Posted on 03/29/2004 8:18:18 AM PST by Glenn
My own brush with the antiwar movement came even before John Kerry met up with the Vietcong halfway around the world.
The law then barred demonstrators from assembling on Capitol Hill. As the congressional correspondent for the old New York Herald Tribune, the police swept me up, notebook in hand.
It was a good one-day story: reporter joins protesters in the clink. Nicholas Katzenbach, President Johnson's attorney general, personally called to get me out.
Sen. Mike Mansfield (D-Mont.), then majority leader, spoke wryly in the Senate on the perils of journalism. I went back to covering LBJ's Great Society dreams and Vietnam nightmares.
More than a decade later, I felt the time was ripe to see if I had an FBI dossier.
And there it was in grim detail: my arrest as an antiwar figure.
The bureau lumped me in with the likes of David Dellinger, one of the notorious Chicago Seven, who was subsequently portrayed by federal prosecutors as the chief architect of the conspiracy as chairman of the National Mobilization Committee to End the War in Vietnam.
About all I had in common with Dellinger was a Yale education. But that was enough, as the file noted, for a skittish social office in Gerald Ford's White House to pull, on ostensible security grounds, a never-issued invitation to a state dinner. (I kept my White House press pass.)
Back in the mid-60s, in an after-action talk with the U.S. Capitol's chagrined chief of police, I'd been told that my (false) arrest had been expunged. A decade later, it took a profuse personal apology from FBI Director William Webster to restore my faith in the criminal-justice system.
That brings us back to Kerry, who has made much of his beribboned four-month tour of duty in Vietnam in positioning himself on the inside pole in the race to capture the Democratic presidential nomination.
Soon after a 25-year-old Kerry returned from skippering Swift boats through the Mekong Delta, he became the national coordinator of the top veterans antiwar group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
In that role, he mobilized 5,000 veterans to march on the Mall. And he turned up before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to demand of the packed hearing room: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
In 1972, with antiwar fever running high, Kerry's nascent political career became an obsession for Richard Nixon, then cruising to a huge re-election victory.
A White House aide once told me that President Nixon wouldn't go to bed on election night until he was sure Kerry had lost his bid for a Massachusetts House seat. If there's anything like a sure bet, you could wager that Nixon took an interest in the Kerry file compiled by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI.
Kerry's antiwar persona long continued to shadow him. When he sought a Senate seat, retired Maj. Gen. George S. Patton Jr., the son of the famous World War II general, charged that Kerry was a communist sympathizer guilty of "near treasonous activity" in having opposed the controversial war.
It's to be hoped that Kerry's FBI file is more accurate than mine was.
In any event, it's time for the senator to ask the FBI to give him the file and to make it public. Oh, by the way, if he ever moves into the White House, he need not ask me to dine.
I wonder how many of them really were.
I wasn't questioning the number so much as the designation of "veterans". So many of the "veterans" at the Winter Soldier thing were found to be out and out frauds that I question how many of these guys really were veterans.
Treasonist communist works for me!!!!!!!!!!!!
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