DID DOUGLAS BRINKLEY single-handedly create John Kerry's Swift Boat nightmare?

August 27, 2004

DID DOUGLAS BRINKLEY single-handedly create John Kerry's Swift Boat nightmare? It appears so. First Douglas Brinkley inspired the founding of "Swift Boat Vets for Truth" with his book "Tour of Duty". Quotable:

Retired since 1978 as a two-star rear admiral, [Roy] Hoffmann comes under particular criticism in the Kerry biography. Brinkley wrote that Kerry saw him as approving cowboy tactics and holding a cavalier attitude toward civilian casualties. Hoffmann said was stunned to find what he termed "gross exaggerations" and "distortions of fact" attributed to Kerry in the Brinkley book. That motivated him to contact other veterans and ask if they'd seen the book. Before long, he said, he had "80 to 100 people solidly lined up" to cooperate in the production of a new book - "Unfit for Command" by John E. O'Neill and Jerome R. Corsi - that outlines their challenge to Kerry.

Then he provoked John Kerry's most potent Swift Boat accuser -- shipmate Steve Gardner -- with a viciously unfair hit piece in TIME magazine. Quotable:

[Steve Gardner's] first public statement came unintentionally, he said, when Douglas Brinkley, author of the authorized Kerry war biography "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" talked to him in a phone conversation he thought was off the record.
Brinkley put Gardner's thoughts in a March 9 article for Time magazine online, "The Tenth Brother" in which he got a story "sharply different from what the other nine crew members have had to say." Gardner said he thought Brinkley, who spoke with him for two hours, simply was checking facts he had gathered in compiling his book, which relied heavily on Kerry's personal war journals.
Brinkley claims he had tried hard to track down Gardner during his research for the book, but Gardner is skeptical, noting the Globe's Kranish was able to reach him easily. In the Time story, Brinkley writes: "A disappointed Wasser gave me Gardner's telephone numbers, reminding me that PCF-44 gunner's mate was nicknamed 'The Wild Man' by his crewmates for his hair-trigger penchant for firing M-60s into the mangrove thicket. 'Let me know what you find out,' Wasser told me. 'I'm having trouble understanding where he's coming from."
After that article, Gardner said he felt "trashed" and vulnerable, until he got a call from Adm. Roy Hoffman, the organizer of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ..
Now Gardner appears in the new swiftboat vets' television ad, accusing Kerry of falsely claiming to have spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1968. "If I had been by my lonesome, I would have been history six months ago," he said. "Nobody would have listened to me as a gunner's mates, until officers stepped forward and said, 'This has got to stop.'"

Good work Doug. Can't wait to read your New Yorker piece.

UPDATE: Here's some good advice for John Kerry:

First, admit the fallibility of wartime memory: He was not in Cambodia in 1968 when he said he remembers "President Nixon" (who did not take office until Jan. 20, 1969) lying to the American people.
Second, clarify that he never saw any war crimes committed by Swift Boat units he served with or in. Apologize to vets offended by the aspersions in his postwar remarks ..
Such modesty and magnanimity would be great qualities to reveal in a man who would be commander in chief ..

Does John Kerry want to be "right" -- or does he want to be President?

Arrogantly, righteously, duplicitously superior or humbly, honestly, openly conciliatory. What shall it be?

We'll know soon enough. Posted by Greg Ransom