Posted on 03/31/2004 2:29:48 AM PST by alloysteel
WASHINGTON -- As President Bush plunges into his race against Democrat John Kerry, he might want to get some debating tips from Houston attorney John E. O'Neill.
In 1971, O'Neill squared off against Kerry on the Dick Cavett Show in a 90-minute, televised forum in which the two Vietnam War veterans sparred over the U.S. role in Southeast Asia.
President Nixon and top aide Charles Colson had taken a keen interest in O'Neill as part of their effort to discredit Kerry and the anti-war movement, according to memos and tapes in the National Archives. A clean-cut Naval Academy graduate, O'Neill was viewed by Nixon's team as an effective messenger against Kerry, who was causing the administration headaches as the leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
O'Neill, who clerked for U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice William Rehnquist later in the 1970s, has largely steered clear of national politics since the Vietnam War era. He has focused on his law practice at the firm of Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson.
But now, O'Neill's past role as a Kerry adversary is in the public spotlight as the news media and others look to the Massachusetts senator's past to gain insight into how he might perform as president. And O'Neill, recovering from an operation in which he donated a kidney to his wife, is preparing for an onslaught of interviews with newspapers and TV networks eager for his impressions of Kerry.
O'Neill, 58, is still angry at Kerry for claiming in testimony in 1971 before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that U.S. soldiers committed war crimes by killing and maiming civilians in Vietnam.
"I was appalled at what Kerry did and still am," O'Neill said Tuesday in a phone interview with the Houston Chronicle.
O'Neill, who calls himself a political independent, said he wants to fully recuperate before giving an extended critique of Kerry, who has made his Vietnam military service a central theme of his campaign.
Further, O'Neill said he needs to go back over events that have faded from his memory. He first watched the Cavett debate last weekend when it was shown on C-SPAN, he said.
The June 30, 1971, debate occurred at a troubled time, with Americans deeply divided over the war and President Nixon's decision to bomb Cambodia and Laos. Adding to the tensions was the controversial trial that year of Lt. William Calley, who was convicted of the premeditated murder of Vietnamese civilians in the hamlet of My Lai.
That spring, veterans led by Kerry marched on Washington and threw their medals and ribbons at the Capitol.
Nixon officials saw Kerry as particularly dangerous and effective because he was articulate and clean-cut, in contrast to what Nixon referred to as the "bearded weirdos" who were involved in the anti-war movement, according to White House tapes.
O'Neill on Tuesday dismissed the suggestion that he was used by Nixon and his aides.
"My involvement had nothing to do with Nixon," he said. "I got involved because I was outraged with Kerry."
In the debate moderated by talk show host Cavett, O'Neill pounded Kerry for exaggerating the violence committed by U.S. soldiers and for using the war to promote his own political agenda. Kerry was considering a run for Congress at the time.
"Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on the war-weariness of the American people," O'Neill said in the debate.
Kerry argued that he was not condemning American soldiers but seeking a change in misguided U.S. policy.
Nixon was supporting gradual reduction of U.S. troops in Vietnam. Kerry and others wanted a deadline for withdrawal.
Referring to the pro-administration veterans group that O'Neill belonged to, Kerry said, "I think the attitude of the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace is really sort of `My country, right or wrong,' which is really, on the intellectual level, I think, of saying, `My mother, drunk or sober.' "
O'Neill was viewed as a good match for Kerry because they served in the same Navy coastal division that patrolled the Mekong Delta of Vietnam.
In the debate, the two men were a study in contrasts. Kerry, in his well-tailored suit and modishly long hair, spoke in dispassionate, measured terms. O'Neill, dressed in a white suit and sporting white socks and black shoes, was the more pugnacious of the two.
O'Neill joked Tuesday that he still gets ribbed about his unfashionable wardrobe, noting that the suit was the only one he owned, having just left the Navy.
In a series of memos, Nixon aide Colson, who later went to prison for his role in the Watergate scandal, referred to the administration's efforts to promote O'Neill and to challenge Kerry to debate him.
On June 15, 1971, Colson noted that Kerry first turned down a debate offer with O'Neill and that he was "beginning to take a tremendous beating in the press."
"Let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader," Colson wrote about Kerry.
Colson wrote that he arranged an Oval Office meeting between Nixon and O'Neill on June 16, to boost the morale of O'Neill, who had become disillusioned because of the hostile reception he received during other television appearances.
O'Neill, who had flown up from his hometown of San Antonio, spent about 40 minutes chatting with Nixon and National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger about the war and its opponents.
Nixon said he understood that O'Neill was "the guy to take brickbats when you go on some of these TV shows." He encouraged the young veteran to continue his fight.
"Give it to 'em. Give it to 'em. You can do it," said Nixon, according to a tape of the meeting.
O'Neill mentioned to the president that he had supported Democrat Hubert Humphrey against Nixon in the 1968 presidential election. But he was critical of the beating that Nixon was taking in the press and advised the president that when reporters "ask you totally stupid questions about which they always seem to ask, laugh at them, and I think the whole country will laugh with you."
The next day Colson wrote a memo to top Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, pronouncing the session a success:
"O'Neill went out charging like a tiger, has agreed that he will appear anytime, anywhere that we program him and was last seen walking up West Executive Avenue mumbling to himself that he had just been with the most magnificent man he had ever met in his life."
Despite the attention lavished on him by Nixon and his appearance on a national TV show, O'Neill has been largely quiet about his past, according to Harris County Democratic Chair Gerald Birnberg, a fellow lawyer who has known O'Neill for more than 20 years.
O'Neill only recently mentioned in passing that he had debated Kerry, Birnberg said.
Although a Kerry critic, O'Neill has also expressed reservations about President Bush, Birnberg said: "I don't think he is a George Bush lapdog."
Sounds familiar.
Ha! But the French surely don't want him claiming them as his ancestral home. "He's American!", said some Frenchman, supposedly in his family tree back there.
This guy has flip-flopped on every issue, including his own nationality!
John Kerry: He's not Irish anymore
Kerry visited the Yale campus as a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before he testified to Congress. He made the outrageous claim that U.S. soldiers routinely committed war crimes in Vietnam. When I challenged his claim, he stated, "I was there! You weren't! I know what happened there!" He became highly indignant when I stated that were what he said true, he should be tried for the crime under the UCMJ of failing to report atrocities which he claimed all officers in Vietnam knew occurred. I was then shouted down -- the major way leftists from the '60s and '70s dealt with people who asked questions. (I suspect they would have lynched me if they could have.)
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