I think that what we're doing is we're trying, in a sense, to show where the country went wrong. And we believe, as veterans who took part in the war, we have nothing to gain by coming back here and talking about those things that have happened, except to try and say, "here is where we went wrong, and we've got to change."And I think that the attitude of the Vietnam Veterans For A Just Peace is really one, sort of, of, "my country, right or wrong," which is really, on the intellectual level I think, of saying, "my mother, drunk or sober." And I think that, just as when your mother is drunk, you take her and dry her out -- God forbid that she is -- you take your country, in the words of Senator Carl Schurz who said, "my country, right or wrong; when right, keep it right; when wrong, put it right."
I hope C-SPAN does post a full transcript. I haven't been able to find one elsewhere on the net. O'Neill responded to every point of Kerry's opening statement and eviscerated him with facts, often quotes from Kerry himself. Here's O'Neill's reaction just to the "drunk mother" portion:
Our attitude certainly isn't, "our country, right or wrong." We were all fifteen and sixteen years old [when] we happened to get into the Vietnam War. What's so interesting about many of Mr. Kerry's backers, including Clark Clifford, Roger Hillsman [and] a number of others, is that they happen to be exactly the same people who sent us to Vietnam. We certainly, obviously, would never support this country if we felt it were wrong. We just feel we need a rational way out of Vietnam.
Elsewhere, of course, O'Neill pointed out that Kerry's advocacy of the "Paris plan" was an irrational full retreat, and a blatant capitulation to a communist takeover of South Vietnam. Stunningly, Kerry later in the discussion went a long ways toward acknowledging this:
The bigger issue at hand is the question, literally, of how the United States is going to get out of Vietnam now. And I have said again and again this evening that we can set a date, that we can bring the prisoners home.But the point is I think this administration is still seeking some kind of victory. It is still committed to the idea, totally, of a non-communist regime [in South Vietnam], and I think that is unrealistic in terms of the political forces that are in play in South Vietnam, in fact in all of South East Asia. And we have learned, if we haven't learned anything by now, that we simply cannot impose a settlement ourselves.
I just don't understand how they believe, or how this other group believes, that the Vietnamese are going to succeed in doing with 50,000 Americans what they haven't been able to do with 500,000 Americans. I'd like that explained.
O'Neill responded effectively on several counts, noting that his group (and the Nixon administration) was not seeking a military solution but a negotiated one, that it was Kerry's friends that had escalated to hundreds of thousands of troops, and that the South Vietnamese military had not been properly equipped, cultivated or used as a military force until (Nixon's) program of Vietnamization beginning in '68, that this was what allowed the American forces to be reduced, and so on.
Kerry is being disingenuous with language here, but is remarkably upfront for all that. His position was not merely against seeking "victory," it was against negotiating a rational peace at all. Kerry was claiming here that the only way we could get the POWs back, and the only option we had period, was to agree to the demands of the South Vietnamese insurgents (who even wanted us to topple the South Vietnamese government for them!) without substantive negotiation. He didn't just want us to leave without a (further) fight, he wanted us to leave without even a verbal argument!
There is terrific material for Republican political ads throughout this, but the above has especially obvious applications to the present day.
'My country, right or wrong' is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying except in a desperate case. It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'
He also left out the last part of the Schurz quote (as leftists always do) "but always: my country".
Just for completeness, the original version is from the naval hero Stephen Decatur (1816):
Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right, but our country, right or wrong.
Which was critiqued as follows by John Quincy Adams shortly thereafter, and long before Shurz:
I can never join with my voice in the toast which I see in the papers attributed to one of our gallant naval heroes. I cannot ask of heaven success, even for my country, in a cause where she should be in the wrong. Fiat justitia, pereat coelum ["Let justice be done though heaven should fall" - anonymous, circa 43 B.C.]. My toast would be, may our country always be successful, but whether successful or otherwise, always right.