Where is the John Kerry/Jane Fonda Photo?

someone on another thread said that when they entered John Kerry and Jane Fonda into Google they came up with thousands of references! LOL!

A re-post of a 2002 article about Kerry in the New York Observer

The Long War of John Kerry

Excerpt:

by Joe Klein
Posted 2004-01-05

Senator John Kerry, of Massachusetts, surprised observers by winning the Democratic caucuses in Iowa, and has surged in the polls in the lead-up to the New Hampshire primary next week. In this article from 2002, Joe Klein profiles Kerry.

On a rainy October morning, the day after Senator John Forbes Kerry, of Massachusetts, announced that he would reluctantly vote to give President George W. Bush the authority to use lethal force against Iraq, the Senator sat in his Capitol Hill office reminiscing about another war and another speech. The war was Vietnam. The speech was one he had delivered upon graduating from Yale, in 1966. Kerry was twenty-two at the time; he had already enlisted in the Navy. As one of Yale’s champion debaters and president of the Political Union, he had been selected to deliver the Class Oration, traditionally an Ivy-draped nostalgia piece. But the speech he gave, hastily rewritten at the last moment, was anything but traditional: it was a broad, passionate criticism of American foreign policy, including the war that he would soon be fighting.

I’d been trying to get a copy of this speech for several weeks, but Kerry’s staff had been unable to find one. There seemed a parallel—at least, a convenient journalistic analogy—to his statement the day before about Iraq: two questionable wars, both of which Kerry had decided to support, conditionally, even as he raised serious doubts about their propriety.

Kerry bristled at the analogy. He assumed that a familiar accusation was inherent in the comparison: that he was guilty of speaking boldly but acting politically. And it is true that from his earliest days in public life—a career that seems to have begun in prep school—even John Kerry’s closest friends have teased him about his overactive sense of destiny, his theatrical sense of gravitas, and his initials, which are the same as John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s.

“I signed up for the Navy in 1965, the year before the Class Oration,” Kerry said now, with quiet vehemence. He repeated it, for emphasis: “I signed up for the Navy. There was very little thought of Vietnam. It seemed very far away. There was no connection between my decision to serve and the speech I made.”

But there was a connection, of sorts. Kerry had made the decision along with three close friends, classmates and fellow-members of Yale’s not so secret society, Skull and Bones: David Thorne, Richard Pershing, and Frederick Smith. All came from families with strong traditions of military and public service. Pershing was the grandson of General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. (Richard Pershing was killed during the Tet offensive.) “Our decisions were all about our sense of duty,” Fred Smith, who went on to found Federal Express, recalls. “We were the Kennedy generation—you know, ‘Pay any price, bear any burden.’ That was the ethos.”

The week before John Kerry delivered the Class Oration, the fifteen Skull and Bones seniors went off on a final jaunt together to a fishing camp on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Fred Smith remembers spending the days idly, playing cards and drinking beer. David Thorne, however, says that there was a serious running discussion about Vietnam. “There were four of us going to war in a matter of months. That tends to concentrate the mind. This may have been the first time we really seriously began to question Vietnam. It was: ‘Hey, what the hell is going on over there? What the hell are we in for?’”

Kerry’s reaction to these discussions was intense and precipitate. He decided to rewrite the speech. His original address, which can still be found in the 1966 Yale yearbook, was “rather sophomoric,” he recalled. “I decided that I couldn’t give that speech. I couldn’t get up there and go through that claptrap. I remember there was no electricity in the cabin. I remember staying up with a candle writing my speech in the wee hours of the night, rewriting and rewriting. It reflected what I felt and what we were all thinking about. It got an incredible reception, a standing ovation.”

The Senator and I were sitting in wing chairs in his office, which is rather more elegant than those of his peers—the walls painted Chinese red with a dark lacquer glaze and covered with nineteenth-century nautical prints. There is a marble fireplace, a couch, a coffee table, the wing chairs: in sum, a room with a distinct sensibility, a reserved and private place. Kerry seemed weary. Our conversation was interrupted, from time to time, by phone calls from his supporters—most of whom seemed unhappy about his Iraq vote.

At one point, he had to rush over to the Senate chamber to vote on another issue. When he returned, we began to talk about his time in Vietnam. He served as the captain of a small “swift boat,” ferrying troops up the rivers of the Mekong Delta. He was wounded three times in four months, and then sent home—the policy in Vietnam was three wounds and you’re out. He received a Bronze Star, for saving the life of a Special Forces lieutenant who had fallen overboard during a firefight, and a Silver Star. The latter, a medal awarded only for significant acts of courage, was the result of a three-boat counterattack Kerry had led against a Vietcong position on a riverbank. He had chased down, shot, and killed a man that day. The man had been carrying a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. “You want to see what one of those can do to a boat?” he asked. “A couple of weeks after I left Vietnam, a swift boat captained by my close friend Don Droz—we called him Dinky—got hit with a B-40. He was killed. I still have the photo here somewhere.”

Kerry began to rummage around his desk and eventually pulled out a manila folder. “Here it is,” he said. The boat was mangled beyond recognition. “Oh my, look at this!” He held up a sheaf of yellowed, double-spaced, typewritten pages. It looked like an old college term paper, taken from a three-ring binder. “It’s the original copy of my Class Oration. What on earth is it doing here?”

He sat down again and studied the speech, transfixed. Then he began to read it aloud, curious, nostalgic, embarrassed by, and yet impressed with, his undergraduate eloquence. He read several pages. Worried looks passed between the two staff members who were in the room: Was he going to read the whole damn thing? “‘It is misleading to mention right and wrong in this issue, for to every thinking man, the semantics of this contest often find the United States right in its wrongness and wrong in its rightness,’” he read, swiftly, without oratorical flourish. “‘Neither am I arguing against the war itself. . . . I am criticizing the propensity—the ease—which the United States has for getting into this kind of situation—’”

He stopped and looked up, shaking his head, “Boy, was I a sophisticated nabob!” The two staff members exhaled. “You have to laugh at this now. . . . Do I even want this out?”

But he continued reading, unable to stop himself. He skipped several pages in the middle, then recited the entire peroration.

The Class Oration says a lot about John Kerry, who will soon announce his intention to run for President of the United States. It is a nuanced assessment of American foreign policy at a crossroads—delivered at a moment when the political leaders of the country should have been questioning basic assumptions but weren’t. Kerry did, however—a year before the antiwar movement began to gather strength and coherence. The speech was notable for its central thesis: “The United States must . . . bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention”—against Communism—“that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world.”

Kerry went on:

In most emerging nations, the spectre of imperialist capitalism stirs as much fear and hatred as that of communism. To compound the problem, we continue to push forward our will only as we see it and in a fashion that only leads to more mistakes and deeper commitment. Where we should have instructed, it seems we did not; where we should have been patient, it seems we were not; where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not. . . . Never in the last twenty years has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today.

There is, nonetheless, something slightly off-putting about the speech. The portentous quality, the hijacking of Kennedyesque tics and switchbacks (“Where we should have instructed . . .”), the absence of irony, the absence of any sort of joy—all these rankle, and in a familiar way. This has been the knock against John Kerry for the past thirty years, ever since he captured the nation’s attention as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group whose members staged a dramatic protest in Washington in April of 1971, camping out on the Mall and tossing their medals and combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps.

He seemed the world’s oldest twenty-seven-year-old that week, even though he was dressed in scruffy combat fatigues, his extravagant thatch of black hair gleaming, flopping over his ears and eyebrows—he looked a bit like the pre-hallucinogenic George Harrison. Kerry spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in much the same style as he’d spoken at Yale. His testimony was brilliant and succinct: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”

He was an immediate celebrity. He was also an immediate target of the Nixon Administration. Years later, Chuck Colson—who was Nixon’s political enforcer—told me, “He was a thorn in our flesh. He was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil. 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.”

Kerry launched a national speaking tour; he spoke to the National Baptist Convention, was named an honorary member of the United Auto Workers, and spoke on campuses across the country. He was the subject of a “60 Minutes” profile. Morley Safer asked him if he wanted to be President of the United States. “No,” he said with a chuckle, after an instant’s surprise and calculation.

Serious as all this was—he was, for a moment, as Colson suggests, the most compelling leader of the antiwar movement—there was something uneasy, and perhaps even faintly risible, about it, too, particularly the ill-disguised Kennedy playacting. Even as Kerry delivered his Senate testimony, he distorted his natural speech to sound more like that earlier J.F.K.; for example, he occasionally “ahsked” questions. (Kerry had befriended Robert F. Kennedy’s speechwriter Adam Walinsky and consulted him about the speech, bouncing phrases and ideas off the old master.)

This sort of thing had been a source of merriment for his classmates ever since prep school, where the joke was that his initials really stood for “Just For Kerry.” He had volunteered to work on Edward Kennedy’s 1962 Senate campaign, had dated Janet Auchincloss, who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s half sister, had hung out at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss family’s estate in Newport, and had gone sailing with the President. A practical joke—one of many, apparently—was played on him in the 1966 Yale yearbook: he was listed as a member of the Young Republicans. After his 1971 antiwar début in Washington, his fellow-Yalie Garry Trudeau lampooned him in the “Doonesbury” comic strip.

The jokes have never really abated. William Bulger, a state senator from South Boston and the dean of that city’s clever politicians, nicknamed Kerry Live Shot, for his homing instinct when it came to television cameras. Indeed, Kerry’s every move—the fact that he tossed his combat ribbons, not his medals, onto the Capitol steps; the fact that he had corrective jaw surgery (to fix a clicking sound, which had been compounded by a hockey injury); the fact, most recently, that he married the wealthy widow Teresa Heinz, whose late husband, Senator H. John Heinz III, was an heir to the ketchup fortune—all these were assumed to be political and were subjected to ridicule.

“We were pretty rough on him over the years,” Martin Nolan, a recently retired member of the Boston Globe’s mostly Irish and extremely raucous stable of political writers, says. “He was an empty suit, he was Live Shot, he never passed a mirror without saying hello.”

Indeed, John Kerry has always looked as if he had been requisitioned from central casting: preposterously dignified, profoundly vertical. He is six feet four inches tall, and his narrow frame, long face, and sloping shoulders make him seem even taller. His face is a collection of strong features that inaccurately suggest an Irish heritage, as does his name: his father’s family was mostly from Austria. He has a practically endless jaw, a prominent nose, and eyebrows that hang like a set of quotation marks beside grayish-blue eyes. And then there is the hair, which is so melodramatically profuse and puffy that it seems an encumbrance almost too weighty for his long, thin neck.

“He’s cursed to look like that,” says Bob Kerrey, the president of New School University, who served with Kerry in the Senate and is a fellow combat veteran of Vietnam. “His looks say something about him that is different from what he actually is. He’s very easy to hang out with. There isn’t an excessive use of the pronoun ‘I.’ There’s a genuine person there, a very approachable person, a very honorable person.” Other friends reflexively assume a defensive posture when describing him: He’s not the loner that he once was, he’s not as aloof, he’s more comfortable than he used to be, he’s grown as a person—although people have been saying these sorts of things about him, especially at election time, for the past twenty years.

Kerry’s aristocratic reserve, his utter inability to pose as a populist, is not a quality recently associated with successful candidates for President of the United States. His voice and manner are cultured, Brahmin; he seems the sort of person who might ask for a “splash” of coffee, as George H. W. Bush did, to his political embarrassment, at a truck stop during the 1988 campaign. That Kerry is a Massachusetts liberal does not recommend him highly, either: the last three such candidates were Ted Kennedy, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis, and the latter’s campaign has become shorthand for the disastrously effete, National Public Radio tendencies of the Democratic Party. Kerry has consistently voted for gun control, for abortion rights, and for environmental protection, and has opposed the death penalty; he has voted with Kennedy about ninety-six per cent of the time.

Continue at the link above for the rest .. it's a long piece.

Check out this thread:

More information about Kerry here (especially about his anti-Vietnam War stances):

What You Don't Know about John Kerry

Nothing like reminding ourselves of where she and been. And that she was one of Kerry's early sponsors.

What You Don’t Know About John Kerry
Chuck Noe, NewsMax.com
Tuesday, Jan. 20, 2004
With his win in Iowa, Sen. John Kerry could be on his way to the White House. But most Americans are unaware of the real Kerry.
Here are facts and quotations that reveal the character of the new Democrat leader.

Denouncing America with ‘Hanoi’ Jane: Although Wesley Clark and others have attacked former front-runner Howard Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum, Kerry is far more complex than the simple war hero he portrays himself as.
He became a celebrated organizer for one of America's most extreme appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He consorted with the likes of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s radical former attorney general.

He attended a seminar bankrolled by Fonda in Detroit in February 1971. Watching 125 self-proclaimed Vietnam veterans testify at a Howard Johnson’s about atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. forces, the man who would be president later said he found the accounts shocking and irrefutable.

Dubbed “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” the protest attracted minimal media attention, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Fonda insisted it be held in the remote Michigan city rather than the less “authentic” Washington, D.C.

Still, the event gave Kerry an idea for a protest that was sure to be a media smash, and he immediately set out to organize one of the most confrontational protests of the war.

Operation Dewey Canyon III began on April 18, 1971, when nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and people claiming to be veterans gathered on Washington’s Mall for what they called “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.”

The group staged mock firefights on the steps of the Capitol and Supreme Court and defied U.S. Park Police after the Department of Justice issued an injunction barring it from camping on the Mall.

Those evil American soldiers: Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

‘We are not the best’: In his testimony, Kerry claimed there was no communist threat and said: “In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ‘some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,’ and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country ….”
U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted in 1996: “Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the ‘People's Peace Treaty,’" a supposed ‘people's’ declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.”

Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol.
Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office.

Communist stooge: The communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him speaking to demonstrators and boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, on record stating, “I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society,” the New American recalled in May 2003.
“By frequently participating in VVAW’s demonstrations, Kerry found himself marching alongside what the Boston Herald Traveler identified as ‘revolutionary Communists.’ While noting that known Reds had openly organized these events, the December 12, 1971 Herald Traveler reported the presence of an ‘abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.’"

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry says: “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain.

“Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.”

Sen. John McCain revealed that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily noted that Kerry’s actions had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.”

In recent years when Kerry has exploited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for photo opportunities on Veterans Day, some veterans, still outraged by his betrayal, have turned their backs on him.

The book he doesn’t want you to see: When Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House of Representative in 1972, “he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima,” according to Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry.
“Suddenly, copies of the book became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries. But the Lowell (Mass.) Sun said of the type of person shown on its cover: ‘These people spit on the flag, they burn the flag, they carry the flag upside down, [and] they all but wipe their noses with it in their efforts to show their contempt for everything it still stands for,’” the New American reported.

Even today it is hard to find this infamous photo and book.

Friendly with the enemy: Kerry’s fondness for Vietnam’s communist dictatorship, one of the most oppressive in the world, continues.
As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 to investigate reports that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry badgered the panel into voting that no American servicemen remained in Vietnam.

“[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry,” noted U.S. Veteran Dispatch.

“But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992,” reported the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.”

The “odd coincidence,” according to FrontPageMagazine.com, involved a deal worth $905 million.

Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, notes that Kerry continues his apologia for Vietnam's never-ending atrocities. "Far from taking the lead on the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, he has prevented it from coming to a vote. He claims that making an issue of Hanoi's repression would be counterproductive."

Kerry is also a fan of China’s communist dictatorship. “On May 19, 1994, five years after Tiananmen Square, Kerry spoke on the Senate floor against linking China's Most Favored Nation trade status to its human rights record,” Slate reported.

Kerry said: “China is the strongest military power in Asia. We need China's cooperation. We cannot afford to adopt a cold-war kind of policy that merely excludes and pushes China away.”

Limiting China's MFN status “would make us a bit player in a production of enormous proportions. We possess no stick, including MFN, which can force China to embrace internationally recognized human rights and freedoms.”

More extreme than Hillary and Kucinich: Among the White House wannabes, long-shot Rep. Dennis Kucinich has the reputation of holding the most left-wing congressional voting record. In fact, this “honor” goes to Kerry.
According to American Conservative Union, Kerry has a lifetime rating of 6 percent, compared to 13 for the demolished Rep. Dick Gephardt, 14 for Sen. John Edwards, 15 for Kucinich and 19 for Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle score 13 percent. Only the likes of Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Boxer have more left-wing records than Kerry. In contrast, Sen. John Breaux, one of the upper chamber’s few remaining moderate Democrats, has a 46.

Drive as I say, not as I do: Like Al Gore and other self-described environmentalists, Kerry has a radical agenda that would devastate the U.S. economy in favor of the likes of communist China, yet he enjoys the gas-guzzling modern conveniences that greens denounce. Kerry, a delegate to the environment-destroying Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, left-wing activist Teresa Heinz, the multimillionaire widow of GOP Sen. John Heinz), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000, has attacked President Bush for withdrawing from the anti-U.S. Kyoto Protocol. This treaty, which then-President Bill Clinton had signed, would impose severe restrictions on the United States but not Third World polluters that already enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S.
However, although Kerry spouts the party line on anti-U.S. ecopolicy, he doesn’t like to practice what he preaches. Kerry was humiliated in April 2002 when photographed attending a rally against energy independence and then heading back to his SUV, the symbol of all that is evil to self-described greens.

Bone to pick: Bush-hating conspiracy theorists find it alarming that the president, like his father, was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Another alum of this club: John Kerry.

Get out your wallets: One reason Kerry and Edwards did well in Iowa: Losers Dean and Gephardt admitted they'd repeal all of the president's tax relief. However, although Kerry has taken credit for middle-class tax cuts, child tax credit and relief of the marriage penalty, he voted against them, GOP.com disclosed.
"Kerry will have to expend an awful lot of time and money to convince people that he's not the classic Massachusetts liberal," Larry Sabato, a respected political analyst at the University of Virginia, told the Associated Press in December 2002. "And that's going to be tough, because mainly he is."

Waffling on Iraq: Kerry has the tough job of wooing Howard Dean’s anti-war Democrats despite his support of the war in Iraq. His favorite tactic, claiming the president outfoxed him, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.
On “Meet the Press” in late August, Tim Russert played a tape of Kerry addressing the Senate in October 2002 with a hard-line speech declaring Iraq “capable of quickly producing weaponizing” of biological weapons that could be delivered against “the United States itself.”

Kerry insisted: “That is exactly the point I’m making. We were given this information by our intelligence community.”

However, as columnist Robert Novak noted, “as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability. Being tricky may no longer be as effective politically as it once was.”

No doubt Dean, Lieberman, Clark and other rivals will now use these and other details to do to Kerry what the Democrats did to Dean.

Wow! Last time I looked it was $92.50!!!

Somebody buy it so that Kerry cannot squelch it again!

The pic you sought, post # 8....... ?

Stay Safe !

Yep...a good description:
http://www.montagnard-foundation.org/about-degar.html

Posted on another thread by adamaz

from the National Park Service Statue of Liberty website

Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War leaving the Statue of Liberty, which they had occupied for two days. The demonstrators emerged in response to a court order, December 28, 1971. (Source: Photograph Collection of the American Museum of Immigration, Liberty Island, U.S. Department of the Interior, NPS)

Tim MacCormick of New Jersey and fourteen other members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, on the afternoon of December 26, 1971, arrived on Liberty Island by the Circle Line boat along with other tourists. But, when the last return ship to Manhattan sailed that evening, the veterans were not aboard. Instead, just before closing time, they hid among the exhibit partitions, building materials, and storage closets which were lying about the monument's base while work was being finished on the American Museum of Immigration. When NPS personnel made their 7:30 evening check-up of the statue, they found that the veterans had seized control of the landmark and barricaded the three ground floor entrances. The men inside refused to speak to or admit any Park Service people, but on the door they posted a typewritten statement addressed to President Richard M. Nixon:

Each Vietnam veteran who has barricaded himself within this international symbol of liberty has for many years rationalized his attitude to war. . . .We can no longer tolerate the war in Southeast Asia. . . .Mr. Nixon, you set the date [for leaving Vietnam], we'll evacuate. [13]

On December 27, twenty-one National Park police flew to Liberty Island from Washington where they were joined by New York City police and Coast Guardsmen. These security forces stood by while the government attempted to reach a peaceful compromise with the occupiers. They were told that they would be permitted to picket and protest on the island if they would simply vacate the statue, allowing it to reopen to visitors. The veterans rejected the offer, flew the United States flag upside down from the statue's crown, and waited. Law enforcement officers also waited. During that day thousands of disappointed tourists were told at the Battery that they could not go out to the statue. Congresswoman Bella Abzug (Democrat-New York) sent a telephone message of support to the demonstrators.

Members of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War leaving the Statue of Liberty, which they had occupied for two days. The demonstrators emerged in response to a court order, December 28, 1971. (Source: Photograph Collection of the American Museum of Immigration, Liberty Island, U.S. Department of the Interior, NPS)

Meanwhile, United States Attorney Whitney North Seymour, Jr., went before District Court Judge Lawrence Pierce to request an injunction directing the veterans to open the doors, leave the statue except during regular visiting hours, and permit Park Service personnel and tourists to enter. On the morning of December 28 Judge Pierce issued a temporary restraining order, instructing the protestors to leave the statue "forthwith." Two hours later, after conferring with their lawyers, the veterans removed the barricades from the entrances and emerged with "clenched fists raised." They had cleaned up their debris and caused no significant damage to the property. The monument was reopened to the public, with the first ferry-load of visitors arriving at 2:15 that afternoon.

Tim MacCormick issued a statement to the press explaining why they had picked this particular target:

The reason we chose the Statue of Liberty is that since we were children, the statue has been analogous in our minds with freedom and an America we love.

Then we went to fight a war in the name of freedom. We saw that freedom is a selective expression allowed only to those who are white and maintain the status quo.

Until this symbol again takes on the meaning it was intended to have, we must continue our demonstrations. . . . [14]

In April 1974, twenty members of a radical student organization, the Attica Brigade, copied the example of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Barricading themselves inside the statue, they protested social injustice in the United States and called for the ouster of President Nixon. They finally left the monument when a force of twenty National Park Police walked toward the barred doors with the intention of breaking in. No one was injured, nor was there any property damage. At a later news conference a spokesman for the protestors proclaimed that the statue is "a facade put up to make people believe that the ideals of democracy actually exist." [15]

Two years after the Attica Brigade sit-in, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War were back. On June 6, 1976, they occupied the statue, and on the following day, when they refused to comply with a court order to leave, NPS police arrested and removed them. Again, the statue escaped with minimal damage. [16]

39 posted on 01/20/2004 5:42:13 PM PST by adam_az

John Kerry with Daniel Ortega AND Mr. and Mrs. Tom Harkin!

John Kerry with Daniel Ortega AND Mr. and Mrs. Tom Harkin!

I don't care for tyrants of any stripe. Apparently though, tyrants are peachy-keen to leftists if they are:

1. Left wing or

2. Any political orientation, if a Republican president is going after them.

There are liberals I suppose, who will argue that being leftist tyrants automatically means that they aren't tyrants at all.

So true! Our RVN allies were literally sold down the river by the 'rat congress which cut off their parts and ammunition. The 'rats in congress were literally the allies of the NVA in the defeat of the RVN.

I stopped to browse this thread just for that photo.

It says it all for me about John F***ing Kerry (Counselling with the likes of Ted Kennedy - now that's JUST what this nation needs).

The truth of the matter is Ford let them down
Wasn't it Congress that voted to cut off their funding ?

I am with you -- I have learned from what I have found too! Hate is right! Mine is starting to get right there with them after reading some of the things about Kerry!

I live in Middle America and no way is his involvement with Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark going to play well out here -- they hate both of them. And they still hate both of them! A lot of us know people on The Wall and the fact he threw someone else's medals across the White House fence doesn't play well with any of us. Why don't you ask the Veterans that turned their back on Kerry at The Wall. If you researched, you would find that a lot of the people in this country still have no use for the peace demonstrators, hippies, or whatever else you want to call them!

Don't know what part of Middle America you are from but here in OK/TX Kerry will not play well at all not to mention he is very liberal and from MA which they hate around here.

Thanks for posting that. My opinion of Hanoi Jane has not changed in all these years and after reading all of this tonight, it has made me mad all over again. We had POW's in Hanoi and she was broadcasting against the United States from Vietnam. And nothing happened to her was the worst part!

Leaving Vietnam was the mistake.

The crucial mistake came long before that. In his memoirs, and the derived book on Vietnam, Kissinger claims that Ike, on leaving office, urged Kennedy to defend Laos at all cost, claiming that it was the essential strategic front against the North Vietnamese.

Clearly Ike had it right, and Kennedy screwed the pooch with his myopic focus on Vietnam alone (as opposed to the strategic big picture in Indochina). Once the NV had established bases all along the borders in Laos and Cambodia (and had secured, however perverted, the precedence that any attempt to dislodge them was a violation of Laotian and Cambodian sovereignty) the game was pretty much up. The North Vietnamese could then maintain a guerrilla insurgency in South Vietnam indefinitely. Short of a massive commitment (hundreds of thousands) of troops, we were basically screwed from that point on.