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Two Psychologists on Kerry: Dangerous on National Security
C. Alan Hopewell, Ph.D., Former Major, MSC, USAR
Dr. C. Alan Hopewell, a Vietnam era vet and fellow psychologist, was Chief of Psychology for Landstuhl Regional Army Medical Center in Germany and Director of the Neuropsychological Lab, 7th U.S. Army, European Theatre during the middle of the time of the Iranian revolution and the increase in terror attacks again U.S. forces in Europe. He has held a number of offices in his state psychological association. Here is his view of Kerry:
1. Here is a commissioned Naval officer who takes a formal oath of service to his country as well as an equally strong oath, albeit simply understood among a Band of Brothers, to keep the faith with his fellow officers and troops. He betrayed both on several levels, first by being a "medal hound," next by abandoning his command after only four months, and finally by testifying under oath to blatant lies which exposed his comrades in arms who were still in country to mortal danger and those in the United States to psychological abuse and distortion. It is pretty much unheard of for military doctors to know of an officer leaving his command after only four months for anything less than substantially disabling injuries, and all the line commanders I ever recall treating were extremely anxious to return as soon as possible to their duty assignments unless we doctors prohibited it by sending them to Walter Reed or Brooke.
2. Here is a commissioned Naval officer who was entrusted with the lives and future of the people of Viet Nam and their children. Instead, the officer entrusted with their safety and future helped to insure their enslavement and often their brutalization or death.
This is the same as if the police officer commissioned to protect your family decides that "you are not worth the risk any more," quits patrolling your neighborhood and shuts down the police station, effectively turning you and your family over to the criminals. His most stunning failure of judgement was probably in convincing the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that "only about 3000 South Vietnamese" would suffer reprisals if we abandoned the Republic of Vietnam to the communists, an assertion which even the Committee found hard to believe.
3. Here a Yale graduate who obviously did not want to investigate the truth of a variety of issues, a guy on a boat for only four months who then under sworn testimony before the United States Congress offered himself as an expert on the atrocities of land warfare and the entire theater of war, governmental policy, and command and control issues.
4. He then used these distortions and betrayals for his own benefit as an opportunist to advance his own political career, continuing his traits of opportunism and political expediency.
SELF-CONFESSED WAR CRIMlNAL MORPHS INTO SELF-PROMOTER WAR HERO  (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE)
5. And finally, a number of sources indicate that he was party in some form to clearly illegal proposals, to include at the minimum discussions of assassinations and the knowledge that some members of the VVAW were avowed communists bent on taking over the organization as the VVAW became increasingly radical. Although an intelligent Yale graduate who presumably knew the law and also a Naval Officer with continuing reserve duty obligations to his country, he declined to recognize criminal activity and report it.
Dr. Hopewell says he is concerned because, "John Kerry's actions after returning to the United States did not simply constitute a "courageous dissenting opinion," as he and others would have us believe, but was a distortion of facts and failure of judgement so severe that it set into motion a cascade of events which assisted not only in the conquest of the Republic of Vietnam but also demoralized and stigmatized an entire generation of military personnel, the effects of which are still felt to this day. This type of failure of judgement would be catastrophic in dealing with our current crises."
The Kerry statement to Congress in 1971, shown recently on C-Span was more than what he now claims, just an anguished cry from those who had seen the horror of war and wanted it ended. There was an agenda involved, an ideology, the same as the one argued by people like Jane Fonda, Jerry Rubin, and Ramsey Clark. Dr. Hopewell made a very important point when he said that Kerry's actions after returning to the United States "did not simply constitute a 'courageous dissenting opinion,' as Kerry and others would have us believe, but was a distortion of facts." Kerry is trying to transform his '71 protest into something it was not.
Kerry was probably more moderate than the above three, but still, he did emphasize "atrocities", "immorality", and "out now" with no regard for the fate of the South Vietnamese, major themes of the protestors.
"In his testimony, Kerry described the Vietnam War as a "civil war, an effort by a people who had for years been seeking their liberation from any colonial influence whatsoever." That view -- which depicted Ho Chi Minh as a nationalist hero and totally ignored the Soviet Union's involvement in training and funding the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong -- was embraced by naive romantics as well as communist propagandists and apologists in the anti-war movement."
#4 - Kerry champions tolerance for terrorists (TERRORIST SYMPATHIZER vs. TERRORIST ANNIHILATOR)  (viewing movie requires Flash Player 7, available HERE) "The young Kerry seems to have fallen in the latter category, communist apologist. Said scholar Stephen J. Morris of Johns Hopkins University this week, Kerry "sympathized with the communist cause." John Kerry deserves to make atonement to the Vietnamese people -- not for what he did as a young soldier but for what he has done ever since to justify communist tyranny in Vietnam and elsewhere."
Earlier, on Sept. 17, 1970, Kerry and his group, Vietnam Veterans Against the War had also slandered the National Guard, protesting at its convention in New York that year that
"The National Guard Uses Your Tax Dollar:
To support the military-industrial complex
...all standard leftist rhetoric.
Today on the campaign trail Kerry tries to tell people his group was dedicated to advancing the interests of American servicemen -- protecting them, bringing them home, helping them. We know that is not true. Said John Podhortz of "The New York Post," "Kerry was a key midwife in the birthing of one of the worst myths ever fostered in this country, the myth of the crazed, violent, dangerous Vietnam vet who had come back to America to wreck the same kind of devastation here he had wrecked in Southeast Asia."
What is going on here? This looks like the biggest shell game since Watergate. Kerry was a leader in the "peace" movement, sharing platforms and ideology with the likes of Jane Fonda. In a sense, a vote for Kerry is a vote for Fonda, a vote for the 60's radicals. There is a reason vets refer to Kerry as "Hanoi John."
For thirty years Vietnam vets have been trying to get the truth out about that war as against the 60's version, and have an unprecedented opportunity to do so now. We know of a number of national symposiums being planned to reverse the campus version of the Vietnam War. A Kerry win would leave the current tissue of lies about Vietnam in place forever. By not mentioning his background, the media has helped Kerry to project himself as an idealist, a friend of the Vietnam vet, when in actual fact he played a significant role in the betrayal of their sacrifices to help the people of South Vietnam, and played a significant role in the triumph of tyranny and genocide in Southeast Asia. His pal Ted Kennedy also played a role in this triumph by cutting off all ammunition to the South Vietnamese, plunging them into the dark night of Communist horror. It was not the first time Kennedy had plunged someone into the dark. Kerry's pal Kennedy could not run for president because his two aides that fateful night could have blackmailed the nation, knowing what they did about the cover-up at Chappaquiddick.
Kerry should also not be running for president; he helped betray a national sacrifice for freedom for the people of South Vietnam. How did these two old partners in crimes against freedom manage to hijack the Democratic party? There is much to be said for forgiving the past. But it is best to keep an eye on second chances. They might do it again. In Kerry's subsequent history there is not much to indicate he has changed. Let's look at that.
In "The Harvard Crimson" of 1970 Kerry said "I'm an internationalist, I'd like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations". Later, in 1971, at West Virginia's Bethany College, Kerry told students "Democracy is a farce," and that Communism "did not pose any kind of threat to the United States and the war was not moral. We can't sit around and support this kind of society." Nor had Kerry much changed his views sixteen years later. Speaking at Yale in 1987 he said U.S. policy in Vietnam was "tantamount to genocide" and on Meet the Press he again said our soldiers were guilty of "all kinds of atrocities" and branded America's leaders as "war criminals." Asked why there were so many Communists in his movement, he said that was not "relevant."
Kerry championed a nuclear freeze in the 1980's in opposition to Ronald Reagan's peace-through-strength stance, which won the Cold War. Kerry was also one of the strongest critics of Ronald Reagans policies of military resistance to Communist inroads in this hemisphere. He lent his name to aid Communist guerrillas in El Salvador and was a vigorous opponent of the anti-Communist Contras in Nicaragua, undercutting U.S. policy.
His voting record on defense is appalling. He voted against the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, the Apache helicopter, the Patriot missile, the F-15, the F-14, the Harrier jet, and the Aegis air defense cruiser. He advocated cuts in other systems, including the Bradley vehicle, the Abrams tank, and Tomahawk missile programs, all critical to U.S. military success.
In a foreign policy address last December Kerry pledged that if elected he will abandon the president's war on terror and begin a dialogue with the terrorists. Begin a dialogue with the terrorists?
An e-mail sent overseas by Kerry ended up on the front page of the anti-American "Theran Times," Iran. That murderous regime was ecstatic over his statement of support. The president of the student pro-democracy movement in Iran immediately wrote Kerry, "You have given them credibility and comfort and encouraged them into declaring open season on the freedom fighters in Iran." Both Iran and North Korea have announced their support for Kerry. No wonder.
If John Kerry is elected president the new first lady will have a track record of support for the causes of radical, anti-American groups, including Islamists and terrorist-defense lawyer firms. One of her favorite charities is the Tides Foundations, which supports the War Resisters League, Ramsey Clark's International Action Center, A.N.S.W.E.R, and United for Peace and Justice; all of which have been involved with long-time communist revolutionaries. It also supports the Council for American Islamic Relations, (CAIR) which has links to the terrorist group Hamas. Isn't that cozy? A whole nest of leftists and terrorists in the White House.
There are simply too many signs of sympathy for the left in this history. The left has already crippled public education, it dominates the media, and it is promoting anti-Semitism on campuses across the country. We don't need even a hint of it in the White House.
The Center for Security Policy, a Washington-based think tank, has rated Kerry among the worst on Capitol Hill when it comes to national security. In 1995 the Center gave Kerry a score of five out of a possible 100 points. Two years later Kerry earned a mind-blowing score of exactly zero. That's just great. Here we are facing probably the greatest crisis in our history, and we've got a man who says he can handle it running for president who is a total zero when it comes to national security.
Go to www.JohnKerry.com. Look up "foreign policy" and "homeland security." It says Kerry "rejects the Administration's erratic unilateralism." He wants the U.S. to work with the United Nations to secure a lasting peace so that "the conditions that gave rise to the terrorist threat can never recur."
Said Peter Brown of the Orlando Sentinel, "McGovern, who flew bombers in World War ll, was, like Kerry, a war hero, yet voters rejected his foreign policy as hopelessly naive. So is Kerry's and he can't hide his record on national defense behind an honorable discharge and medals."
Conclusions:
Said Mr. Magruder, a psychologist, "The biggest issue in choosing between Bush and Kerry is how they characteristically handle conflict. Bush and the people around him have clearly shown themselves to be tough-minded. They will deal with the problem of terrorism no matter how difficult. Senator Kerry, trusting to negotiation, dialogue, compromise, and even appeasement to work in the new world of terrorists, deadly religious fanatics and suicide bombers, plus his history of weakness in dealing with totalitarian movements, would certainly fail in the face of such challenges. The main question for everyone regarding Kerry would seem to be whether he is capable of handling the terrorists. Does he even understand what that is all about? Has he studied Islam, the root of the problem. We have never even heard him mention the word."
"Looking back over his record, and looking at recent statements, I believe, with Dr. Hopewell, that he would be extremely dangerous on the issue of national security."
Negotiation, dialogue, compromise, and even appeasement, the typical tools of a liberal, 20th century diplomat in dealing with reasonably civilized nations, would prove utterly useless in light of 9/11 and an enemy that has repeatedly said:
"We will offer no chance for America to come to an agreement with the righteous warriors, no possibility for compromise, no hope for a treaty, no attempt for solution. The war will be waged until the United States remains a memory."
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Former New York City Mayor Edward Koch, a Democrat, will for the first time in his life vote for a Republican presidential candidate this year because he feels Kerry "doesn't have the stomach" to fight terrorism, Koch told WorldNetDaily.