Posted on 01/24/2008 8:56:32 PM PST by The Shrew
If John Kerry had been elected President of the United States in November 2004, especially with the incoming majority Democrat Congress, it is highly likely that Iraq would be in the midst of a civil war, Iran’s regional influence would have increased, Israel would be in more jeopardy than it is now, two Supreme Court seats would be occupied by clones of John Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg instead of by John Roberts and Samuel Alito, judicial decisions would have given even more “rights” to enemy combatants, domestic entitlements and earmarks would have skyrocketed, the Bush tax cuts would be history. And more!
Thankfully, Kerry was defeated. A new book by authors Scott Swett and Tim Ziegler, To Set the Record Straight, demonstrates that much of the credit for that defeat needs to go not to the “compassionate conservative” who now occupies the White House, but instead to Vietnam War swift boat veterans and former prisoners of war—and the “new media.”
Before getting to a discussion of To Set the Record Straight, however, it is necessary in the name of full disclosure to reveal that Erika Holzer (my wife) and I were actively involved in unmasking John Kerry for what he is: a “Fake Warrior.”
When in 2003 our book Fake Warriors: Identifying, Exposing, and Punishing Those Who Falsify Their Military Service was published, little did we know that Kerry would soon emerge as the quintessential Fake Warrior.
Given our sensitivity to the Fake Warrior problem, when the 2004 election campaign began with constant references to Kerry’s Vietnam War “heroism,” and at the later Democrat Party nominating convention, he saluted and announced that “I’m John Kerry and I’m reporting for duty,” our “phony meter” needle jumped into the red zone.
As a result, as page 202 of To Set the Record Straight recounts, “On August 20 [2004], law professor and author Hank Holzer and his wife Erika reported in FrontPageMagazine.com that although the DD214 [record of separation from service] posted on Kerry’s campaign website cited a ‘Silver Star with combat V,’ no ‘combat V’ for valor had ever been issued with the Silver Star award. The Holzers followed up four days later with a detailed analysis of the unusual fact that Kerry had received three separate citations for his Silver Star. The original citation, which was available from the Navy, but not posted on the Kerry campaign’s website, described Kerry as pursuing and killing a single Viet Cong soldier. However, the two subsequent citations omitted the fleeing (and wounded) enemy soldier entirely, merely reporting that Kerry had ‘led a landing party ashore in pursuit of the enemy.’ The Holzers wondered how Kerry might have persuaded four-star Navy admiral John Hyland to reissue a sanitized version of his award, and speculated that the answer probably had to do with Kerry’s friendship with Senator Edward Kennedy.”
When we wrote those articles and several others showing that candidate Kerry was a military phony, we were not yet aware of just how much other evidence existed proving conclusively that he was actually the worst Fake Warrior in American political history.
Much of that evidence would be presented in the best-selling book by John O’Neill, Esq. and Dr. Jerome R. Corsi, Unfit for Command, a crucial weapon in the fight against Kerry’s candidacy. There were other weapons, too, all of which were leveled at Kerry’s lies and slanders, too many of which obtained undeserved traction with the Kerry-favoring media, self-serving politicians, and a too-gullible public.
It is the authors’ task in To Set the Record Straight to explain what brought the veterans’ campaign against Kerry and Unfit for Command to life and, to quote the book’s Introduction, to show “how an ad hoc collection of veterans and political activists overcame their opponents’ efforts to silence and marginalize them, and delivered the explosive proof about John Kerry’s past to the public.”
In essence, their book shows the political/cultural application of Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.” John Kerry’s presidential campaign book (“action”) caused the Swift Boat veterans to organize ("reaction”). And it was the abominable McCain-Feingold law’s successful attack on free speech (proudly co-sponsored by Kerry) (“action”) that provided a vehicle for the Swifties to bury Kerry in a pit of his own lies (“reaction”).
It is usually difficult to pinpoint exactly when a political or cultural movement begins, and so it is with what would become the Swift Boat organization during the 2004 election.
Probably, it began in the spring of 1971 when a young former Marine sergeant named Bruce Kesler publicly denounced Kerry’s Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and created a small ad hoc group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace.
That June, Kesler, O’Neill (a swift boat veteran), and eight other veterans held a press conference, stating that the group’s purpose was to support creation of “a viable South Vietnam with the capability for self-defense” and, domestically, “to advocate for better benefits for Vietnam veterans.”
In his statement, O’Neill challenged Kerry’s assumed leadership of Vietnam veterans and, at the end of that month, made his anti-Kerry, anti-VVAW case on the now famous Dick Cavett television show. Much of the O’Neill-Kerry exchange is presented in To Set the Record Straight, making it clear that O’Neill had the facts belying Kerry’s atrocity tales and that Kerry lied and obfuscated about them.
Following that legendary TV show, a variety of individuals and ad hoc groups tried to get out the truth about the war and expose the slanders and lies of Kerry and other anti-war activists and propagandists, especially about their atrocity stories.
The veterans didn’t meet with great success, and for years the issue remained quiescent, arising only whenever something popped up to remind Americans of antics like VVAW’s earlier demonstrations or when Hanoi Jane Fonda was in the news.
Unfortunately, alleged American atrocities in Vietnam and John Kerry’s military and political “heroism” were indelibly imprinted on the American public’s collective consciousness.
At least, that is, until 2003, when narcissist Kerry released his campaign biography. Entitled Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, it was written by the then-respected historian Douglas Brinkley.
It is a measure of how invested Kerry was in his self-created hero legend, and how blind he was to the potential pitfalls of the truth that he apparently failed to realize that Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War would presage his political downfall.
The book (“action”) put Kerry’s antiwar conduct and alleged heroism in play, courting the inevitable (“reaction”).
And it was not long in coming.
In late January 2004, retired Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann—commander of the Navy’s Swift Boat operation in Vietnam in 1968 and 1969—read Tour of Duty. Among other serious misgivings about the book, Hoffmann was greatly offended by being compared with “the crazed and murderous Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now”—yet another iteration of Kerry’s earlier fantasy stories about American atrocities.
In response, Hoffmann contacted some former Swifties, and the ball began rolling. Soon, veterans from all over the country were disputing Kerry’s stories about atrocities and his alleged valor, and a consensus developed that Kerry was unfit for the presidency and the Commander-in-Chief position it conferred.
At a meeting on April 4, 2004, “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” was conceived. On April 23, 2004, about six months before election day, the organization was born when, as a “527” not-for-profit, it filed with the IRS.
Ironically, because of the Kerry co-sponsored McCain-Feingold legislation muzzling certain political speech (another “action”), the Swifties had to choose the 527 not-for-profit organizational form (another “reaction”)—which, as it turned out, would make possible large financial contributions that enabled the Swifties to disseminate the truth about Kerry’s atrocity lies and military self- aggrandizement.
To Set the Record Straight tells that dramatic story, providing many, and some shocking, details not well known until now:
Who the Swifties and other veterans who came forward were, why they stepped up, and at what personal cost.
The organization’s disappointing—indeed, sabotaged—first press conference.
How the mainstream media carried Kerry’s water, dumping on the Swifties at every opportunity.
Swifty circumvention of that biased media by use of the Internet.
Internal organization of the pro-truth, anti-Kerry effort, and its chain of command.
Conceiving, researching, writing, publishing, and promoting the O’Neill-Corsi blockbuster book about Kerry, whose title said it all: Unfit for Command.
Development and utilization of the Swifties’ television campaign.
Kerry’s counterattack, and why it failed.
How former POWs joined the Swifties’ effort, and their impact.
Exposing Kerry’s phony medals and awards, and his quick exit from Vietnam.
For all of this, and more, To Set the Record Straight provides thorough sourcing, demonstrating that “the story about the story” is as credible as the original Unfit for Command story itself.
Yet, there is one paragraph in the book that tantalizes, leaving the reader wanting more information.
The authors write concerning the press conference for the anti-Kerry film, Stolen Honor, one POW arrived late for the press conference, Col. George ‘Bud’ Day. Day was a legendary military figure, a veteran of WWII, Korea and Vietnam who had been awarded the Medal of Honor for his incredible 12-day effort to escape from his captors after his F-100F Misty FAC was shot down over North Vietnam in August 1967. Senator John McCain, his former cellmate in Vietnam, had called Day ‘one of the greatest men I have had the honor to know.” Now, Bud Day was at McCain’s Washington office, asking his old friend to tone down his criticism of the Swift Vets. Day pointed out, as had Admiral Roy Hoffmann, that the Swifties were witnesses to what Kerry had done in Vietnam, but McCain was not.” (My emphasis.) (The source for this statement, another POW, is unimpeachable.)
Yes, the man who today would be Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces of the United States, John S. McCain, III, stood up for Fake Warrior (and Senate colleague) John Kerry against the overwhelming evidence that his atrocity stories were damaging lies, eclipsed only by his fraudulent self-created tales of heroism in Vietnam.
Were the full story of McCain’s attempt to undermine the Swifties and bolster the faker Kerry known in detail today, perhaps he would not be doing so well in some of the Republican primaries.
But despite McCain’s, the media’s, the Kerry campaign’s, and the Democrat Party’s attempts to vilify and destroy the Swifties, in the end they had created what the authors of To Set the Record Straight describe as “the multi-pronged information campaign that would produce the nation’s most popular book, the Internet’s hottest political website, and the most effective TV ad campaign in American political history.”
Too modestly, they neglect to say that the Swifties, contributed mightily to saving the American Republic from the world-class opportunistic, slandering, self-serving, Fake Warrior, John F. Kerry.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Henry Mark Holzer, Professor Emeritus at Brooklyn Law School, is a constitutional lawyer and author most recently of The Supreme Court Opinions of Clarence Thomas, 1991-2006, A Conservative’s Perspective.
TS
Regards,
TS
I am a Viet Nam vet and I prayed on my knees for the Lord to bless those Swift Boat Veterans .
I think the Lord answered your prayers.
TS
I blame bush for not letting Kerry win
LOL.
However, I don't think the President would have won without the SwiftVets.
Regards,
TS
Were the full story of McCain’s attempt to undermine the Swifties and bolster the faker Kerry known in detail today, perhaps he would not be doing so well in some of the Republican primaries.
Regards,
TS
man, that should be regularly circulated...
LEST WE FORGET....
This is a fine review. Thanks for posting it.
Thank you for the ping. Good to see you around.
If taking a landing party ashore gets you a silver star, then every SEAL who served in Viet Nam surely deserves a few dozen of them.
I’m reminded of another faker’s phoney war record: LBJ. His silver star was “earned” just about the same way, riding on an airplane within a few hundred miles of possible Japanese.
But hey, nothing assures future political success like a war record.....fake or not.
Fake Warriors, a good precursor to Unfit for Command and now your book.
Now there's a Trifecta!
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.