kerry's career. When it came to VVJP, the most they could suggest is that after our press conference, the White House may have supported us.
Individual Vietnam veterans banded quickly together to defend our reputation and sacrifices against the distorted claims of a few hundred radical Kerryites, many of who were proven not to even be Vietnam veterans. From the small donations received from average Americans, I paid off the debts, and we all returned to school and our lives.
In the 1972 campaign, a few VVJPers were active for Nixon. I was not, too busy in graduate school and working, confident Nixon would win over McGovern. McGovern only won Massachusetts, Kerry's home state.
The John O'Neill I knew in 1971 was a humble, sweet, decent guy. It was not until recently that I even found out he'd been tops at Annapolis, and came from a distinguished Naval family. He slept in my mother's roach-infested slum apartment in Brooklyn without any comment (probably a little better than the digs we had in Vietnam). John O'Neill, today, still seems the guy I knew then.
On March 19, 2004, John O'Neill and I had our first contact since those days, when I Googled and called him. My purpose was primarily to interrogate him whether he knew anything that I didn't as to whether, as some were saying in the press, the Nixon White House created the VVJP. O'Neill did not. We then chuckled at how ignorant we were in 1971 about John Kerry's war and protest record, and were only beginning to find out. In 1971, we were interested in the reputation of Vietnam veterans, and secondly on leaving a viable South Vietnam behind.
Bruce Kesler resides in Encinitas, Calif.
The views expressed by op-ed writers do not necessarily reflect those of management of The Augusta Free Press. |
_________________
Home in Lubbock Texas, home of the Vietnam Project at Texas Tech University. A place visited frequently by Navy Chief. |
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kurtsprincess
Seaman Apprentice
Joined: 15 Jun 2004
Posts: 80
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| Posted: Fri Aug 27, 2004 5:45 am Post subject: |
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Thank you for sharing this. 
_________________
KP
A people that values its privileges above its principles soon loses both.
History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.
Dwight D. Eisenhower |
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