Posted on 02/17/2004 3:48:56 PM PST by Hon
From the VVAW website:
Since Vietnam Veterans Against the War's inception in 1967, tens of thousands of vets, GIs and supporters have participated in and supported the actions of VVAW. One of those members in the early 1970s was John Kerry.
VVAW national leader Al Hubbard appointed Kerry to the VVAW Executive Committee to assist in preparing Dewey Canyon III, VVAW's limited incursion into the land of Congress in 1971. Kerry made his greatest contribution to the anti-war movement and to VVAW in his speech to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on April 23, 1971.
http://www.vietnamvets.com/wwwboard/messages/24613.html
Kerry's VVAW leader and friend from 1971, Al Hubbard, lied about being an officer, Vietnam Veteran, and sustaining war injuries.
B. G. Burkett, in Stolen Valor reports that "Al Hubbard, the VVAW's executive secretary...wrote a poem:
America
Now,
Before the napalm-scorched earth
consumes the blood of would-be-fathers
and
have-been-sons
of daughters spread-eagled
and mothers on the run.
Reflect.
See what you've become,
Amerika.
A scathing commentary by one of those who could no longer stomach the fight, right? Wrong. Hubbard first claimed he was a decorated Air Force Captain who had caught shrapnel in his spine flying a transport plane into Da Nang in 1966. But after NBC received a tip that Hubbard was lying about his rank, a reporter confronted him. He confessed on the evening news and the Today Show that he actually served as a sergeant, not a pilot or captain, in Vietnam.
John Kerry defended Hubbard, citing the confession as proof of Hubbard's integrity. "Al owned up to the rank question," Kery said. "He thought it was time to tell the truth, and he did it because he thought it would be best for the organization."
Then the Defense Department issued a news release about "Alfred H.Hubbard['s] military record stating that "There is no record of any service in Vietnam."
http://www.tracyfineart.com/blog/
From the Weekly Standard:
John Kerry seems to have had a way of eluding the bad odor that clings to his old associates. On "Meet the Press" in 1971, he appeared with VVAW member Al Hubbard, a veteran who was exposed around this time for lying about his rank and combat experience (he had seen no combat). While this confirmed suspicions about the dubious identities of many of the winter soldiers, it didn't keep Kerry from becoming famous. The young politician was able to have his cake and eat it, too, becoming the establishment, patriotic face of a radical, anti-patriotic movement. Quite a trick, really.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/003/712ljiby.asp?pg=2
Looks like the source of the article is a FReeper --- he has a link to FreeRepublic on the website (RichardPoe.com)
Here's an excerpt:
In May 1969, fishermen discovered the body of Black Panther Alex Rackley floating in Connecticut’s Coginchaug River. Rackley’s captors had clubbed him, burned him with cigarettes, scalded him with boiling water and stabbed him with an ice pick before finally shooting him in the head.New Haven detectives learned that the Panthers suspected Rackley of being a police informer. Panther enforcers had tied him to a chair and tortured him for hours. Police arrested eight Panthers and later extradited Panther leader Bobby Seale from California, after a witness accused Seale of ordering Rackley’s death. (1)
Campus radicals supported the Panthers. They organized mass protests in support of the so-called "New Haven Nine." Hillary was right in the thick of it.
By the time she entered Yale Law School in 1969, Hillary was already a radical celebrity on campus. Life magazine had featured Hillary in a piece titled, "The Class of ’69," which showcased three student activists whom Life’s editors deemed the best and brightest of the year. A line Hillary used in her Wellesley College commencement speech appeared under her photo: "Protest is an attempt to forge an identity." (2)
I thought not. Thanks for the info ! ...
ha ! I hope so !Hey ! Old Edwards is giving Kerry a run for his money. Nip and Tuck !
Per FOX News, Edwards is edging Kerry 39% to 38% ...
Looks like the Intern thing is working against Kerry.
Earlier, they showed that 'late deciders' were STRONGLY going with Edwards by around 53%.
pp. 63-64 Operation RAW (acronym for Rapid American Withdrawal--letters spelled war backwards), Labor Day weekend 1970, "performance of guerrilla theater on a stage nearly 100 miles long." This was the march from Morristown, NJ to Valley Forge, PA. The next two major demonstrations were the Winter Soldier Investigation and Dewey Canyon III.
"Senators George McGovern, Edmund Muskie and Congressmen John Conyers,Jr., Paul O'Dwyer, and Allard Lowenstein had all endorsed the action. But the biggest coup of all was getting Jane Fonda to agree to address the rally in Valley Forge."
A crowd of 10,000 was expected. The crowd was actually 1000. The VFW staged a counter demonstration. Mark Lane, Kennedy assassination researcher, warned the VFW they wouldn't stand a chance trying to stop the demonstration, and threatened that the Vietnam vets would kill them if they tried.
"Jane Fonda stood on the bed of an old green pickup truck to address the assembly at Valley Forge. In place of the usual political bunting, the vets had hung black zippered canvas bags, which resembled body bags, over the edge of the makeshift speakers' platform; on each of the bags was stenciled the words: 'YOUR SON?' To great cheers--more than she would ever hear from American veterans again--she began: 'This is not my country right or wrong. It's my country, but what is wrong must be changed. I can't escape the belief that My Lai was not an isolated incident but rather a way of life for many of our military.'"...
"She'd spent the last couple of years getting an intense political education from the likes of Mark Lane, a Kennedy assassination conspiracy theorist, and Huey P. Newton, one of the most dynamic and brilliant leaders of the Black Panthers. Echoing Newton, she told reporters at Valley Forge that 'any black militant in this country who isn't armed is a fool' and that she doubted 'if change can be non-violent.'"
Fonda's speech was followed by Mark Lane, vet Bob Hoffman, actor Donald Sutherland, Allard Lowenstein, and Rev. James Bevell of the Southern Leadership Conference who asked people to join him on a march to the United Nations, to present the secretary general with a petition charging the United States with genocide in Southeast Asia.
pp. 70-71: "But by all accounts, the man who most stirred the vets was one of their own, Lieutenant (j.g.) John Forbes Kerry, a Silver Star winner who had gotten an early discharge to run for Congress from his native Fourth District in Massachusetts."
"Kerry had had an action-filled tour as a swift-boat commander in Vietnam, where he was severely wounded in an ambush, gaining three Purple Hearts and a Bronze Star, in addition to the Silver Star, which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But Admiral Elmo 'Bud' Zumwalt Jr. had intercepted the paperwork for Kerry's Navy Cross and changed it to a lesser award so that he could approve it himself (the Navy Cross requires congressional approval) and pin it on Kerry a few days later, as an 'impact award,' to boost morale."
"Kerry could not help but sense the irony of his being a war hero, since he had not wanted to fight in the war at all. Before Vietnam, he had led a life of privilege. His father, a lawyer, had worked in the foreign service, and John had been schooled at St. Paul's and Yale, with summers in Europe. Exceedingly tall and rangy, Kerry was a good athlete, and at Yale he had distinguished himself as an orator; in fact, he delivered the senior oration at his graduation in 1966, criticizing the draft and the war. He had been planning to pursue his graduate studies abroad when he received a notice from his draft board that he would soon be called. Though he questioned the policy behind the war, he did not see either jail or exile as a reasonable alternative for himself; besides, he says he 'believed very strongly in the code of service to one's country.' So he enlisted in the Navy, to see for himself what was going on and at the same time to stay out of combat. To that end, he volunteered for assignment on one of the swift boats--short, fast aluminum craft that were used for patrol duty off the Vietnam coast. Two weeks before he arrived in Vietnam, the Navy began changing the deployment of the boats, sending them up the rivers instead to ferret out pockets of Viet Cong that were guarding the waterways for their own use. Still, Kerry shrugs off the attribution of heroism. In the action of February 1966 for which he was awarded the Silver Star, he maintains that he simply got tired of being ambushed. 'The riverbank just erupted with small weapons fire,' he recalls. 'We were caught in it. So I turned all the boats right into it and we charged the riverbank--beached right in the positions, ran ashore, and ran right over the ambush. Then I took one boat upstream with me, and we took [were hit by] a B-40 rocket on the boat, and I guess I just got pissed off again, and I went straight into the rocket position. I wanted to see some of the enemy and fight 'em. So we did, and we beat the hell out of 'em. We went into this village and captured a lot of weapons and people and VC flags.'"
"Stationed in New York a few months later, in the spring of 1969, Kerry, showing the same gumption, went directly to Admiral Walter F. Schlech Jr. to request the early discharge. Before he had gone to Vietnam, he had spent hours debating the value of the war and the help we were allegedly giving the Vietnamese people, but once in combat 'the answers hit [him] pretty hard, right in the face.' He was appalled by 'the lack of strategy, the stupidity of many of the missions, the apparent lack of political will by this country to pursue [the war], the lack of a commitment to the men who were fighting in the field, [and] the absurdity of some of the losses that we were incurring,' as well as 'the corruption within the [South Vietnamese] government.' 'Everything added up,' he says in hindsight, explaining how 'this kid coming back from nowhere,' who 'wasn't known from Adam,' suddenly found it in his heart to run for Congress in order 'to make an antiwar statement.' Schlech, who disagreed with Kerry's position on the war, agreed to set him free from the Navy. 'To his enormous credit,' remembers Kerry, 'he understood where I was coming from, and he said, 'That's a fair request. You've served honorably, and you've done your duty, and I think you have a right to exercise your judgment.' Kerry's discharge came through on January 1, 1970."
"Kerry never did run for Congress that fall, but it wasn't because he got cold feet. His immediate target was the incumbent Democrat from the Fourth District, Philip Philbin, who had been consistently hawkish about the war. Kerry had felt that a highly decorated Vietnam vet such as himself running against Philbin would 'make clear the need to take action...lend to the debate and help in the process of ending the war.' But a coalition of antiwar forces had already come up with a redoubtable opponent to defeat Philbin in the Democratic primary, Father Robert F. Drinan, S. J., the dean of Boston College Law School and a widely known critic of the war. Kerry immediately pulled out of the race to make way for Drinan, and eventually became chairman of Drinan's campaign."
"While working for Drinan, Kerry, who was still 'so anxious to tell the story...just burning with this anger' to make the public aware of 'what was going on,' began speaking about his war experiences to various civic groups...."
p. 72: "That day at Valley Forge, Kerry told the cheering crowd: 'We are here because we above all others have earned the right to criticize the war on Southeast Asia. We are here to say that it is not patriotism to ask Americans to die for a mistake, and that it is not patriotic to allow a president to talk about not being the first president to lose a war, and using us as pawns in that game.'"
Note in the passage from pp. 70-71 the difference in the story about the medals (which by all rights should have been a Navy Cross. But...), and the description of the battle. My single quotes are direct quotes in the book from Kerry. Kerry is listed in the acknowledgements as one of many who gave personal interviews to the author. The whole section I quoted is footnoted as from interviews with John Forbes Kerry. The interviews took place in late 1988 and early 1989.
There's much much more in the book. The book includes the original upside-down flag pic of the six vets that appears on the cover of "The New Soldier." The original is attributed to George Butler. There is also the pic of a uniformed and beribboned Kerry walking with Ted Kennedy. The caption reads, "Senator Ted Kennedy and John Kerry discuss the Supreme Court injunction against Vietnam veterans sleeping on the Mall and whether the vets ought to risk violating it, Washington, D.C., April 21, 1971." Photo by Sheldon Ramsdell. On page 565 is a pic of the VVAW marching on the Capitol. "Photo courtesy of the VVAW Archive."
Hmmm, they have an archive!
Note that Kerry's interviews with the author late in 1988 and early in 1989 were the basis for these passages.
Hubbard served as a sergeant, but represented himself as a captain. I'll be putting some more information on Hubbard and Kerry on the Kerry Dossier link in a day or so.
pp. 50-51 “The most important new member to enter VVAW that fall (1969) was a black man named Al Hubbard, an Air Force veteran of both Korea and Vietnam. In fact, he claimed to have been on American air transports bringing supplies to the beleaguered French during their war with the Viet Minh, the forerunners of the present Viet Cong. Al was older by at least a decade than most of the other vets in VVAW, and he was already highly politicized. He was a tall, lean, light-skinned black man and wore a militant Afro hairstyle, a goatee, and talked in the lingo of the Black Panthers, to whom he had strong connections, though more as a sympathizer than a member. In Sheldon Ramsdell’s view, Al had ‘a good healthy attitude[on the subject of racism]. We needed him badly. We had to get people of color [into VVAW].’”
“Hubbard was by all accounts a character, what in certain places like Greenwich Village in the fifties would have been called a hipster. He even wrote his own brand of poetry. He had injured his back in a military plane crash, lived on a service pension, and took a large quantity of prescription drugs for back pain. He was always ready to have a good time; and by all accounts, he had a great affinity for the opposite sex. The other vets found him attractive as a leader for a variety of reasons. He had been a sergeant in the Air Force and had the tough discipline of a noncom who’s used to getting things done quickly and efficiently. He also had an angry edge that gave teeth to his social conscience, so that he did not fight from the head only, but also from the heart. In the words of Sheldon Ramsdell, ‘Al had a bit of a complex’ over the inferior roles he’d had to play in life—a black man in a white man’s world, a sergeant doing the work of officers, always making others look good, and helping white men fight two wars against people he considered his dark-skinned brothers. Like a lot of younger blacks in that period, Hubbard felt impelled to stand up to authority and to get some of life’s good things for himself.”
“He started the process by telling people he had been a captain, not a sergeant—a deception that later almost cost VVAW its credibility in the media and before the American people. But from the moment Al came into VVAW he began to make friends and acquire followers, not least of all because of his fierce enthusiasm for reform. ‘I used to get a kick out of him,’ Ramsdell recalls, ‘because he was actually having a good time with all of this [organizational work of VVAW].’”
“Hubbard had grown up in Brooklyn and gone into the Air Force planning to make it his career. But he had been in only twelve years when the plane crash forced him to take a medical retirement.”…
“…Hubbbard’s mind was the most forceful one there.”
Hubbard began to act as a leader from the day he joined VVAW “The guys respected him and he was absolutely crucial.”
“Hubbard was repelled by the blind patriotism of the VFW and the American Legion, which he blamed “for the military attitudes in this country through their unlimited lobbying.”
p. 53. “One of Hubbard’s first moves was to send members out to organize chapters on campuses…The campus chapters of VVAW would become one of the organization’s strongest bases of support in the years to come...”
“…Two other major areas were VVAW recruited were the VA hospitals and black political groups, especially the Black Panthers.”
If the Dept. of Defense has no record on Hubbard, could it be that his service was covert? Were we admitting to having American military in Vietnam when it was a French war?
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