How Kerry Quit Veterans Group Amid Dark Plot
Posted on 03/12/2004 5:29:50 AM PST by veronica
When Talk Turned To Assassination He Exited, Vet Says
The anti-war group that John Kerry was the principal spokesman for debated and voted on a plot to assassinate politicians who supported the Vietnam War.
Mr. Kerry denies being present at the November 12-15, 1971, meeting in Kansas City of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and says he quit the group before the meeting. But according to the current head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, Randy Barnes, Mr. Kerry,who was then 27,was at the meeting, voted against the plot, and then orally resigned from the organization.
Mr. Barnes was present as part of the Kansas City host chapter for the 1971 meeting and recounted the incident in a phone interview with The New York Sun this week.
In addition to Mr. Barnes’s recollection placing Mr. Kerry at the Kansas City meeting, another Vietnam veteran who attended the meeting, Terry Du-Bose, said that Mr. Kerry was there.
There are at least two other independent corroborations that the antiwar group Vietnam Veterans Against the War, of which Mr. Kerry was the most prominent national spokesman, considered assassinating American political leaders who favored the war.
Gerald Nicosia’s 2001 book “Home To War” reports that one of the key leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Scott Camil,“proposed the assassination of the most hard-core conservative members of Congress,as well as any other powerful, intractable opponents of the antiwar movement.”The book reports on the Kansas City meeting at which Mr.Camil’s plan was debated and then voted down.
Mr. Nicosia’s book was widely praised by reviewers as varied as General Harold Moore, author of “We Were Soldiers”; Gloria Emerson, who had been a New YorkTimes reporter during the Vietnam War, and leftist Howard Zinn. Mr. Kerry himself stated in a blurb on the cover that the book “ties together the many threads of a difficult period.” Mr. Kerry hosted a party for the book in the Hart Senate Office Building that was televised on C-SPAN.
Another source is an October 20,1992, oral history interview of Scott Camil on file at the University of Florida Oral History Archive.In it,Mr.Camil speaks of his plan for an alternative to Mr. Kerry’s idea of symbolically throwing veterans’ medals over the fence onto the steps of the Capitol during the Dewey Canyon III demonstration in Washington in April of 1971.
“My plan was that, on the last day we would go into the [congressional] offices we would schedule the most hardcore hawks for last — and we would shoot them all,” Mr. Camil told the Oral History interviewer. “I was serious.”
In a phone interview with the Sun this week, Mr. Camil did not dispute either the account in the Nicosia book or in the oral history. He said he plans to accept an offer by the Florida Kerry organization to become active in Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign. Campaign aides to Mr. Kerry invited Mr.Camil to a meeting for the senator in Orlando last week, but they did not meet directly.
Mr. Camil was known to colleagues in the anti-war movement as “Scott the Assassin.” Mr. Camil told The New York Sun he got the name in Vietnam for “sneaking down to the Vietnamese villages at night and killing people.”
According to the Nicosia book and interviews with VVAW members who were involved, at theVietnamVeterans Against the War Kansas City leadership conference, Mr. Camil tried to put his plan into effect. He called together eight to 10 Marines to organize something he called “The Phoenix Project.” The original Phoenix Project during the Vietnam War was an attempt to destroy the Viet Cong leadership by assassination. Mr. Camil’s Phoenix Project planned to execute the Southern senatorial leadership that was financing the Vietnam War. Senators like John Stennis, Strom Thurmond, and John Tower were his targets, according to Mr. Camil. They were to be killed during the Senate Christmas recess the following month.
After an attempt to parcel out the hit jobs required to kill the senators, Mr. Camil’s plan was presented to all the chapter coordinators present and the VVAW leadership. Mr. Nicosia’s book recounts, “What Camil sketched was so explosive that the coordinators feared lest government agents even hear of it. So they decamped to a church on the outskirts of town with the intention of debating the plan in complete privacy.When they got to the church, however, they found that the government was already on to them; their ‘debugging expert’ uncovered microphones hidden all over the place. An instantaneous decision was made to move again to Common Ground, a Mennonite hall used by homeless vets as a ‘crash pad.’”
“Camil was deadly serious, brilliant, and highly logical,” Mr. Nicosia told the Sun.
The plan was voted down. There’s a difference of opinion as to how narrow the margin was.
The claims of Mr. Kerry’s involvement in the assassination discussions in Kansas City have apparently not been previously reported.
The most recent book that focuses on Mr. Kerry’s relations with his fellow Vietnam veterans, Douglas Brinkley’s “Tour of Duty,” reports the events as follows: “In a November 10 letter housed at the VVAW papers in Madison,Wisconsin, Kerry quit, politely noting he had been proud to serve in the national organization. His reason was straightforward: ‘personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy.’ In two days,VVAW was meeting in Kansas City and he would be a noshow.”
But in a footnote, Mr. Brinkley acknowledges,“I could not locate Kerry’s November 10 VVAW resignation letter supposedly housed at the Wisconsin archives. The quote I used comes directly from Andrew E. Hunt’s essential ‘The Turning: A History of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (1999).”
When asked by the Sun who told him Mr. Kerry was “no-show” at Kansas City, Mr. Brinkley replied, “Senator Kerry.” Mr. Brinkley also stated that Mr. Kerry did not have a personal copy of the resignation letter either.
But in an interview with the Sun, the “essential” historian Mr. Brinkley relied on as his source, Andrew E. Hunt, said “I never stated that there was a letter of resignation, or even implied in my book that I saw one. I never could find one in the archives in Wisconsin. I don’t know how Brinkley got the idea that I had. I never could figure out when Kerry resigned.” When asked about Mr. Brinkley’s statement that Mr. Kerry didn’t have a copy of the resignation letter either, Mr. Hunt said, “I don’t know about that. I never could get an interview with Senator Kerry. But I never saw anyone who saves things the way Kerry does.”
Whether or not there was a letter of resignation dated November 10 is obviously important, since it predates the Kansas City assassination discussions by two days.
Mr. Camil said he did not recall whether Mr. Kerry was at the Kansas City meeting nor did he recall whether he had discussed his assassination plan with Mr. Kerry.
But Mr. Barnes, the head of the Missouri Veterans for Kerry, said, “I don’t think there was a letter of resignation. He just said he was resigning after the vote.”
Clearly there is considerable confusion about the time of Mr. Kerry’s resignation.According to Mr. Nicosia,“He resigned from the executive committee” after a spectacular argument with VVAW leader Al Hubbard at the July national leadership meeting in St Louis.
But on behalf of the John Kerry campaign, spokesman David Wade told the Sun yesterday that Mr. Kerry resigned from Vietnam Veterans Against the War “sometime in the summer of 1971 after the August meeting in St. Louis, which Kerry did not attend.”
Mr.Wade also said,“Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting.”
Two-thirds of the American troops in Vietnam at the height of American commitment in 1969 had already been withdrawn in the “Vietnamization” policy in effect at the time of the VVAW Kansas City conference in November 1971. When asked recently by the Sun why the assassinations still seemed necessary, Mr. Camil replied: “The war was still going on. We had to stop it.”
On at least one point the recollections align: A 1971 Kansas City meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was marred by talk — shouted down by a disgusted majority — of assassinating pro-war politicians.
Members of the group that John Kerry propelled to the center of the anti-war movement and that helped launch his political career do not agree, however, whether the man now on course to the Democratic presidential nomination was around for the debate.
At least one enthusiastic Kerry supporter said he remembered him attending at least the start of the group's national steering committee meeting and urging the organization to distance itself from radicals.
“John said, … I think his exact words were, ‘You guys are getting way too radical, you're defeating your purpose, and I quit,' ” Randy Barnes said Friday.
A Kansas Citian and an active volunteer this year for Kerry's presidential run, Barnes said upon reflection later in the day that he could “not be absolutely certain” that Kerry was in Kansas City for the meeting.
Others, including the veteran who had proposed the idea of violence at the meeting, think Kerry had left the organization before it gathered at various Kansas City locations in the fall of 1971.
“My recollection was that he wasn't there,” said Scott Camil, a disabled Marine veteran living in Gainesville, Fla.
At the time, Camil said, he thought severe action was needed to end the war, and he argued for a “domestic Phoenix Project” modeled after attempts by U.S. forces to make Viet Cong leaders targets for assassination.
“I thought that when the Congress is not doing what we want them to do, you change things. As a Marine sergeant in Vietnam I was conditioned to think you went after the head of the snake,” Camil said.
“I'm sorry about those discussions now, but they did take place. … I had no cause ever to discuss those plans with John Kerry.”
He disputed an article published Friday in The New York Sun that said specific senators were targets and that attempts were made to parcel out killings. Camil said the talk never got that far.
“It did not float at all,” Camil said. “I took a lot of (criticism) from the guys there for bringing it up.”
John Hurley, who runs the Kerry campaign's veterans operation, said he spoke to Kerry on Friday night. “There was no way” he attended the Kansas City meeting, Hurley said. “He was not there.”
In Tour of Duty, a largely sympathetic book about Kerry's war record and anti-war activism, author Douglas Brinkley wrote that the senator from Massachusetts did not attend the Kansas City meeting.
The book cites a Nov. 10 resignation letter saying that Kerry had been proud to work for the group but that he was leaving it because of “personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy.”
By the book's chronology, the Kansas City meetings began two days later. Those contacted for this story could not recall the precise dates of the gathering.
In his book Home to War, A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, Gerald Nicosia writes that Kerry resigned from the organization at its St. Louis meeting in July 1971.
John Musgrave said he attended the fall 1971 meeting in Kansas City, his first Vietnam Veterans Against the War session as Kansas state coordinator. He said he remembered Kerry attending as well.
“There was never any serious consideration of it (Camil's proposal against politicians) at all,” Musgrave said. “It went over like a lead balloon.”
He still respects Camil but said he was impulsive at the time and angered other members of the group by raising what they considered to be an absurd and ugly idea.
As for Kerry, Musgrave said he remembered him talking to the veterans about protecting the group's credibility.
“He said, ‘It's people like you who are going to hurt the credibility of the organization,” Musgrave said. “(Kerry) may have resigned shortly after that meeting or at that meeting, I don't know. …We were all aware that he was getting ready to run for some political office.”
Hurley said the speech Musgrave referred to came earlier in the year.
“I think he's confusing the St. Louis and the Kansas City meetings,” Hurley said.>{? ~END~
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Tom Lipscomb told me that Kerry was on TV recently saying he was not at the St. Louis meeting. The supposed letter of resignation from Kerry cannot be found! It was claimed to be in the VVAW archives in Madison, Wisconsin. It is not there.