Over the past week, the New York Sun and the Kansas
City Star have been reporting another unsavory story about
John Kerry’s antiwar past. Witnesses and FBI meeting minutes
conclusively place Kerry at an event he has always denied
attending: The November 1971 meeting of Vietnam Veterans Against
the War (VVAW) in Kansas City, in which a plan to assassinate
pro-war senators was discussed. How seriously the plan was debated
is in dispute; some veterans say it was nothing more than “guys
ticked off and talking big at midnight,” while others remember a
bitter confrontation over the idea. All agree, however, that Kerry
was not involved in the discussions and would never have approved
of such a plan.
Nevertheless, the Kerry campaign is eager to distance itself
from one of VVAW’s most notorious episodes. Now that the evidence of his attendance is overwhelming, the
campaign is trying to chalk up its earlier denials to faulty
memory. Late last week Kerry spokesman David Wade conceded that
Kerry had been there, but clung to the contention that the senator
simply didn’t remember the meeting. Wade’s description of the
Kansas City meeting as a “historical footnote” was too clever by
half — if the meeting and Kerry’s attendance really were
footnotes, the campaign would never have cared about the story in
the first place.
On Monday, the Sun reported on a former VVAW member who
claims Kerry operatives urged him to change his story about Kerry’s
presence in Kansas City. John Musgrave, a Marine who earned three
Purple Hearts in Vietnam, claims that John Hurley, head of Veterans
for Kerry, asked him to call back the Star reporter he had
spoken with and “tell him you were wrong.” Hurley insists he only
asked Musgrave “to be very sure of his recollection.” Apparently
this simple instruction required two phone calls to impart.
The Kansas City story has emerged at the same time that the FBI
has revealed it conducted surveillance on Kerry
during 1971 and 1972, when he was rising to fame as an antiwar
spokesman. The FBI monitored the Kansas City meeting as well,
though it’s not clear if it picked up the chatter about
assassination plots. When informed of the FBI story recently, Kerry
unleashed his practiced moral indignation, harumphing about civil
liberties and the sad abuses of power of the Hoover-era FBI: “I’m
surprised by [the] extent of it. I’m offended by the intrusiveness
of it. And I’m disturbed that it was all conducted absent of
some showing of any legitimate probable cause [italics mine].
It’s an offense to the Constitution. It’s out of order.” Then the
Kerry campaign trotted out more of its defiant, desperate macho,
claiming that the FBI revelation was “a badge of honor.”
Kerry has not explained why the FBI was wrong to spy on meetings
where political assassinations were being discussed. If that isn’t
“legitimate probable cause,” what is? The senator likes to bluster
about President Bush’s supposed failures on homeland security, and
perhaps he is worth heeding on that score. After all he, not our
hopelessly provincial president, has real-world experience with
groups threatening violent action. He should make the most of it.
Perhaps a line can be worked into his stump speeches, right after
the line about aircraft carriers: “I know something about
assassination plots, too.”
ANOTHER QUESTION THAT COMES to mind is whether Kerry felt any
obligation to report the plot to authorities. Under certain
conditions, knowing about such a plan — even a plan that was
probably half-baked at best — and not reporting it could be a
crime in itself. Gerald Nicosia, the author of Home to
War, a largely positive treatment of the VVAW, absolves Kerry
of any responsibility: “I think if the thing ever got off the
ground, Kerry would do something to stop it.” Still, it would be
worthwhile for someone to ask Kerry directly, if only because Kerry
would provide at least two answers to choose from.
For those opposed to Kerry’s presidential ambitions or troubled
by his conduct after returning home from Vietnam, the Kansas City
story shines a welcome light. It may even do the senator some
damage. But it is unlikely that Kerry’s disgraceful behavior as a
member of VVAW — slandering American soldiers, spreading
fictitious atrocity stories, theatrically discarding someone else’s
war medals — will be a major factor in the campaign. The Vietnam
records of Kerry and Bush have been given a going over, almost as
if they are preludes to the real campaign, when the two candidates
can tackle real issues like prescription drugs, gay marriage, and
outsourcing.
Our political culture has been irrevocably altered by the
Clinton ethos of “moving on.” There is a widely held sentiment
among the media, and perhaps even the public at large, to let
sleeping Vietnam dogs lie. Let’s just agree to disagree, the
thinking goes. Besides, George Bush is hardly an articulate
advocate for the merits of the Vietnam War. In his February
interview with Tim Russert, he denounced the war because “we had
politicians making military decisions,” as if this is not a feature
of every war.
Kerry has little to fear from the Kansas City story. Even if
there is a bombshell revelation yet to come, the story is already
playing out on the familiar terrain of “gotcha” personal
campaigning, devoid of genuine historical context. Kerry faces an
opponent who has no desire to discuss Vietnam-era politics and a
public that has long-since accepted the liberal narrative of
Vietnam as a wrongful war. And he operates in a political culture
in which a Democrat’s sins are easily forgiven, if in fact they are
viewed as sins in the first place.
All of this is to be regretted, because the election of 2004
offered one of the last chances to have a meaningful national
debate about the merits of the Vietnam War. Unless I was out of the
room the last 30 years, I don’t think we’ve had it yet. As an
interested non-expert who grew up in Vietnam’s aftermath, it seems
to me that Vietnam in the context of the Cold War and Iraq in the
context of the Terror War have many points of comparison.
Chief among them is the concept of the Twilight Struggle against
an implacable global adversary, where the rules of engagement
cannot preclude elective interventions that are part of a long-term
strategy. But the only discussion about Vietnam we tend to get is
of the quagmire variety whenever an American soldier dies in Iraq;
only then is the war in Iraq said to be “like Vietnam.”
The Right lacks confidence in its Vietnam arguments and the Left
has no moral authority, so the two sides have agreed to a silent
truce on the matter. But it’s not a truce that serves the interests
of the country, any more than VVAW did then or John Kerry does
now.
