Kerry praised Ho Chi Minh!

You might think you've heard all the startling revelations about John Kerry's history from the new book, "Unfit for Command," by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi.

As I finish reading this book, I continue to find – literally on every page – new information that stuns even me, someone who has watched John Kerry's career with skepticism and alarm for the last 33 years.

On June 29, 1971, according to an FBI report, Kerry praised Vietnam's communist dictator Ho Chi Minh, comparing him to George Washington.

At the time, Kerry was serving as the point man for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. The president of the organization was Al Hubbard, who claimed to be an Air Force captain who was severely injured during his service in Vietnam. It turned out Hubbard was a sergeant who never served in Vietnam. He did, however, as Kerry knew, serve the communist cause with great enthusiasm and distinction – making propaganda trips to Hanoi paid for by the Communist Party USA.

Kerry didn't distance himself from Hubbard even when the lies were uncovered. In fact, he rationalized them. Kerry didn't distance himself from Hubbard when he became aware, as an executive committee member of VVAW, that its actions were being coordinated and sponsored, in part, by the communists.

Furthermore, Kerry himself made two trips to Paris to meet with representatives of the enemy.

He was also present at VVAW steering committee meetings in which debates took place about assassinating three U.S. senators. Kerry, of course, did not report these crimes to any authorities. Kerry tried to say he had quit the organization before these meetings. Now he claims his memory is hazy about what took place – that he doesn't recall hearing any of these dire plots.

Of course, his fantasy about being in Cambodia during Christmas 1968 is "seared" in his memory banks. Yet, he has no recollection about his fellow executive committee members discussing murder plots.

Is it any wonder with that kind of track record that Kerry would tell extraordinary lies for 30 years about spending time in Cambodia on illegal missions? Is it any wonder he would tell extraordinary lies about atrocities by American troops? Is it any wonder that he would tell extraordinary lies about his own "heroics" on the battlefield?

What is a wonder is the fact that 33 years later Kerry has enough credibility left to make run for the presidency on a major party ticket.

I keep hearing other commentators talk about his honorable record of service in Vietnam. They must not be reading this book very carefully. They must not be listening to those with whom Kerry actually served. They must be listening only to Kerry's own public relations machine.

John Kerry dishonored America and the uniform of the U.S. Navy long before he got back to the states and betrayed his fellow servicemen with lies about atrocities.

According to nearly everyone he served with in Vietnam, Kerry was a self-serving malcontent from the day he arrived in Vietnam for his brief four-month visit. He was disgruntled. He avoided combat. He didn't obey orders. But he did go beyond the call of duty in the pursuit of one objective – seeking medals and commendations and a shortened stay in Vietnam.

It's way past time for my colleagues in the news media to join me in calling on Kerry to execute Standard Form 180, which would release to the public all his military and medical records for examination by the American people before Election Day. So far, he has not done so, despite the demands of more than 250 of his fellow Vietnam veterans.

This refusal continues even after Kerry made his Vietnam experience the very cornerstone of his campaign beginning with his acceptance speech at the convention.

If we're to believe Kerry's war experience somehow distinguishes him for consideration to be the next president, if we're to believe that record of achievement is so distinguished, if we're to believe the portrait painted at the convention is true, why would Kerry hesitate for even a moment to release his service records, to release his medical records and even his own journal and films from Vietnam for public inspection?

I found this one.

Preface to the New Edition of Home to War
How A Historian Can Shake Up A Presidential Election:
The Story of the FBI Files on VVAW

by Gerald Nicosia
I remember back in 1988 when Scott Camil first told me about his idea for a domestic Phoenix program-the idea that had thrown VVAW's November 1971 national steering-committee meeting in Kansas City into an absolute uproar. We were sitting in his comfortable old house in the swampland outside Gainesville, Florida, with a rifle-shooting range out back of the house that made that whole insane era seem not so very far away. But Scott made it clear to me how far he himself had come-now the father of three young teen or near-teen daughters, working tirelessly for the passage of environmental-protection laws in his area of the state. Scott recalled how crazed he had been on first returning Stateside from Vietnam. He told me he had been an "assassin" in the war, but he did not tell me till years later that he had killed Vietnamese people under the aegis of the actual U.S.-sponsored, SOG-managed Phoenix program that some historians think killed as many as 10,000 village chiefs and other non-simpatico South Vietnamese leaders and politicos. Scott was not proud of having proposed a domestic Phoenix program to murder diehard pro-war senators and congressmen, but he was not ashamed of it either. He had been "thinking like a Marine," he told me, and hundreds of people were dying needlessly every day because of what Scott believed was "an illegal, immoral war."

As I recall, it was Scott who gave me my first glimpse of FBI surveillance files. He had obtained a thick stack of them-all pertaining to himself and his antiwar activities-through the Freedom of Information Act. Far from making me think he was a criminal, they made me very concerned about the potential illegality of the Nixon Justice Department that had surveilled him. One of the documents, referring to Scott, stated that it was the FBI's goal to "neutralize" him. Scott said he believed that meant they planned to kill him; and indeed, not long after he left VVAW, acquitted in the long and expensive Gainesville Conspiracy trial, he was shot at point-blank range with a .45 caliber handgun by an undercover government agent, who was never brought to justice for that homicidal action.

Long before I had even embarked on my 12-year project of researching and writing Home to War, I had heard hair-raising tales of the vast and often grossly abusive government surveillance and harassment of VVAW. Ron Kovic, who became my close friend in 1984, told the outrageous story of how he had been on an antiwar march down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles when the big red-headed guy who'd been pushing his wheelchair suddenly grabbed him from behind and flung him down to the pavement, where the paraplegic Marine veteran lay flopping about in great pain till other protesters rushed to his rescue. The redhead, allegedly a fellow veteran against the war, turned out to be a government agent.

Kovic later obtained his own personal file of surveillance documents from the FBI. That surveillance, he said, was a "grievous assault on the rights" he had fought and been wounded for in Vietnam, and it "wounded him a second time."

Not long after I heard that first story, Kovic's sidekick and fellow veteran activist, the late Bobby Waddell, described being at a highly-charged VVAW meeting in Long Beach, in which ten or twelve vets gathered in a circle all began pointing angry fingers at one another, accusing, "You're the agent!"-"No! You're the agent!"-and so on. Several of them were inches from fisticuffs; several others walked out in high dudgeon and never returned. The Long Beach chapter was decimated and effectively "neutralized," to use the word from Camil's file. And as Kovic and Waddell explained to me, the FBI and other government police agencies had sought to do just that, to set veteran activist against veteran activist, which was easy to do once the suspicion and paranoia aroused by infiltration had begun to grow within an organization.

It was to be expected, then, that when I began work on my history of the veterans' movement I would file a Freedom of Information Act request for all the FBI surveillance records on VVAW. Had I had the time, energy, and other resources, I would have filed FOIA requests on VVAW from a host of other agencies: the CIA, the Secret Service, the Office of Army Intelligence, the Office of naval Intelligence, on down the line-for it is now apparent that they all surveilled VVAW. Indeed, VVAW was probably the most heavily surveilled political organization in American history outside of the Communist Party. Nevertheless, what I did not expect was the degree of resistance to my request I would encounter at the FBI itself.

I did not save a copy of my original FOIA application for the FBI files on VVAW, but I can confidently say it was submitted around January or February of 1988. In March, probably at the government's suggestion that I would have to pay full price for the copies, which were estimated at over 10,000 pages, I submitted a letter requesting a full fee waiver on the basis that my work would be educational, which is supposed to mandate free government copying.

Arguing voluminously for this fee waiver, I wrote:

The information about government surveillance and infiltration of the veterans
movement is not in the public domain, and much of this history is known now by
only a few people. As more information comes out about this significant
interaction, people will want to know why the government was heavily involved
in monitoring and attempting to control the movement. I believe my book will
help the public to understand these issues.

I cannot now recall all the stalls, hindrances, and dodges that came my way from the FBI over a period of more than ten years-as I struggled to complete my book from 600 source interviews and thousands of other paper documents. I recall at one point I was told that the documents were poorly catalogued and buried amid many other related files; and at another point I was told that the FBI's FOIA-unit budget had been severely cut (probably true) and they no longer had sufficient manpower to properly redact these documents-"redaction" being the heavy black inking-out of sections still vital to either national or agents' personal security-which was required before their formal release into the open air of public scrutiny. Over all this time, I knew that I could complete Home to War without the additional material in that gargantuan file, but I also held on to the hope that I might still receive it in time to include some insights there from in the book.

Along the way I sought the aid of many lawyers, politicians, and other "heavyweight" individuals in prying those thousands of pages from the FBI. Those assisting me with letters, phone calls, and various forms of actual and moral support included the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, Public Citizen, and David Addlestone, General Counsel for the National Veterans Legal Services Program in Washington, D.C. Also among my letters of support is an eloquent plea to the Assistant Attorney General from the junior senator from Massachusetts, John F. Kerry. Wrote Senator Kerry in a letter dated June 21, 1989:

Mr. Nicosia has clearly demonstrated that his concern is public awareness and
not "commercial interest" … As a veteran of the Vietnam War, I assure you that
we will all benefit from an informed interpretation of this crucial event in our
national history.

My recollection is that some time in mid 1996, after hundreds of letters traveling back and forth, officials at the FBI's FOIA unit finally began to return my phone calls. But it was not until late in 1998 that I actually began receiving the first cardboard boxes with Department of Justice return-address labels, each packed wall-to-wall with ten or so of the brown cardboard-backed file folders of FBI surveillance documents that each held about 250 pages. I did not get them all till almost mid 1999-and after paying a slightly reduced but still substantial amount of money for them.

By that time, the text of Home to War was essentially complete. It had grown to 2,000 pages, and had been bumped out of three publishers-W.W. Norton, Grove, and Henry Holt-for its length and also, on at least one occasion, for its political slant, which the editor had informed me was too "anti-U.S. government." Slowly, with great difficulty, the manuscript was moving toward a new home at Random House, but the executives there were terrified of its size and called me to New York for a special pre-editorial discussion concerning possible large cuts-as a prerequisite for their presenting me with a contract. There was no way I could think of adding an ounce of new material to the manuscript if I ever hoped to see the book moved from the drawers in my home and out into the world between the stiff covers of an actual published book.

So the 14 boxes of FBI surveillance files, which contained perhaps as many as 20,000 documents and stood 12 feet high when piled top-to-bottom-a kind of monument to democracy gone wrong-went into storage in my garage for almost five years, gathering dust.

Fast forward to March, 2004. John Kerry had become the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for President, but a writer named Tom Lipscomb called me ostensibly not to write about Kerry but to do a piece on VVAW itself, and specifically about the November 1971 Kansas City meeting at which Scott Camil had put forward his now infamous Phoenix proposal. Lipscomb had found and studied that passage in Home to War (pp. 218-223), the only book at that point to have reported in detail on the Kansas City meeting. Lipscomb praised Home to War in such an unctuous manner that it made me quite uncomfortable, and I almost didn't cooperate with him. But not then knowing how deeply placed he was within the Republican Party, I gave him some names and phone numbers to follow up with. It was only in a later conversation, as I remember it, that he mentioned his notion that John Kerry was present at that November 1971 meeting.

I told Lipscomb I was almost certain that John Kerry was not at that meeting. Indeed I had gotten it wrong in the text of Home to War-a mistake I now leave in for the sake of its historical significance. From Scott Moore and others I had gotten the false notion that Kerry had had his big fight with co-leader Al Hubbard and had subsequently resigned from the organization at the June 1971 national steering-committee meeting in St. Louis. But Lipscomb was uncannily sure of himself, and insisted to me that he would soon establish Kerry's presence at the "assassination meeting."

A few days later, Lipscomb published his first piece in the New York Sun, citing two witnesses who put Kerry in Kansas City for at least part of that four-day VVAW convention. I knew both of them, Randy Barnes and Terry DuBose, to be very credible people. Suddenly, almost as if in a surrealistic film, what I had taken for reality began to melt before my eyes into something entirely different. Senator John Kerry, whom I knew to be the most law-abiding of men-more law-abiding, in fact, than myself, who cut my own teeth on Henry David Thoreau's "On the Duty of Civil Disobedience"-was now suddenly at least a bystander at the serious discussion of assassinating congressmen and senators.

Lipscomb and his associate, New York Sun writer Josh Gerstein, published a series of follow-up pieces, adding to the number of witnesses and other evidence that placed John Kerry in Kansas City in November 1971, while Kerry himself began issuing a series of denials through his assistant David Wade-to the effect that he had resigned from VVAW at least a few days before that notorious meeting commenced. Meanwhile, other witnesses surfaced to corroborate his story that he had not attended the meeting in question.

Hot on the pursuit of a potentially controversial story, Scott Canon of the Kansas City Star called me to ask if I had any documents that might shed light on this growing mystery. What I had were the minutes to that four-day meeting (November 12-15, 1971) taken by VVAW stalwart Mike Oliver. I had xeroxed the minutes years earlier while working with the archive of VVAW documents at the Wisconsin State Historical Society in Madison. The minutes clearly showed John Kerry resigning from VVAW on the third day of the meeting, November 14, 1971. Though Oliver was now living as a semi-recluse in the Oregon woods, I had known him when he worked for the veterans' self-help group Swords to Ploughshares in San Francisco, and I knew that he was utterly reliable as a reporter. There was now little question in my mind that John Kerry was at the November meeting.

I faxed the minutes of that meeting to Canon; but because of conflicting accounts, and especially in light of the Senator's own denials, he was far from certain that Kerry had actually been at the November meeting, and he let that ambiguity remain in the story he published on March 20, 2004.

Other writers were pushing for a definite answer-not least of all Lipscomb himself, who left a threatening message on my phone machine, warning that he would attempt to discredit me in the national media if I did not cooperate with him further. I complained about this unprofessional behavior to Gerstein, bureau chief of the New York Sun's San Francisco office, who passed my complaint along to Lipscomb's editor. I received a far more civil request from John Glionna, the San Francisco bureau chief of the Los Angeles Times. Glionna had somehow found out that I had the FBI files on VVAW, and he asked if he could come to my Marin County home to review them. I agreed, and he said he would come by the next morning, March 17. That night, the 16th, I carried the 14 boxes out of the garage and into my dining room, looking through the individual folders just enough to label the years chronicled in each box-for example, "'70-'71," which were the years I knew John Kerry to have been most active in VVAW. That night I also started leafing through one of the 1971 folders and discovered the first reference to John Kerry at the November 12-15, 1971, Kansas City meeting.

The next morning, Glionna pulled out about 50 pages relating to Kerry's presence at the meeting. He asked to copy them, and I reproduced them myself on the Xerox machine in my office.

One of the first things I did while Glionna was preparing his bombshell story on the existence of thousands of pages of FBI surveillance documents on Kerry, was to email Simon Sargent at the Kerry Campaign headquarters and let him know that documents now existed that irrefutably placed the Senator at this controversial VVAW meeting. Sargent arranged for a messenger to come to my house from Kerry's San Francisco campaign headquarters and pick up copies of the same 50 documents that Glionna had taken. And that night, Thursday, March 18, 2004, Senator Kerry issued a retraction of sorts, again through David Wade, citing his own faulty memory and stating that "If there are valid FBI surveillance reports from credible sources that place some of those disagreements [with Al Hubbard and other VVAW leaders] in Kansas City, we accept that historical footnote in the account of his work to end the difficult and divisive war."

When Glionna's story broke on the front page of the Los Angeles Times on Monday, March 22, it sent shock waves internationally. My own three telephones didn't stop ringing for ten days with hundreds of calls from the media, from Brazil to Switzerland. Writers from the New York Times, the Boston Globe, and elsewhere sought exclusive access to the documents. Rather than playing these journalists off in some kind of destructive competition, I decided to break the story myself of what was in the documents-in the Los Angeles Times Magazine.

And then, on Thursday, March 25, approximately 4,000 of the FBI documents-perhaps hundreds of them on Kerry himself, in folders that I had already bookmarked-were stolen from my home: a burglary that remains unsolved, but which I have my own suspicions about, and which I definitely believe to have been politically motivated.

By the time you read this preface, most of the signal revelations in the 16,000 or so documents still in my possession have already been made public. Among the startling disclosures about the young John Kerry, besides his presence at the infamous "assassination meeting," are the facts that on his own initiative he met with Communist North Vietnamese negotiators in Paris in 1971, to discuss, among other subjects, ending the war and returning our POW's; as well as his belief, in 1971, that Communist leader Ho Chi Minh was the "George Washington" of his country.

The surveillance, of course, cuts both ways. In the vast excesses of its invasiveness and paranoia-where government agents were sent to report on even a harmless veterans' swimming party-it ran perilously close to illegal, Communist-style monitoring of totally legal and clearly innocent and sincere dissent. Since almost all the material in these files was produced by Richard Nixon's Justice Department, the hit in this regard falls squarely on the Republican Party-a party that has once again avidly embraced surveillance and infiltration under the auspices of its anti-terrorism crusade, which includes Patriot Act I and the yet-to-be passed Patriot Act II.

Apart from the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election, this whole nerve-racking episode (chilling and sleep-disturbing not least of all to my two young children) has taught me one extremely important lesson: that history is not a hermetic enterprise practiced in dust and dryness by bespectacled scholars far from the fray; but it is, rather, a potent instrument for political and social change and the evolution (or de-evolution, as the case may be) of what we call "real life." As such, we historians must redouble our efforts to persevere in learning and communicating the truth, for our efforts just might profoundly affect the history that is yet to be written by those who come after us.

--Gerald Nicosia, Corte Madera, California
April Fool's Day, 2004

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