John Kerry and John O’Neil on the Dick Cavett Show: The Song Remains the Same

 by Joseph M. Bravo  

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The Swift Boat Veterans’ beef with Kerry goes back to 1971, when John Kerry acquiesced to appear on the Dick Cavett Show for one debate with John O'Neil.

Much has been made in the media over the recent ad by Swift Boat Veterans attacking Senator John Kerry’s Vietnam record.  For most people it is distasteful and somehow inappropriate to call into question the details of a veteran’s wartime service.  After all, John Kerry’s decorations were duly awarded, even if it seems that someone at HQ was taking particular care to see that no form remained unfiled lest any of his glories go unrewarded.  Regardless, the men on Senator Kerry’s boat seem satisfied to lend him their auspices, and for most Americans that is probably sufficient.

The DNC spin machine would have us believe that the Swift Boat Veterans’ animosity toward Kerry is simply agitprop generated by the vestiges of Hillary’s “vast right wing conspiracy.”  They cite wealthy Texas Republican operatives as being the source of the cabal.   (It is interesting to note that when these commentators say the word “Texas” they invariably get a look on their faces that resembles someone with a mouth full of bull pucky; as they proceed to pontificate, it becomes clear that this is indeed the case.)  Undoubtedly, big Texas soft money is funding the purchasing of airtime to promulgate the Swift Boat Veteran’s grievances with John Kerry.  It is unlikely that this belated financial commitment to these veterans’ concerns is motivated simply by a heart-felt passion for Vietnam era truth telling. 

Between the records of LBJ and Richard Nixon, neither Democrats nor Republicans have much of a stake in such an endeavor.  But, to simply dismiss the bonafide qualms these men have with Senator Kerry as “election year politics” does a disservice to all those who fought and died in America’s most controversial war.  It is also to ignore the fact that these are not Johnny-come-lately Republican political hacks.  In fact, the Bush campaign has spent the better part of the last week responding to cries of “foul” over an ad that the campaign wishes would just go away.  It takes the RNC pundits off their own message and incites reprisal ads like MoveOn.Org’s attack on GW’s own less than stellar military career.  Senator McCain’s repudiation of the Swift Boat Veterans’ ad has caused the campaign yet further embarrassment in this matter, putting it in the awkward position of distancing itself from supporters over whom it has very little control.  It is also interesting to note that there is a noticeable lack of indignation about George Soros’ bankrolling of the MoveOn attack blitz to the tune of two million dollars.  I guess for Kerry advocates, European soft money in an American political campaign is preferable to those pernicious “Texans” thinking they are entitled to a say in things.

The Swift Boat Veterans’ beef with Kerry goes back to 1971, when John Kerry was loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen (or make a donation to his political campaign for a seat in the US House of Representative) that all Vietnam Vets were war criminals by definition — simply because of the widespread use of free-fire tactics and the bombing of Laos.  The over 2,000,000 Veterans of that war took understandable umbrage at these charges and immediately began to respond to then aspiring Congressman Kerry and his Vet-bashing cronies.

One such long-time Kerry nemesis is John O’Neil, author of the recent book Unfit for Command.  In 1971 O’Neil challenged Kerry to a series of debates about the conduct of the Vietnam War.  At the time, most of the respected televised news programs jumped at the chance to boost their ratings with such a hot topic. Unfortunately for them, and perhaps for the American people, Kerry declined all offers except one.  He acquiesced to appear on the Dick Cavett Show for one debate.  Kerry’s choice of venue could have hardly been less courageous, given Dick Cavett’s well known distaste for the war as well as his legendary snide yet shameless flirtation with the Hippie pop culture of the period.   A condescending preppy of aristocratic bearing, if not stature, or in other words, a Massachusetts homeboy, Dick Cavett afforded John Kerry the ultimate home court advantage.  This Dick Cavett Show was originally broadcast on June 30, 1971 and is currently being made available online by the fine folks at CSPAN (God bless’em), and I strongly urge anyone with an Internet connection to avail themselves of this rebroadcast.

The contemporary viewer will find the broadcast an artifact of its time, complete with wide ties, Kerry’s flowing locks and the occasional surreal juxtapositions of heated debate interrupted by Dick holding up bottles of bath oil beads as he cuts to commercial.  What is remarkable is how little John Kerry has changed in thirty-three years.  In a bad dejavu we hear Kerry demanding a date certain for withdrawal of all U.S. forces from Vietnam.  He seems oblivious to the consequences of providing such a date to one’s enemy.  He reflects a deep skepticism of the process of Vietnamization, which in 20/20 hindsight may seem prescient.  Skepticism is one thing, but Kerry goes farther; he is hostile to the very idea of Vietnamization, insisting that it will only prolong the war and hence the suffering of the Vietnamese people.  He bemoans the lack of democratic perfection of the South Vietnamese government and its crackdown on opposition newspapers.  He asserts that the sooner America pulls out of Vietnam, the sooner peace and prosperity will return to the land.  The naivety of such a position would be laughable if its consequences were not so tragic.  By this logic Mr. Kerry offers the South Vietnamese the same deal Southern planters offered the Southern blacks in 1860.  Just one problem Mr. Kerry, the price of such a peace is millions of people left in slavery and hundreds of thousands massacred.  

On that subject, Mr. Kerry’s foresight fails him, as he boldly asserts that there is no reason to assume that the Communists will create a bloodbath after we pull out.  No reason Mr. Kerry?  Do the names Stalin and Mao ring any bells?  Thirty million dead or disappeared in Russia, millions more in China and countless millions worldwide throughout the 70’s seems to constitute a trend, but one apparently missed by the reportedly astute Mr. Kerry.  I guess he presumed Pol Pot would prove a successful Utopian.  

If the young John Kerry had been content with a single foot in his mouth one might have chalked it up to youthful optimism; unfortunately his appetite for shoe leather seems insatiable.  In the spirit of the best tradition of Holocaust deniers, he asserts that there was no bloodbath in Algeria.  While I was never in Vietnam, this one is something I know a little about since my parents were American diplomats in Morocco at the time.  They assure me that there was indeed a bloodbath in Algeria as they were overwhelmed with refugees.  The bloodbath had spilled over into Casablanca where they personally witnessed countless atrocities.  If John Kerry has myopia when viewing history, his comprehension of the present seems no better. 

While the ability of John Kerry to offer empathy (bordering on sympathy) to America’s enemies might reflect a laudably open mind, his inability to offer the same empathy to the millions of Vietnam Vets he and his comrades slandered and spit upon, reflects a smug self-righteousness that is more indicative of his patrician upbringing than his service in Vietnam.  When pressed as to why none of his purported witnesses to the alleged American atrocities would testify in depositions (incidentally he says that he didn’t personally witness any atrocities), the young Mr. Kerry answered that “they did not want to get anybody in trouble.”  While this might possibly account for their reluctance to testify, it is considerably more plausible that they did not want to be prosecuted for perjury.  Indeed many of Kerry’s colleagues that were making these accusations were later proved to not only be lying about atrocities but had never even been in the military, let alone baby killing in Vietnam.  Senator Kerry’s recent demands for heads to role for pre-9/11 intelligence failures must reflect his newly found concern for individual accountability.

The young Mr. Kerry was not above prevarication of his own on these matters. He attributed the burned out villages in Laos and the tens of thousands of hill tribe peoples who were displaced and seeking refuge in South Vietnam as evidence of the “atrocities” perpetrated by the US Air Force.  Maybe John Kerry was ignorant of the fact the North Vietnamese government had invaded Laos itself and had perpetrated a policy of genocide against the very people Kerry claims the Americans were bombing.  (Take a breath.) Or, that these very people have been subjected to centuries of periodic “ethnic cleansing” by an aggressive Vietnamese empire that to this day has territorial aspirations on its neighbors.  But the fact that these refugees were heading for South Vietnam and not Ho Chi Minh’s “worker’s paradise” should have caused John Kerry to take a breath long enough in the middle of his own bull pucky to realize he was talking nonsense, if not sedition. 

Of course John Kerry and his ilk are rarely troubled by the veracity of “facts” presented so long as the “evidence” supports their agenda.  In lieu of testimony, Kerry cites the “journalism” of the notorious propagandist Peter Arnett, another individual who never lets the facts get in the way of a good story.  In fact, Peter Arnett long ago discovered that the surest way to scoop the competition is to give aid and comfort to the enemy, and in his case any enemy will do.  Peter apparently has yet to realize that treason may be a short cut to fame and fortune, but its price is paid by the blood of patriotic young men.  Hopefully his latest stunt doing PR for Saddam in Baghdad will be the last time we all have to witness Peter “unapologetically” romancing the enemy.  What is amazing is how so many on the Left think this makes him Don Juan. 

After spending the better part an hour disseminating Communist propaganda as if it was truth, the young Mr. Kerry finally offers us a fact that is indeed verifiable.  He tells the audience that after his third combat injury and “much soul searching,” he decided to avail himself of the opportunity to leave the theatre of operations.  According to the Swift Boat Veterans, two of these wounds were acquired when on two separate occasions he was injured by his own grenade.  While no one asserts that John Kerry’s injuries were intentionally self-inflicted, to twice injure oneself with one’s own grenades suggests at the very least a certain lack of aptitude for the task at hand.  That a young John Kerry given a choice between returning to his unit, thus facing more Mei-Kong River ambush duty, and going back to cushy desk jockey position stateside chose the latter is certainly understandable, if less than heroic. 

What is more interesting, is his admission that upon his return to the United States he requested an early discharge from his Admiral on the grounds of “conscientious objection” to the ongoing conflict.  This is a curious justification since he had completed his required tour of duty and would no longer have to suffer the moral dilemmas of a combat sailor.  Equally curious is his Admiral’s acquiescence at losing a “fine officer” to such a request.  (Several U.S. soldiers have made similar requests on the same grounds to get out of duty in Iraq, but they have found their commanding officers far less compliant.) That upon his release, the young Mr. Kerry went immediately into the political arena and within a year was running for office, suggests that perhaps his true motivation for requesting an early release was less the result of an over-active conscience and more the result of an overriding sense of ambition.  Given Senator Kerry’s professed, albeit ambiguous, objections to the war in Iraq, one is inclined to wonder, “If he is elected Commander in Chief, will he resign his commission in the face of the present moral challenges and then proceed to accept his appointment to Secretary General of the United Nations?”  With John Kerry’s proclivities for “reporting for duty,” then resigning that duty, followed by a resounding condemnation of the duty itself, perhaps we should take a closer look at Senator Edwards, since he very well may be the President in 2008.
 
One might ask, “What’s the big deal about a young man speaking his mind in a free country?”  The answer lies not in the present but rather in the atmosphere of the period.  In 1971 hundreds of U.S. servicemen were being held prisoner by the North Vietnamese government.  In a circumstance that is eerily similar to current events, the North Vietnamese government maintained that all U.S. servicemen were “war criminals” and were not entitled to the protections of the Geneva Convention.  The North Vietnamese arranged kangaroo show trials and tortured American POWs to obtain confessions to imaginary events.  American heroes were being tortured to death every day in Vietnam for refusing to say what John Kerry was enthusiastically willing to proclaim without the slightest corroboration.  What is more, every time a pilot was shot down after John Kerry shot off his mouth, that aviator’s torturers pointed to the malicious accusations promulgated by John Kerry and his cronies as evidence that the North Vietnamese maltreatment of American POWs was lawful and justified.  Concern over the alleged atrocities committed by American troops is certainly open-minded, but to place this concern above the well-being of American POWs suffering in captivity is at best disloyal and certainly reflects a misplaced sense of priorities.  As Americans we all have the right to free speech but that does not absolve us from the consequences of that speech, especially when it negatively impacts patriots suffering in horrific conditions.  Of course if John Kerry had known when to shut up, there wouldn’t be miles of damning videotape of Kerry contradicting himself for us to peruse.

Kerry’s entire political history consists of an acquiescence bordering on genuflection to Communist regimes and insurgencies throughout the world.  Whether it was the spread of Communism in Central America, Southeast Asia, Africa, or Central Asia, or his advocacy of unilateral American nuclear disarmament while thousands of Russian warheads were pointed at the United States, John Kerry was always willing to trust the motives of America’s adversaries.  But he has invariably offered only the most cynical interpretations of American intentions in foreign policy.  Never one to anticipate, or even acknowledge the horrors perpetrated by Communist regimes, he has nonetheless been more than willing to castigate American policy as if it was the United States rather than Stalinist and Maoist dictators who had spent seventy years raping and pillaging their way across the planet in an effort to set up a global totalitarian tyranny. 

If Senator Kerry’s myopia and double standard had ended with the Cold War, we could attribute his pinko tendencies to youthful idealism.  After all, who wasn’t a little Bolshy in the early 1970’s; even Nixon put in place Federal wage and price controls.   Unfortunately Senator Kerry’s sympathy with everyone but Americans continues.  Apparently he did not anticipate a “bloodbath” in the United States even after September 11th, since he missed every single meeting of the Senate Intelligence Committee after that national tragedy.   Maybe he just thought the 15-odd intelligence agencies of this country were so competent they didn’t need oversight.  This would make “Kerry-sense” since he thought they could do a better job of making America more secure if their budgets were drastically cut.  Or maybe his mind was already made up when it came to the defense and intelligence services of the United States.  He doesn’t need the facts since he knows in advance that he has never seen a weapons system he thought this country needed, nor an intelligence budget that didn’t need slashing.  Neither has Senator Kerry seen fit to “report for duty” at 75% of the Senate Intelligence Committee meetings since his tenure began on the committee.  (At least GW showed up most of the time.)  This attitude toward defense and intelligence spending might just be the force of thirty years’ habit for John Kerry, but if this is true then Senator Kerry better get with the program. 

Senator, we are no longer fighting your militant socialist cousins.  The current global totalitarians are radical Jihadist fundamentalist groups who use terror as a weapon and the perpetual suffering of their own people as a tactic.   This is not a gentleman’s disagreement about competing economic philosophies.  This is an existential crossroads.  The ideology of the Jihadists is not motivated by concerns for social justice and economic egalitarianism.  They believe that they ensure their instant and eternal salvation simply by killing an “infidel.”  Get this straight; an “infidel” is anyone who disagrees with them about anything.  This includes about 998,000,000 of the world’s 1,000,000,000 Muslims, who for their own reasons are prone to detest Arab Wahabists (ie. those responsible for the mass dissemination of a culture of hate in the Middle East). 

Contrary to the cynical Wahabist doctrine, to kill oneself in an act of murder does not make one a martyr.  Murder for the sake of instant personal salvation is perhaps the ultimate selfish act, and the vast majority of Islam knows that there is a special place in Hell for those who commit such barbarities. There is nothing cool or righteous about sympathizing with these murderers.  They don’t appreciate it and they make no distinction between sympathetic, hand wringing, open-minded liberals and bayonet wielding U.S. Marines.  Senator Kerry it is your very open mindedness they hate.  Truth be told, given a choice between the equivocating “complex” senator from Massachusetts and an enraged U.S. Marine, the Jihadists have more respect for the Marine.  Like most Americans, so do I.  Is it any wonder that most Vietnam Vets to this day would like to see the (thankfully late) Ho Chi Minh, Peter Arnett, Jane Fonda, Osama Bin Laden and John Kerry marooned on the same desert island? With hams like these in residence, I suggest a satellite blackout of that place.

Vietnam War

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