Right Voices

Kerry’s Record

John Kerry mentions his service in Vietnam so frequently that it has become a running joke on the campaign press plane. He seldom if ever mentions his postwar activities

Kerry burst onto the national political stage in 1969 when he returned from Vietnam. The NYT reported that Kerry had “asked for, and been given, an early release from the Navy so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform.” He unsuccessfully sought election in two different Massachusetts districts, in 1970 and 1972. The Globe reported that in the space of two months in early 1972 he lived in three congressional districts while deciding where to run.

In April 1971, Mr. Kerry captivated television audiences with his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. His testimony went far beyond the now-uncontroversial position that Vietnam was a mistake. Mr. Kerry took a benign view of the Viet Cong and urged immediate withdrawal.

He told the senators that American servicemen had committed atrocities, including the razing of villages “in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan.” These were not isolated incidents, Mr. Kerry claimed, but happened “on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” He said that 200,000 Vietnamese a year were “murdered by the United States of America.” (A Kerry spokesman now distances the candidate from the word “murdered,” saying he “never suggested or believed and absolutely rejects the idea that the word applied to service of the American soldiers in Vietnam.”)

Kerry now says he was relying on the “highly documented and highly disturbing” stories he heard at a Detroit conference funded by Jane Fonda. The Naval Investigative Service later found that some of the most grisly testimony there was given by false witnesses.

After his testimony, Mr. Kerry became the celebrity voice of the VVAW, at the same time that he became increasingly alienated from the group. The controversy about Mr. Kerry’s presence at a meeting of the VVAW steering committee on Nov. 12 through 15, 1971, seven months after his testimony, erupted this month after writer Thomas Lipscomb broke the story in the New York Sun that several veterans remembered Mr. Kerry being present at the meeting when Scott Camil, a key leader of the VWAW from Florida, proposed the assassination of key pro-war senators, including Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Democrat John Stennis of Mississippi.

According to six eyewitnesses the plan was discussed and voted down, with Mr. Kerry speaking out against it, although there is disagreement about how narrow the margin of defeat was. On the third day of the meeting, Mr. Kerry and three other people resigned from their posts as national coordinators of VVAW. Historian Douglas Brinkley says Mr. Kerry told him he quit because of “personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy.” Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Brinkley that he was a “no show” in Kansas City.

The entire article is a good read and brought up some very interesting points and has left me with a question:

Here is a man who wants to be President of the United States – - a man who is supposed to know right from wrong and all that type of thing – - However, did he not think it wrong to sit in on and participate in a meeting (by the account of several eyewitnesses and FBI evidence) where the assassination of several political figures was discussed and plotted and not go to the authorities with that information?