Twisted Anger Leads to Truth-

Swift Boat Veteran’s 527 Efforts Reopen Wounds
That Ultimately Hurt America More Than John Kerry

By William Finucane & Michael Bradley

Republican President George W. Bush says he wants to erase all the so-called ‘527’ groups that operate separately from the candidate, producing advertisements and undertaking other political activity that nonetheless assist one candidate over another.

None have been good for the election, declares Mr. Bush. What a kind man!

However, even though so much of the media doesn’t seem to have a long-term memory, it isn’t hard to recall that George W. Bush was a staunch defender of 527’s way back in the year 2000, when during the Republican primaries his supporters had started such a group that attacked his opponent at the time, then-presidential candidate John McCain, another Vietnam war hero.

At that time, Mr. Bush told CBS’s Face the Nation that 527’s are "part of the American process…There have been ads, independent expenditures . . . but that's what freedom of speech is all about."

Currently, however, there seem to be as many Democratic 527’s than GOP ones, and now they are a problem. Apparently so much so that on September 2^nd the Bush Administration filed suit against the Democratic 527’s, such as MoveOn.org, Media Fund, and America Coming Together. Mr. Bush, however, has not disavowed the new GOP 527’s that have been springing up, especially the one involving the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.’

The name, "527" refers to the piece of the U.S. tax code that allows such organizations to exist. Essentially a 527 is a tax-exempt group organized through Section 527 of the Internal Revenue Code, and once recognized by the IRS such a group is able to raise money for political activities, including advocacy and voter mobilization. There are some fine line distinctions involved, and these relate to whether the given 527 groups simply raise money for voter mobilization and advocate in favor of certain issues, or whether the group actively advocates the election or defeat of a given federal candidate. In the latter instance, the 527 could be considered a Political Action Committee, which would supposedly remove 527 protection and status.

Most importantly, a 527 is not supposed to be directly connected or associated with a given candidate or the candidate’s campaign organization.

The reality is that the fine lines have already been blurred on all sides to the point where they are largely non-existent, and since there seems no way to police the good intentions of the 527 regulations, as stated in the IRS code, it appears that the only sure solution is to overturn the enabling legislation and banish 527’s entirely. At the least, such an action would mean that the people arguing the case for one side or the other would be forced to be honest about who they want elected. This is what Mr. Bush says he favors, though his administration’s lawsuits only targets Democratic 527’s.

It already seems obvious, though, that 527’s have done irreparable harm to the traditional give and take of election year politics; the very give and take that allows the electorate to understand the differences between the parties on fundamental issues and policies.

Ironically the one 527 that has twisted the political process most grotesquely is the one Mr. Bush will not disavow. Specifically, the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth’ has been launching a public relations assault for months, seeking to reduce Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry from a decorated Vietnam War hero and then critic of the war to a liar about his wounds and actions, and even worse a liar against his own flag and country.

That trashing of Kerry’s Naval record is out there now and will live forever. And the very techniques used are those of a PAC, not a 527. But no matter how much of a fabrication is involved in the Swift Boat propaganda, Kerry has to defend himself at every stop. And that takes away from his ability to press the campaign on the issues facing the nation.

Taking away Kerry’s ability to campaign is a brilliant maneuver.

So much seems either wrong or questionable regarding Mr. Bush’s positions that the Democratic challenger could obviously spend hours effectively dissecting the issues for the voting public, but not so if the challenger is deflected and forced to defend himself against attacks on his early life. The classic trick is to force the challenger to battle a non-issue and lose ground doing it.

Of course this tactic supposedly has nothing to do with Bush because it is being done, according to the 527 theories, by absolutely unrelated groups of people, not the president or his administration or his campaign organization.

Well, eh, there might be some connection. A volunteer who worked as an advisor for veteran’s affairs in Mr. Bush’s election campaign, former Air Force Col.. Ken Cordier, was recently forced to resign after it was pointed out that he had appeared in an ad produced by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Bush campaign spokesman quickly declared Mr. Cordier had not told the GOP campaign of the ad. And just as quickly, the Kerry campaign accused the Swift Boat group of working directly with the Bush campaign. Mr. Kerry’s organization declared that the Swift Boat 527 is nothing more than a "front" for the Bush campaign and called for the Federal Election Commission to cite the organization for violating federal election laws. So far, the FEC has not commented, but The New York Times discovered that some half a dozen senior Republicans who are Bush supporters and fundraisers from Texas were deeply involved in getting the Swift Boat Veterans advertisements into the media.

According to The Times, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have backers with "close ties to the Bush family and to his chief of staff, Karl Rove. Among them is Merrie Spaeth, who during the last presidential election was spokesman for a group that spent $2-million on adverts that attacked Bush's rival, Senator John McCain."

And then there is Benjamin Ginsberg, who was general counsel to Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney until it was discovered he was also advising the Swift Boat Veterans; an innocent coincidence, Mr. Ginsberg asserted. Then, of course, there is Harlan Crow, a Bush Foundation trustee and longtime Bush family friend and fundraiser, who has reportedly donated at least $25,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans to get them started.

Not least, and certainly not last, is Bob Perry, who is recognized as the largest Republican political/financial donor in Texas. He has reportedly given the Bush family hundreds of thousands of dollars during the various campaigns of Bush family members, and according to reports, he donated at least $200,000 to the Swift Boat Veterans. He is also known to also be a close colleague of Karl Rove, George W. Bush’s top political advisor, and is a good friend of John O’Neill, who has set himself forward as John Kerry’s nemesis since the early 1970’s

But the controversy doesn’t end there. In late August retired U.S. Navy Rear Admiral William L. Schachte, Jr., weighed in to support the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, making the incredible claims that not only was Mr. Kerry lying about being wounded, but that Schachte himself was actually in command and was on Kerry’s boat!

"Kerry had himself (listed as) in charge of the operation and I was not mentioned at all," Schachte declared. "He also claimed that he was wounded by hostile fire. None of this is accurate. I know, because I was not only in the boat, but I was in command of the mission."*

Not surprisingly, this incredible statement got a great deal of press coverage with precious little scrutiny, given the current policy of much of the press, whereby anything can be quoted by anyone with some credentials and will not be questioned until someone else steps forward and challenges the statement. This journalistic passivity obviously also serves to distort the news, since there is no balance to the given coverage until much later, if at all, and then the delayed counterpoint may not get the same news placement or general prominence, and of course may never be read by the people who read the initial story. This journalistic perversion is pervasive in today’s print press.

The Schachte statement is incredible on the face of it because if retired Admiral Schachte had been the actual commander of the mission, he would have had to file or sign off on the after action reports, particularly those relating to Kerry’s boat, had he been on it. And he would have been in control of what commendations were made regarding individual heroic actions.

So why would retired Rear Adm. Schachte make such a remarkable statement? Possibly because he is on record as a long-standing supporter of George W. Bush, and perhaps even more importantly, because he is a lobbyist whose client, FastShip Inc., "recently won a $40 million grant from the federal government."*

Mr. Kerry has flatly denied that Schachte was on his boat that night in Vietnam.

"But other events are not in dispute," The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank reported on August 31^st, noting that: "According to a March 18 legal filing by Schachte's firm, Blank Rome, Schachte was one of the lobbyists working for FastShip on issues such as the effort to win funding for a new marine cargo terminal. On Feb. 2, Philadelphia-based FastShip announced that it would receive $40 million in federal funding for the project. In addition, David Norcross, Schachte's colleague in the Washington office of Blank Rome, is chairman of (the now completed) Republican convention in New York. Records also show that Schachte gave $1,000 to Bush's 2000 and 2004 campaigns."

"It's amazing what a $40 million government contract can do for your memory," Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton told The Post, noting that Schachte did not challenge Kerry's Purple Heart awards while describing the incident in an interview last year.

It is reasonable to ask why otherwise honorable and brave veterans would risk tarnishing their own reputations in order to tarnish or harm Mr. Kerry and his reputation? The answer seems to lie in festering anger over Kerry’s decision to speak and act against the Vietnam War when he returned to the United States. Some veterans seem to equate Mr. Kerry’s return to civilian life as an anti-war veteran as treasonous, to them personally and to the country, and this seems to blur or obscure normal standards of behavior among these honorable and brave men.

But the 527 organization, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, no matter how much of an oxymoron that name proves to be, seems able to capture media attention, again and again, with limited scrutiny in the bulk of the passive press.

Yet Mr. Bush says he’d like to stop all 527’s, even though he doesn’t mention the ‘Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.’ However, it doesn’t matter anyway because spokesmen for the Swift Boat Veterans vow they wouldn’t quit their advertising even if Bush asked.

A founder of the Swift Boat group is retired Admiral Roy Hoffman. In this election year he apparently found a reason to move dramatically away from his earlier positions. The New York Times reported that a year ago Admiral Hoffman, "told Kerry’s biographer Douglas Brinkley…that he had disagreed with Kerry, but said: ‘I am not going to say anything negative about him – he’s a good man.’" In another interview, he is quoted as saying Kerry "had guts and ‘I admire that.’"

Similarly, George Elliott, another veteran who recently climbed on the anti-Kerry bandwagon is on record mentioning Kerry’s "acts of courage." Elliott, who was one of Kerry’s superior officers, is quoted by The Times as having considered Kerry "one of the top few" of his best officers, whose actions were "unsurpassed" and "beyond reproach."

That was then and this is now, of course, and truth and ethics have apparently taken a holiday during this particular election year.

Now, the Houston leader of the Swift Boat Veterans, John E. O’Neill, has indicated he will continue to attack Kerry, pretty much in any way possible, no matter what. It gets better and better, he notes, every time they raise a controversy over Kerry’s war record..

After Vietnam, O'Neill obtained a law degree from the University of Texas, and in 1973/1974 he was a member of Republican President’s Nixon and Gerald Ford's National Advisory Counsel on Supplemental Services and Centers. He was admitted to the Texas bar in 1974, and interestingly became a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William H. Rehnquist, who was nominated to his position by Republican Richard Nixon.

O’Neill, who is now a successful Texas lawyer, bears an enmity toward Kerry that goes back to the end of the Vietnam War. He apparently feels and believes that Kerry’s antiwar statements painted him and virtually all other Vietnam vets, especially combat vets, as war criminals for acts committed during the war; he makes no distinction between the reality that there were soldiers who committed crimes and the vast majority that did not.

Mr. O’Neill’s view seems to hold that any assertion of war crimes or violations of the standards of conduct implies that everyone who was there is guilty, which of course is unreasonable. But in April, 2004, O’Neill told CNN that he feels Kerry lied in his statements as an antiwar protestor.

His deep dislike of Kerry was known publicly even in 1971, when then President Richard Nixon and his top aide, Charles W. Colson, (who was later imprisoned as part of the Watergate scandal), sought to use O’Neill to discredit Kerry and the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

The Houston Chronicle, earlier this year, cited a June, 1971 memo from Colson that stated, "Let’s destroy this young demagogue (Kerry) before he becomes another Ralph Nader."

Yet during that volatile time period, O’Neill actually debated Kerry regarding the U.S. role in Vietnam and Southeast Asia during a 90 minute version of the Dick Cavett Show, and Kerry emerged enough of a winner to continue on successfully in his public career. But O’Neill never gave up, and now he’s deeply involved with the Swift Boat Veterans and their 527 group.

All the stops are apparently being pulled out for fear that if that isn’t done, Mr. Bush will be revealed, among other things, as a so-called ‘war president’ who conveniently made certain he never fought in the one war where he could have been a combatant, the Vietnam War.

Now the GOP and the 527’s have even brought out ex-Senator Robert Dole of Kansas, a true war hero whose right arm was rendered useless in World War II as a result of brave action during battle. Dole now says he doubts if Kerry was ever seriously wounded. Yet Kerry got three Purple Hearts for injuries caused by enemy action, and Mr. Dole knows perfectly well that nowhere does the military code require that the given wound must be life threatening. The serviceman has to have been wounded in combat. That’s all.

Kerry spent four months captaining a swift gunboat in the fighting in Vietnam, by all accounts a high-risk assignment with a very high casualty rate, where months in such a daily combat area were the equivalent of much more time in other service areas.

Lt. Kerry personally killed at least one man with his own gun, coming ashore and chasing the Communist soldier from the area where he had fired at Kerry and his men; he saved other men in the water, including a Green Beret officer, and by the original accounts he did so under heavy enemy fire.

At the time, Kerry was credited by his superiors with being a very aggressive captain serving in an extremely dangerous environment. All quibbling aside, it has to be recognized that Kerry was a Navy man who fought with the best of them, risked his life and returned to the United States a decorated veteran.

Back in ‘The States,’ Kerry embarked upon what may have been the bravest act of all; he spoke out against the Vietnam War. It is this last part of Mr. Kerry’s Vietnam story that is the hardest of all, and from it stems the current situation.

After trading bullets with Vietnamese combatants, Kerry returned to the U.S. and said what few would say. Maybe his comments were too broad brushed, which he himself has indicated, but it’s easy today to forget how heated the times were when the Vietnam War was dragging on and on; thousands upon thousands of American men were dead and the numbers were still climbing, the war was becoming more and more brutal as Americans were killed by hidden and often horrendous traps, and it had become nearly impossible to decide who was and who wasn’t the enemy.

At home during the same time, the Nixon Administration appeared to be playing a corrupt chess game of international politics, using bombing and peace talks as pawns while acting criminally within the American political structure itself.

Nonetheless, Kerry’s comments asserting that the war was more than wrong, but that it was a morally corrupting venture in which Americans were increasingly likely to be exposed to and sometimes participate in actions that could be considered war crimes, brought out a sort of reflexive hatred from some veterans. Yet Kerry’s comments were later shown to be more than a little accurate. Lt. William Calley and his Charlie Company’s My Lai Massacre in 1967 is but one such example.

It was not easy to tell such stories, and all the more so because a great deal of official effort was made to cover up those incidents, but there are true American heroes that emerged from such darkness and it remains important that they be recognized.

Two such heroes are helicopter pilot and former Chief Warrant Officer Hugh Thompson and his crew chief and door gunner, Lawrence Colburn, together with the rest of their flight crew.

Thompson, almost beside himself by witnessing ground troops slaughtering men, women and children at My Lai, brought his close-support, attack helicopter down and placed it between the surviving Vietnamese and the Charlie Company soldiers, ordering Colburn to turn his .50 caliber machine gun on any American that fired again on the civilians.

This was the only redeeming action on that December day in ’67, and although Thompson filed official reports they were buried until another soldier, Ronald Ridenhour, conducted his own investigation and began writing letters to officials in Washington. And it wasn’t until 1998, thirty-one years later, that Thompson and Colburn were awarded belated medals by Maj. General Michael Ackerman for helping the civilians of My Lai.

Thompson and Colburn were and are true heroes, in the full American tradition.

The journalist and author Seymour Hersh later wrote that by March 1968, "many in (Charlie) company had given in to an easy pattern of violence." And Doug Linder, writing, ‘An Introduction to the My Lai Courts-Martial,’ declared that "soldiers systematically beat unarmed civilians. Some civilians were murdered. Whole villages were burned. Wells were poisoned. Rapes were common."

Americans, in isolated but increasing incidents, were committing atrocities in this confused and ugly war. And herein is the deep divide. It is so deep it can break friendships and drive men to insanity, alcohol, drugs or suicide. And here is where the Bush camp and its helpers in the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth do real damage to the nation as a whole. Instead of letting the Vietnam wounds slowly heal, they have reopened this festering infection and not surprisingly the effect has become larger.

Some men, like Kerry, felt at the time that they had to expose what they knew were acts beyond the reach of war.

When Lt. Kerry decided to speak, he was not talking about killing people in combat; nor was he speaking of what it meant to chase down and with his own weapon kill a Vietnamese combatant who had a weapon of his own that he had just used against Americans under Kerry’s command. Such actions were expected in combat, where it was vital to know when it was necessary to shoot to kill. In doing that, Kerry showed no hesitation. No one could question Kerry’s courage at the time, although apparently that is possible several decades later.

But throughout the Vietnam War, particularly in its last years, there were other acts, now well documented, which often fell somewhere between traditional military actions and covert operations, sometimes even involving assassination, that were harder to spell out to Americans at home. Finally, there were war horrors that had nowhere to hide under any military pretext, and the fact that the enemy often did the same or worse didn’t change the fact that this was not supposed to be the way the United States and its soldiers conducted themselves. But incidents happened.

America had them all.

It dealt with them.

Then it went back to being a normal, healthy, upstanding nation. Of course all America did was to bury the awful parts and keep the good. Until the 527 efforts of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth pulled up Kerry’s war record and used it to rake up all the mud it could find or hope to create by implication and sarcastic skepticism, playing upon the growing sense among average Americans that nothing is ever really as it seems. This latter point, ironically, having been given life by the Nixon Administration.

Nonetheless, once such a festering history as that of America’s involvement in Vietnam is uncapped, it cannot be conveniently re-covered, which means that it will spill out in unexpected and unmanageable directions.

It seems obvious that whether or not the specifics of Kerry’s war record is truly or accurately portrayed by the Swift Boat Veterans is of little apparent consequence to the members of that group.

What seems all important is that a significant number of Vietnam War veterans are encouraged to feel that John Kerry, individually and specifically, stabbed them in the back by returning home and talking about the ugly and dark side of what may well have been America’s most controversial and divisive war, with the exception of the Civil War.

Personally, Kerry helped to turn the war into something the public would perceive as increasingly horrible and shameful, something that the nation should and increasingly did feel guilty about. But when Kerry did that, by his actions on the home front, including his testimony before Congress, it was during the heat of the conflict, and his clear goal was to stop what he perceived to be antithetical to American values, as well as detrimental to America and its interests, and finally perhaps even to its national soul.

Kerry did this when the country was as divided as it had ever been since the Civil War, and to take such a stand at that time required a great deal of courage and no small measure of patriotism. To declare that countrymen were now more and more frequently becoming brutal in what was an increasingly politicized conflict required a great loyalty to the nation that superseded loyalty to fellow military men. And despite recent assertions to the contrary, Kerry’s declaration of conscience was certainly not a pathway to a political career that anyone interested in major political office would have chosen, then or now.

But now the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have released their pent up rage at Kerry for his lack of loyalty to them – for his lack of knowledgeable silence – and they have opened the wound again, forcing Americans to once more consider the putrid aspects of United States actions in Vietnam.

"Truth" was apparently the farthest thing from their minds when the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth began their well-funded efforts, which have obviously been fully appreciated and rewarded by the currently powerful and the entrenched, many of whom exercised every option to avoid service in the Vietnam conflict. Yet truth is what those Swift Boat veterans will ultimately find, and it is reasonable to suspect they won’t like it.

Vietnam is again tearing apart those Americans who thought they had a handle on how we as a people should agree to see the conflict in historical terms. Now Vietnam again threatens our friendships, our families, and our own souls. The scab has been ripped from the wound, and this is the legacy of the GOP’s most prominent 527 group, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

This won’t be forgotten.

The Bradley Report, September 5, 2004