The night of his testimony, a gang of Kerry's fellow protesters took a large American flag, flipped it upside down and marched around the White House. Critics have said the scene was a deliberate attempt to mock the famous flag-raising at Iwo Jima.
Kerry chose a photo of the scraggly vets carrying the flipped flag for the cover of his book "The New Soldier," which documented the Dewey Canyon demonstration.
The next day, Kerry joined dozens of other protesters who discarded their war medals on the steps of the Capitol. Years later, the presidential hopeful explained that the medals he threw away actually belonged to somebody else, and that his real medals were displayed on the wall of his office.
The antics of Kerry and his colleagues didn't do much for those who were still fighting the Vietnam War.
Last December, former POW Michael Benges told the Washington Times that retired Gen. George S. Patton III lumped Kerry in with Fonda and Clark, complaining that they had all "given aid and comfort to the enemy."
Even the most famous POW of all, Sen. John McCain, later revealed that his North Vietnamese captors used reports about the Kerry-led protest to taunt him and his fellow prisoners.
A few years later the ambitious Democrat found that his book documenting the celebrated peace protest had become something of a political liability.
"Suddenly, copies of ["The New Soldier"] became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries," one old-time Massachusetts hand told The New American Magazine in May.
A search of several rare book Web sites failed to turn up more than a few copies of Kerry's anti-war book for sale anywhere. NewsMax obtained its copy from a bookstore in Great Britain.
'The New Soldier' by John F. Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against The War New York: Collier Books.
In 1971, the Communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him (Kerry) speaking to demonstrators as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). The April 23, 1971 Daily World boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, who was on record stating: "I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society."
MR. CROSBY NOYES (Washington Evening Star): Mr. Kerry, you said at one time or
another that you think our policies in Vietnam are tantamount to genocide
and that the responsibility lies at all chains of command over there. Do
you consider that you personally as a Naval officer committed atrocities in
Vietnam or crimes punishable by law in this country?
KERRY: There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that,
yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities