Merrie Spaeth
Posted on 08/21/2004 2:35:53 PM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON - (KRT) - Looking at Merrie Spaeth's resume, you might think that co-starring with Peter Sellers was her biggest claim to fame.
Lately, though, her days as a child actress, and later as a radio host and aide in the Reagan White House, have been overshadowed, as the Dallas public relations maven has become a central player in the war over John Kerry's war record.
"These guys have a mission," Spaeth said of her role with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the group of Vietnam veterans who question the senator's claims of heroism. "I believe in them. I'm convinced they're telling the truth."
Democrats dispute the group's claims, question the members' credibility and accuse them of acting at the behest of Republicans.
"This is a group of proven liars. They have been completely discredited," said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton. "This is a front group for the Bush campaign."
Spaeth said: "It is so insulting to the swifties to insinuate that. They are enormously credible, mainstream salt of the earth guys."
Few voters probably know of Spaeth's role in the escalating controversy, but her name is being increasingly offered as evidence of complicity by Bush's chief adviser, Karl Rove, and a network of his most dependable Texas Republicans. And over her varied career, rough-and-tumble politics are nothing new.
In this case, she said, her time and effort are donated. The Swift Boat Veterans' leaders met in her office for 12 hours or so to plan their initial assault. One of Spaeth's roles was to recommend a private investigator to gather information from other veterans who served with Kerry. Some veterans contacted by the investigator, Tom Rupprath of Rockwall, Texas, said their stories were distorted to make Kerry look bad.
The Swift Boat Veterans have been bankrolled largely by $200,000 from Bob Perry, a conservative Houston businessman and top Republican donor. Perry is a longtime friend of Bush strategist Karl Rove and John O'Neill, the former law partner of Spaeth's husband, Tex Lezar, who died in January.
Spaeth, who turns 56 on Monday, says she's only spoken once with Rove and has had no contact about the ads with the White House or the campaign, which deny any role.
Democrats contend that their relationships are stronger than acknowledged; either way, the players were moving in the same small political world.
O'Neill is one of Kerry's earliest foils; the Nixon White House recruited the former swift boat commander to debate Kerry about the Vietnam War on the "Dick Cavett Show" in 1971.
Spaeth says, though, that she never heard O'Neill mention Kerry until last winter.
"It just bowled me over. It must have been like the first people listening to Galileo," she said.
Spaeth, a Philadelphia native, was far from that world about that time - Hollywood. In 1964, she co-starred with Peter Sellers and Angela Lansbury in a well-received movie called "The World of Henry Orient," playing a Manhattan prep-school girl with a crush on an eccentric pianist.
She gave up acting, she said, because she had a flash of sanity. By the mid-1970s, she was hosting a call-in show on New York's WMCA. Dallas media consultant Ken Fairchild was vice president of programming.
"She was great," he said. Watergate and Vietnam were the big stories then, and she was "very moderate, very middle of the road."
Then it was on to Washington, where she served as a White House fellow assigned to FBI Director William Webster. She spent two years at the Federal Trade Commission, then moved back to the White House as President Ronald Reagan's director of media relations.
That's when she met Lezar, then a Justice Department lawyer with strong conservative credentials. They got married in 1984, and she moved to Dallas when he left the Justice Department, initially going to work at Fairchild's consulting firm before starting her own.
A graduate of Smith College and the Columbia University business school, she once cited a lesson learned from watching the actors in "Henry Orient": "continual reinvention."
"Sellers constantly reinvented himself," she told Inc. magazine.
"And look at Angela Lansbury. How did the horrible woman in `The Manchurian Candidate' end up becoming Miss Marple? She's consistent in her personality, but she changes the roles she plays to show range."
Lezar ran for lieutenant governor in 1994, the year George W. Bush ousted Gov. Ann Richards. As in most Texas races, they did not run as a ticket - and incumbent Democrat Bob Bullock, later a close ally of Bush, crushed Lezar.
Spaeth herself ran for office once, losing a school board race in 1988 to Dan Peavy. But her political involvement remained largely behind the scenes in an advisory role, such as a decade later, when she coached independent counsel Kenneth Starr, a friend of Lezar, for his testimony at President Bill Clinton's impeachment hearing.
Nowadays, she focuses on strategic communications - shaping and managing messages, almost exclusively for companies. Barney the dinosaur was one client, amid a licensing dispute with PBS.
A key bit of evidence Democrats cite to implicate Bush in the Swift Boat attacks stems from one of the uglier episodes of the 2000 campaign, when Dallas businessmen Sam and Charles Wyly created a group called Republicans for Clean Air to attack Sen. John McCain's environmental record.
For two days when that story broke, Spaeth juggled phone messages for the group. She and Dallas Republican consultant Rob Allyn, who produced the ads, say that all she did was field phone calls as a favor because Allyn was traveling.
"She was not responsible for creating, producing or serving as a spokeswoman for Republicans for Clean Air," Allyn said Friday, dismissing how Democrats and media outlets now portray her role.
As for the Swift Boat campaign, which to Bush critics has the same taint of wink-and-nod coordination shielded in plausible deniability, Allyn said he knows of no connections between Spaeth and Rove, with whom he's worked for years, or anyone else in the Bush White House.
Spaeth calls it a "dumbo" thing that she agreed to do anything for Republicans for Clean Air, speaking somewhat dismissively of that effort. Noting that Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has about 350 members, she said, "There are real people in this."
The group's credibility has come in for major questioning. None of the veterans featured in ads served on Kerry's boat, and Navy records back Kerry's version of events. Plus, several of the group's prominent members have been discovered to have praised Kerry in the past.
Fairchild said he wasn't surprised when Spaeth's name surface in connection with the group, but he said he can't envision her shading the truth.
"I've never known her to be involved in dirty tricks," he said.
---
© 2004, The Dallas Morning News.
Visit The Dallas Morning News on the World Wide Web at http://www.dallasnews.com
Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.
And I just found this also:
PERRY, BOB HOUSTON,TX 77234
PERRY HOMES/BUSINESS OWNER
4/2/2002 $1,000 Jackson Lee, Sheila
Oh my goodness! Bob Perry also supports Democratic candidates! Only one...but still.
And why that one nutcase?
Oh and Mr. Kerrry, Who was Madame Binh's messenger boy?
Tonight the networks are all going to put alot of coverage on the one new veteran, who is also a jeornalist for the Chicago Slimes. We're going to hear alot more about him and his stepping forewards with 'facts' about Kerrys service as opposed to the honest vets. Heads up.
""This is a group of proven liars. They have been completely discredited," said Kerry spokesman Chad Clanton. "This is a front group for the Bush campaign."
Not one of these statements is true.
Names? Any names?
I didn't think so.
Good Lord,I forgot all about Madame Binh. Quite attractive IIRC.
Want to join in the fun? Click the logo to donate to Swift Boat Veterans for Truth!
They have not proven these men are liars.
They have not "completely discredited" these men.
And they have not proven that these men are a front group for the Bush campaign.
But it can be proven that MoveOn.org is a front group for the Democrats and the Kerry campaign!
"Navy records" do NOT disprove what the vets have said, unless they are ones that have been changed. Kerry has not released his "navy records".
Thanks for the heads up. This thing has so many legs I don't know what to call it anymore. But I do believe this: Kerry has egg all over his face. Try as he might, it won't come off. Pass the popcorn.
But no one is listening to that story (moveon.org=Dems) because that story isn't being hammered in the media. and it never will be.
Contribute to and support the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth at http://swift1.he.net/~swiftvet/index.php
Just sent them $25.
Pass it on.
I haven't seen any proof, except silliness
What proof? Discredited by whom? The New York Times? The Chicago Tribune editor who has nothing? A dubious flyer?
You guys don't have squat worth of evidence. Instead you Dims pull out the best play you got, and that's to spread misinformation through the sycophant press.
Nice try. No, they haven't. They've been proven correct.
So far, Kerry is the liar.
Jeffrey M. Epstein of Vietnam Vets for the Truth acquired the photograph over the Memorial Day weekend as America was commemorating its military heroes. Epstein's organization, Vietnam Vets for the Truth, issued a general request last week for photographs documenting Kerry's activities on behalf of the enemy. Bob Shirley, a Vietnam Swift Boat veteran (www.pcf45.com), sent the photograph to Epstein in response to that call. Shirley recently joined over 200 other Swift Boat veterans in signing an open letter questioning Kerry's fitness to serve as Commander-in-Chief.
Not one of these statements is true.
It is understandable for Chad Clanton to lie. He's being paid by the Kerry campaign to do just that. There is no justification for the author of this poor attempt at a hit piece to lie, imply and otherwise throw unproven charges. For instance:
the Nixon White House recruited the former swift boat commander to debate Kerry about the Vietnam War on the "Dick Cavett Show" in 1971.
That's a damnable lie. O'Neill had scheduled that debate before the White House took notice of him.
William B. Rood, a night city editor for the Chicago Tribune, and who served with John Kerry during the Vietnam War, talks Friday about his time as a Swift Boat commander. AP
[FUll Text] CHICAGO -- A Chicago Tribune editor who was on the Vietnam mission for which John Kerry received the Silver Star is backing up Kerry's account of the incident.
William Rood, 61, said he decided to break his silence about the Feb. 28, 1969, mission because reports by the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth are incorrect and darken the reputations of veterans who served with Kerry, according to a report in the Tribune's Sunday editions.
Rood, an editor on the Tribune's metropolitan desk, said the allegations that Kerry's accomplishments were overblown are untrue. Kerry came up with an attack strategy that was praised by their superiors, Rood said.
"The critics have taken pains to say they're not trying to cast doubts on the merit of what others did, but their version of events has splashed doubt on all of us," Rood said in a 1,700-word first-person account published in the newspaper. "It's gotten harder and harder for those of us who were there to listen to accounts we know to be untrue, especially when they come from people who were not there."
According to the Tribune, Rood's recollection of what happened that day in South Vietnam was backed by military documents, including his citation for a Bronze Star and a report written by then-Capt. Roy Hoffmann, who commanded his and Kerry's task force and is now a critic of the Democratic candidate.
The mission has become a focal point of a political and media firestorm fueled by the Swift Boat Veterans.
One of the group's leaders, John O'Neill, succeeded Kerry in command of a swift boat. O'Neill is co-author of the book "Unfit for Command," which accuses Kerry of lying about his wartime record and betraying comrades when he returned from Vietnam by alleging widespread atrocities by U.S. troops. The Swift Boat Veterans have repeated the accusations in TV ads.
The Kerry campaign filed a complaint Friday with the Federal Election Commission, alleging the Swift Boat Veterans are coordinating their ads with the Bush campaign. The Bush campaign has denied the claim but refused to condemn the book or the group's TV ads.
Rood wrote that Kerry recently contacted him and other crew members, requesting that they go public with their accounts of what happened that February day.
"I can't pretend those calls (from Kerry) had no effect on me, but that is not why I am writing this," Rood said. "What matters most to me is that this is hurting crewmen who are not public figures and who deserved to be honored for what they did. My intent is to tell the story here and to never again talk publicly about it."
Rood declined requests from a Tribune reporter to be interviewed. The Tribune's deputy managing editor for news, George de Lama, told The Associated Press on Saturday that Rood would not publicly discuss the issue. When the Tribune asked O'Neill for his response to Rood's account, O'Neill argued that the former swift boat skipper's version of events is not substantially different from what appeared in his book.
A message left with Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was not immediately returned today. [End]
______________________________________________________
Democratic presidential nominee John Kerry (news - web sites), left, and William B. Rood, right, are shown in this undated photo at the Swift boat base at An Thoi shortly after the action for which Kerry was awarded the Silver Star and Rood was awarded the Bronze Star in early 1969 during his service in Vietnam. Both men are holding weapons captured in the mission. Rood, a night city editor with the Chicago Tribune, who served with Kerry during the Vietnam War as the commander of a Navy swift boat on the 1969 mission ischallenging the attacks on Kerry's account of the incident. (AP Photo/Chicago Tribune, Courtesy William B. Rood)
_____________________________________________________
In Unfit for Command, Kerry's boat beached after the other boat filled with our guys and South Vietnamese soldiers had already beached and routed the Viet Cong. The wounded teenage soldier was on the run and Kerry took after him and shot him in the back. That's how he got his Silver Star.
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