Vietnam: Did GOP Pick Wrong Fight?
By David Paul Kuhn,
CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer
John Kerry headed a swift boat along the Mekong Delta, was shot at by Vietcong guerillas, saw his men hit, earned three Purple Hearts for combat wounds and upon his return became an ardent antiwar activist.
Republicans have gone after this biography. Kerry says they picked the wrong fight.
Two aspects of Kerry's Vietnam history have come under scrutiny. The first is his injuries, which by his own admission, consisted mainly of shrapnel wounds.
Second, at the height of his fervor in protesting the Vietnam War, in the spring of 1971, Kerry joined about 800 veterans in throwing away some of their military decorations or dog tags. Kerry has always said he only tossed ribbons. But a television interview surfaced this week from 1971 where he claimed that he also threw his medals. He had also won a Bronze and Silver Star for his service.
"He only pretended to throw his [medals]," Bush campaign communications director Karen Hughes told CNN on Sunday. "Now, I can understand if, out of conscience, you take a principled stand, and you would decide that you were so opposed to this that you would actually throw your medals. But to pretend to do so – I think that's very revealing.''
This is not the first time that a contentious comment from Kerry's antiwar days has come to light. After returning from Vietnam, he told the Harvard Crimson that the United Nations should decide where the United States sends its military.
Also in 1971, as leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he told NBC's "Meet The Press" that he "committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed," including "shootings in free-fire zones" and "harassment and interdiction fire."
Last week, on that same program, Kerry said the words he spoke 33 years ago "reflected an anger. It was honest, but it was in anger. It was a little bit excessive."
They say war is hell and that this hell creates a "fog of war," clouding moral clarity and rules of engagement. No modern American war was more hellish or foggier than Vietnam.
Kerry, like many veterans of Vietnam, returned angry at a government that he said fought an unnecessary and unjust war. He saw his two tours of service as justification for his protest.
Vice President Dick Cheney and Hughes have been the most prominent Bush campaign critics of Kerry but other GOP officials have attacked the Massachusetts senator on both the extent of his first Purple Heart injury, calling it a "scratch," and the issue of the medals he may or may not have returned.
"I think this whole thing is preposterous, this attempt to impugn Kerry is cheesy and sleazy," said historian Stanley Karnow, author of "Vietnam: A History." "If a guy has his arm taken off he gets a Purple Heart. If he has a scratch he gets a Purple Heart.
"I think the Bush campaign, Bush and Cheney are on an absolutely idiotic track, none of these guys served," Karnow continued. "Bush wiggled out of it. I'm not going to hold it against Bush for doing that. I think the Vietnam War was a disaster and if you could get out of going fine... The children of privilege didn't serve in Vietnam."
On Monday, Kerry for the first time responded publicly to accusations that President Bush did not complete his Texas Air National Guard service that began in 1968. He transferred to Alabama in 1972 to work on a Senate campaign and was honorably discharged in 1973, although he ceased flying in April 1972.
While the White House has released hundreds of pages, critics charge Mr. Bush's service record is still incomplete. Even if Mr. Bush's service is proven complete, he utilized his family's standing to take the safe route and enter the National Guard. Kerry is now drawing a contrast.
"I came back from Vietnam having served my country and I took on Richard Nixon and the effort to end the war and I'm proud of that," Kerry told CBS News on Monday.
Kerry added that the president "can't even prove" that he fulfilled his service.
The dilemma the Bush campaign now faces is that Kerry refused to comment on Mr. Bush's National Guard service until Republicans began parsing through Kerry's service in the war and his later opposition to it.
Kerry will continue to say, "This is a controversy the Republicans are pushing," as he did Monday on ABC's "Good Morning America." And soon enough, the Bush campaign may regret picking a political fight over the Vietnam War.
"I'm a veteran of WWII... as soon as you turned 18 you went down and you enlisted and got yourself drafted as I did and everyone else did," Karnow said.
"In 1970 and 1971, I was at Harvard on a fellowship at the Kennedy School and if anybody at Harvard was going to Vietnam he was out of his head," the Vietnam historian continued. "For a guy to decide to go to Vietnam from Yale, as Kerry did, is quite extraordinary."