Kerry charged that U.S. soldiers routinely committed the most gruesome of
atrocities - "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all
levels of command."
The allegations electrified Washington - and made Kerry a national celebrity.
But the charges were slanderous lies.
"John Kerry (news - web sites)'s 1971 testimony slandered an entire generation of soldiers," writes military
historian Mackubin Thomas Owens, who led a Marine infantry platoon into combat in Vietnam.
"He said in essence that his fellow veterans had committed unparalleled war
crimes in Vietnam as a matter of course - indeed, that it was American policy to commit such atrocities," Owens writes.
The libel served Kerry well, though.
The better part of a half-century has passed; the nation is once again at
war - and the junior senator from Massachusetts now stands as the presumptive presidential nominee of the Democratic Party.
Surely it is no coincidence that now - after all these years - John F. Kerry
is trying to rewrite the dialogue that attended his first moments in the national spotlight.
On "Meet the Press" last weekend, Kerry maintained that while his "words were
honest," they were nonetheless "a little bit over the top."
No regrets.
No contrition.
And, certainly, no apology.
"A little bit over the top"?
Well, here's what the then-national spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against
the War had to say on April 23, 1971:
"[U.S. servicemen] had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped
wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at
civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally
ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."
Indeed, he charged, "[Americans] are more guilty than any other body of violations
of those Geneva Conventions; in the use of free-fire zones, harassment interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, the
bombings, the torture of prisoners - all accepted policy by many units in South Vietnam."
Did these things really happen the way John Kerry said they did - routinely,
as a matter of national policy?
In Oliver Stone movies, maybe.
Yes, some American soldiers committed atrocities. (Though even those crimes
paled in comparison to those repeatedly perpetrated by the Vietcong, as an integral part of a decades-long terror campaign
meant to coerce South Vietnamese support for the Communist side.)
But even as harsh a critic of U.S. policy as Daniel Ellsberg, the man who
leaked the Pentagon (news - web sites) Papers, has said that the men involved in the war's most notorious event, the
My Lai massacre, knew that the killing there was "out of the ordinary. That is why [the soldiers] tried to hide the event."
But that's not what John Kerry told the Senate.
Kerry agreed with Jane Fonda, who declared - during a protest at which Kerry
was the featured speaker - that "My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military."
Kerry, to be entirely fair, didn't actually fashion his charges from whole
cloth.
He took them from accounts included in the "Winter Soldier Investigation,"
a fabrication purportedly based on testimony from, in Kerry's words, "over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated
veterans."
That was odious nonsense.
"Winter Soldier" was, in fact, a set-up organized by a JFK-conspiracy theorist,
the fabulist Mark Lane.
And it was quickly exposed as a lie by journalists James Reston and Neil Sheehan
- themselves harsh critics of U.S. policy - who discovered that many of its supposed eyewitnesses never even served in Vietnam.
To date, John Kerry has never disavowed the Winter Soldier Investigation -
or apologized for his role in propagating its notorious falsehoods.
Kerry has tried to explain away his slanderous charges by suggesting they
were spontaneous - prompted by the heat of his anger over the war.
But it is now known that Kerry's speech was in fact carefully crafted by Adam
Walinsky, a one-time Robert Kennedy aide and speechwriter - who also coached Kerry in how to deliver it for maximum emotional
impact.
That is, for utmost political effect.
John Kerry, you see, had carefully planned a political career - and decided
to use the war as his signature issue.
The year before he appeared before Congress, he'd entered a congressional
race in Massachusetts. And he would exploit his sudden notoriety to move up the electoral ladder until he reached the Senate
in 1985.
There are many ironies in Kerry's career, not the least of which being the
fact that he's now running for president as the champion of the very same warriors he so viciously slandered 33 years ago.
Sen. Kerry can't bring himself to apologize for calling the men he purports
to represent war criminals.
But he doesn't hesitate to hit them up for money.
"Most Americans are not familiar with John Kerry's Vietnam record," reads
a current campaign solicitation that complains about "the Bush smear campaign in the press."
"Help us fight back by contributing [money]. And if you're a veteran . . .
join Veterans for Kerry right now."
Not so fast.
As Mackubin Thomas Owens wrote in National Review, "What Kerry did after leaving
the Navy constituted a breach of trust with his fellow veterans - because, to protest the war, he cast aspersions upon their
conduct."
Insists Owens: "He should apologize."
Indeed he should.
