Almost 30 years after the last helicopter fled the roof of the U.S. Embassy in Saigon, Vietnam remains the great American quagmire. You might think it should belong to history by now, especially after the Clinton years, when voters took the measure of a former draft dodger -- one who had been so bold as to put his "loathing for the military" on paper -- and judged him fit and worthy to become America's Commander-in-Chief.
But now, as another Presidential contest loses the track and plunges back into the same old elephant grass, it's clear that Vietnam never went away. And the blame is John Kerry's, no doubt about it. After 19 years in the Senate, the achievement on which he has chosen to place the most stress in proving he has the mettle to occupy the White House is a four-and-a-half-month tour as a junior officer in a war that America lost.
"Reporting for duty," Kerry told Boston's Democratic conventioneers, snapping a smart salute on the night he accepted his party's nomination. The cheers came on cue, even though the applause must have struck quite a few of the Democratic graybeards in the audience as a tad ironic.
A TIME OF A LOOSER TONGUE? Back when George McGovern was their hero and Kerry was accusing his former comrades of tormenting Vietnam "in a fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan," none of them were hailing the legions of other young men who dutifully reported at recruiting stations and induction centers. Cheering? Jeering, more like.
An observer with an eye for consistency can only be struck by the aspiring President's explanation for that change of heart. That was then, he has said, when he was younger and less inclined to curb his tongue. Those accusations he made of rape and the lopping off of ears, committed by U.S. soldiers, were "excessive," he has said. Isn't it time the national debate took up the issues of the moment -- jobs and medical coverage and Iraq? All the complexities, that between now and November will be served only with shallow slogans and slick sound bites.
Well, that's democracy for you, the worst system but for any other -- and Kerry, like George W. Bush, is playing his hand as the rules of a dirty game demand. The party that wants the White House has surrogates like filmmaker Michael Moore peddling distortions and fantastic plots. Meanwhile, the party that holds the White House sneers at "Senator Flip-Flop" while winking with approval as its own, arms-length hit squads that question the challenger's combat record, his honor, his judgment.
PINSTRIPED LEGIONS. From both sides, the cries goes up, "Not fair!" And the lawyers, the only guaranteed winners of this contest, descend on the Federal Election Commission to demand that ads be yanked and candidates rebuked. Voters disgusted by the antics and emptiness of the political class may well hope that the pinstriped legions succeed.
But does this mean these issues aren't fit for public debate? No way, even though the charges and countercharges concerning John Kerry's conduct under fire -- like Bush's record in the Air National Guard -- are being dug up and raked over with the sort of scandal-mongering glee normally associated only with the shrillest of supermarket tabloids.
Fact is, both Kerry and Bush were honorably discharged, and now, after such a length of time, no forensic examination of attendance rosters or after-combat reports can ever be likely to establish any variety of truth that's hard and fast. As the polls show, with the exception of an undecided 7% or so, minds and voting intentions are set. So for most, the question of whether a scratch on the arm deserved a Purple Heart will remain forever academic.
THE TRUTH SHADED. Yet Kerry's conduct in that long-ago war remains relevant -- and not just because he has made his time in uniform both centerpiece and touchstone of his campaign, nor even, as the Swift Boat Veterans assert, because he painted his personal history in the false colors of faux heroics [see BW Online, 8/23/04, "Flinging the Foul Mud of Vietnam"].
If Kerry did shade the truth, he sure wouldn't be the first politician to do so. Only last week, voters were treated to the spectacle of Kerry point man and Iowa Senator Tom Harkin fulminating about the Swift Vets' ads. Yet Harkin is himself an exposed fabulist, having once claimed to have jousted in his F-4 Phantom with North Vietnamese MiGs.
The truth? He never saw combat, spent his war ferrying military planes from Japan to the Philippines for routine servicing, and apologized for his fictions when subsequently exposed by fellow Senator Barry Goldwater.
CHRISTMAS IN CAMBODIA. So why pick on Kerry? Only this: Harkin doesn't want to be President. While voters will never know -- can never know -- if Kerry deserved those medals and his early ticket home, they can be absolutely sure that he did worse than merely embroider his exploits in the years that followed.
Kerry threw his medals over the White House fence -- except he didn't. He slept out on the Mall in Washington, D.C., with anti-war protesters -- except he didn't, having actually bunked down in a borrowed townhouse with Newsweek reporter Robert Sam Anson, according to an investigative story in the New York Observer.
And most troubling of all, Kerry has said he spent the last days of 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia, under fire and listening to President Nixon deny that Kerry or any other U.S. servicemen were operating on the wrong side of the border. In one version, it was the Khmer Rouge doing the shooting. In another, drunken South Vietnamese troops celebrating Christmas, which isn't even a good fable, since Buddhists generally don't get too excited about the birth of the Christians Messiah.
Oh, and another thing: It was President Lyndon Johnson Kerry would have been listening to, not Nixon, since the Republican was still four weeks away from his inauguration.
DECORATED REPUTATION. Kerry's handlers have hedged and qualified those assertions. No, they say, their man wasn't actually in Cambodia, just on its "watery borders." Well, he wasn't there, either, his own journals say. He wrote at the time that he spent Christmas, 1968, at the Sa Dec naval base, a good 50 miles away from the Cambodian border, thinking of "sugar plums...and stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires," and quite possibly, a future in politics.
Cynics might be inclined to argue that all of the above is inconsequential, that politicans lie because falsehood is the stump's stock in trade. Such a glib dismissal doesn't wash, and the reason is a lesson of history.
In 1944, another politician of vaulting ambition scored a Silver Star from an obliging Douglas MacArthur after riding as an observer aboard a U.S. bomber. It was the only mission he ever flew and, according to at least one of the surviving crewmen, an uneventful one at that, with no sight of the enemy nor even the slightest whiff of danger, according to author Robert Caro. Yet back in Washington, the former passenger regaled reporters like Time's Hugh Sidey, with tall tales of marauding Zeros "and how the bullets came zinging through the fuselage," according to Sidey's written recollections on the Web.
TRUTH AND CONSEQUENCES. That politician was Lyndon Johnson -- the President whose escalation of the war saw Kerry and so many others obliged to fight a conflict that geopolitical constraints doomed to failure, even as the force of U.S. arms never failed to triumph in the field.
Might a Johnson who was less keen to gild his reputation as a man of action been more wary of Indochina's swamp? Might he have thought twice about misrepresenting what happened -- or rather, didn't happen -- in the Gulf of Tonkin as his excuse to escalate a war that should never have been fought?
The world will never know. But with the benefit of hindsight, people can be absolutely sure that, then as now, one truth really does matter in Presidential politics: Boasts and a talent for self-serving fiction are no recommendations for a lease on the Oval Office.
