Posted on 08/27/2004 3:43:42 PM PDT by Former Military Chick
Twice in 33 years, John O'Neill looked up from a hospital bed and saw John Kerry on television. Both times, he was stirred to action.
In 1971, while recovering from leg surgery, O'Neill watched his fellow Vietnam veteran tell a Senate committee that U.S. soldiers had admitted committing war crimes there.
Infuriated, O'Neill debated Kerry on national television. He accused him of libel and of spreading "the big lie."
This year, in intensive care after donating a kidney to his wife, O'Neill watched on television as John Kerry emerged as the leading Democratic presidential candidate.
This time, O'Neill wrote a best- selling book that helped unleash a national furor.
Co-written with Jerome R. Corsi, "Unfit for Command" has rallied Vietnam veterans who question Kerry's heroism, deplore his anti-war activism and want to deny him the presidency.
"He criminalized the Vietnam War and made all of us criminals," O'Neill said in an Associated Press interview.
Critics have rebutted O'Neill and Corsi's accusations and charged that the campaign surrounding the book is orchestrated by President Bush's people. They dismiss O'Neill as a Republican stooge, citing his donations to GOP candidates and his law firm's ties to Republicans.
But Gerry Birnberg, chairman of the Harris County Democratic Committee in Houston, has known O'Neill for more than 20 years, and while he believes O'Neill is wrong about Kerry, he does not see a Republican plot. O'Neill simply "has intense personal antipathy" for Kerry, he says.
Things Kerry did and said in 1971 "stick in John's craw," he says.
Both Kerry and O'Neill were decorated in Vietnam - the Navy says O'Neill received three Bronze Stars - and both commanded swift boat No. 94 at different times.
But Kerry is a product of Yale; O'Neill, of the U.S. Naval Academy, where his father (a retired rear admiral), two brothers and 15 other relatives had graduated. Kerry spent 10 months in Vietnam, including six on a frigate offshore; O'Neill was there for 18.
Returning from Vietnam, Kerry got an early discharge to run for Congress and joined the anti-war movement. O'Neill came back to work for the Naval Reserve Officers' Training Corps at the College of Holy Cross.
Hospitalized for an injury exacerbated in Vietnam, O'Neill watched Kerry tell the Senate Foreign Relations Committee the war was foolhardy and recount stories by other veterans about how they had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads."
O'Neill believed in the war effort, thought immediate withdrawal would abandon prisoners of war and was outraged by Kerry's war crime reports.
When the Foreign Relations Committee didn't respond to his offer to rebut Kerry, he contacted Bruce Kesler, an ex-Marine who had written a New York Times op-ed piece supporting the war.
Kesler invited him to a Washington news conference for the new Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.
O'Neill was "a young guy like ourselves, very sweet and straight, a Midwestern sort of guy . . . ," Kesler recalls. "He had one suit, which was going out of style even then, a blue-and-white seersucker. And he wore white socks."
That day, O'Neill gave a speech that drew notice from the Nixon administration, which was alarmed by Kerry's increasing star power.
Kerry "was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil," Nixon aide Chuck Colson once said, reported Joe Klein in The New Yorker. "We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the president, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."
Kesler and O'Neill deny the White House instigated their effort. Kesler says Nixon might have exploited his group but didn't create or fund it.
O'Neill visited Nixon for an hour. He remembers they talked of Vietnam, Kerry and politics. He also recalls Nixon's awkward pause when O'Neill said he supported Hubert Humphrey in 1968.
Two weeks after meeting Nixon, O'Neill debated Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show."
"You obviously are quite good on the polished rhetoric, but I did serve in the same place you did . . . and I never saw anything," O'Neill said, "and I would like you to tell me about the war crimes you saw committed there, and also why you didn't do some thing about them."
Kerry insisted there were violations of the Geneva Conventions and said O'Neill's group should be named "Vietnam Veterans for a Continued War."
After a speaking tour and appearance at the 1972 Republican National Convention, O'Neill entered the University of Texas law school, graduated first in his class and served as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist. He married, had two children and practiced law, often pressing security fraud cases against brokerages.
He describes his political involvement as minimal. He says he voted for Al Gore in 2000, has given $7,000 to Republicans in recent years but also $20,000 to Democratic candidates for Houston mayor and councilman.
But at age 58, he has joined the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth effort to derail the candidacy of the man he debated at age 25.
Copyright 2004 cleveland.com. All Rights Reserved.
Each time I read articles on Kerry I find the spin more annoying.
I am conviced that if we started with his actions after returning from Vietnam, that the SBV may have had less yuck thrown on them. imho
Mr. John O'Neill donated a kidney to his wife and John Kerry is donating his experience as a war hero to America. Who would you vote for. (/sarcasm)
"Kurt Waldheim was elected president of Austria in 1986 despite charges that he had lied about the extent of his complicity in Nazi war crimes while he was a lieutenant in the German army during World War II. In fact, when the United States Senate passed the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (S. 1379) in 1998, Senator Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) had this to say:
"We should never repeat what happened with government records pertaining to Kurt Waldheim. In that instance, the Central Intelligence Agency withheld critical information from researchers about Waldheim's collaboration with the Nazis, even as other government agencies were placing him on the list of individuals forbidden to enter our country because of suspected war crimes. Moreover, an extensive Justice Department report on Waldheim completed in 1987 was then kept secret for six long years, before Attorney General Reno, in response to a FOIA lawsuit, released the document in 1994. The United States government should not be in the business of helping Nazi war criminals keep their past deeds secret."
http://www.super70s.com/Super70s/News/1971/December/22-Kurt_Waldheim.asp
John O'Niell is indeed a decent, honorable man.
To most Americans, John O'Neil is a fellow American, engaging in his Constitutional right of free speech.
For me, John O'Neil is a hero.
Sheesh....today Medved said Kerry's official discharge did NOT come until 1978....6 years after he "left." Something is REALLY fishy about that, and you'd think that "journalists" would look into it.....well, REAL journalists.
I wonder if Kerry had to report for duty while in the Reserves.
If he did, I wonder if he went "AWOL" in the same sense Bush allegedly did... i.e., not show up some times, but then make it up later...
Show me a real journalist. I would love for some of those who have cushy jobs go out and do the grunt work like it would done years ago. I did not always like Brinkly but his tenacity was admirable.
It is like they read something on the net, find a pro to discuss it and thus it is news worthy.
We do need some REAL journalist.
My personnel thought is that the FBI was going to charge JFnK and PresidentCarter squashed it and gave him his discharge.
I heard this man on Sean Hannity and he stated that the only fire from that incident was suppression fire from the boat's themselves, and this was standard procedure for them. I just got "Unfit for Command" this morning and haven't got to his statement in the book but so far I believe all that I have read.
I heard (Medved, again, I think)....that Kerry NEVER showed up for his Reserve duty......NEVER.
I'm not sure what the deal is with the 1968 final discharge, if you notice the Kerry people always refer to Kerry being released from active duty. It definitely needs explaining. Maybe a veteran can help us out.
This is how the supposedly unbiased Associated Press starts a sentence?
Isn't that the year of the pardon for deserters?
Mr. O'Neill is the bee's knees.
"Returning from Vietnam, Kerry got an early discharge to run for Congress and joined the anti-war movement."
And what kind of "discharge" was that?
I was just looking over my Navy DD214.
Date of Entry -- 11 May 54,
Date of "Expiration of term of actice obligated service" -- 8 May 58,
Terminal Date of Reserve Obligation -- 10 May 62
I was enlisted, not an officer. Served 4 years active duty and had 4 years reserve obligation, which did not require attending any meetings.
---thats, active obligated service--
The article is good, straight reporting by a fine journalist. Reread, and stop being reflexive against all journalists. I am firmly against Kerry and for O'Neill. We are more effective when fair.
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