- This time last week, John Kerry was pictured in a salute
on the front of US newspapers, telling the nation that he was "reporting
for duty". Today, his political opponents are hoping to take the shine
off his military record with allegations that he won his five medals by
lies and subterfuge.
-
- An advertisement broadcast last night in the swing states
of Wisconsin, Ohio and West Virginia - where a few votes could make all
the difference - featured veterans such as Larry Thurlow telling voters:
"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry."
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- Mr Thurlow was in Vietnam at the same time as the presidential
candidate, but he was not one of the men who had served on his Mekong delta
swiftboat. Mr Kerry describes them as his "band of brothers",
and they portray him as a courageous fighter and hero.
-
- Mr Kerry's supporters, who have made much of his service
in contrast to that of George Bush - who was excused Vietnam duty to serve
in the Texas National Air Guard - are alleging dirty tricks.
-
- The advert is part of a coordinated campaign. A week
on Sunday, a book called Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out
Against John Kerry, will be published, co-authored by former swiftboat
commander John O'Neill.
-
- It alleges that the wounds Mr Kerry won his three purple
heart medals for were not worthy of the awards and, in at least two cases,
had been self-inflicted in order to get him off the battlefield.
-
- It argues that for him to run for president with such
a record while faulting his opponent's would "represent unbelievable
hypocrisy and the truly bottom rung of human conduct".
-
- The Republican senator John McCain, a Vietnam veteran,
spoke out after the advert's screening to "deplore" the tactics.
When he ran against Mr Bush for the Republican nomination in 2000, he had
to fight off allegations that being a captive (he was held in solitary
confinement for three years) was not as heroic as actively attacking the
enemy. Yesterday, he called on the White House to condemn the "dishonest
and dishonourable" commercial.
-
- Mr Bush's spokesman, Scott McCellan, did not denounce
the advert but the money that paid for it - so-called "soft money",
which is collected by independent political funds known as 527s. These
are not counted as the Bush or Kerry campaigns so long as they do not actively
call on voters to elect either man. Criticising a candidate's record is,
however, fair game.
-
- Therefore, neither of the parties behind the advert are
part of the Republican party or the Bush campaign. Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth is a 527, and Regnery Press is a commercial (although politically
committed) publishing company. However, a look at the people who connect
the enterprises reveals them to be part of a rich partisan tapestry.
-
- Mr O'Neill is the link between them. As well as being
the book's co-author, he is a member of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth
steering committee. The group was set up with the help of Merrie Spaeth,
the widow of Tex Lezar, who was Republican candidate for lieutenant governor
of Texas in the same year that Mr Bush ran for governor. He was a partner
of Mr O'Neill's at their Houston law firm.
-
- Regnery, meanwhile, proclaims itself to be the leading
conservative publisher in the US. Acquired by Republican donor Thomas Philips
in 1993, it is a subsidiary of Eagle Publishing, which is using its flagship
Human Events magazine to promote Unfit for Command and build up its subscription
base and mailing lists.
-
- Regnery publishes on any number of topics (from threats
to marriage to a defence of assault rifles), but scored a number of hits
in the Clinton years with titles such as the conservative columnist Ann
Coulter's High Crimes and Misdemeanors: the case against Bill Clinton.
-
- The most notorious - Gary Aldrich's Unlimited Access:
an FBI agent inside the Clinton White House - depicted the executive mansion
as a den of debauchery, drug-taking and gay sex. One section claimed the
president was smuggled out under a rug for trysts with a female celebrity
in a nearby hotel. Mr Aldrich admitted in the book that many of his allegations
were, at best, second-hand.
-
- On top of this, the O'Neill/Regnery axis has links going
back to Richard Nixon. Also a swift boat commander in Vietnam, Mr O'Neill
was hired by presidential aide Charles Colson in 1971 to discredit the
recently returned Mr Kerry's campaign against the war. Mr Kerry reputedly
beat him in a nationally televised debate on the Dick Cavett Show.
-
- Sidney Blumenthal, a Guardian columnist and former adviser
to Mr Clinton, said he saw nothing new in Mr O'Neill's book and the campaign
mounted by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. "It reeks of partisan dirty
tricks, and the facts simply don't hold up at all. The intent is simply
to dirty Kerry," he said. "They have been trying to do this for
a long time. Regardless of whether it is false, they will put it out to
see if it will hurt."
-
- The truth of the allegations is disputed by the Kerry
campaign, and contradicts the most authoritative account of his time in
Vietnam, Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty. The author is director of the
Eisenhower Centre for American Studies at New Orleans university, which
specialises in military history.
-
- But the truth does not matter - to confuse the issue
of Mr Kerry's military service, which he has made such a strong part of
his campaign, is enough to occupy the candidate, distract him and muddy
his record.
-
- It is not the first time dirty tricks have surfaced in
the 2004 campaign. The Drudge Report (which has served as a conduit for
the allegations over Mr Kerry's Vietnam service, including allegations
that he slaughtered livestock and burned down a village with a Zippo lighter)
ran reports in February that the Massachusetts senator had an affair with
an intern. There was no truth in it.
-
- Later, a photograph emerged of Mr Kerry at a rally with
Jane Fonda, the actress who visited Hanoi during the war and, to some,
will forever be known as Hanoi Jane. It was proven to be a fake.
-
- "In all this campaign, attacking Kerry on his Vietnam
heroism has always backfired," Mr Blumenthal commented.
-
- "It is particularly ironic and dangerous, given
the fact that Bush is withholding national service records that that show
he did not show up for duty in the Alabama national guard, and that he
has still not come clean about why he was suspended from flying in the
Texas air national guard after refusing to take a physical."
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- Of course, Democrats are not the only victims of dirty
tricks. The emergence of documents detailing Mr Bush's arrest for drink-driving
a few days before the last presidential election was blamed in some quarters
for the closeness of the result and his failure to win the popular vote.
-
- Around the time of the Kerry intern allegations, the
Republican national committee chairman, Ed Gillespie, expressed outrage
that the musician Moby, a Kerry supporter, had told the New York Daily
News it would be possible to spread anti-Bush gossip on the internet to
bring down his support among, for example, anti-abortionists.
-
- He then turned it into a pre-emptive rebuttal of a rumour
that did not even exist, opening up the interesting question of whether
allegations of dirty tricks constituted a form of dirty campaigning.
-
- "We know now that, some time this fall, Kerry campaign
operatives intend to go into pro-life chatrooms on the internet to spread
a scurrilous story that President Bush drove a former girlfriend to an
abortion clinic and paid for her abortion," Mr Gillespie told the
Washington Times.
-
- Dirty campaigning is nothing new in US politics: in 1800,
Thomas Jefferson was accused of favouring the teaching of "murder,
robbery, rape, adultery and incest".
-
- One of Mr Nixon's operatives, Donald Segretti, was imprisoned
for illegal campaign material, including faked letters alleging that a
senator had fathered an illegitimate child with a 17-year-old.
-
- The 2004 race for the White House is close, and we should
not be surprised to see more dirty campaigning between now and November.
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- Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited
2004
-
- http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections
- 2004/comment/story/0,14259,1278021,00.html
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