The battle over John Kerry’s Vietnam War record, which has emerged in recent weeks as crucial to this year’s desperately close presidential election campaign in the United States, reached a critical moment on Friday.
An anti-Kerry campaign by a group of navy veterans — who are accusing the Democratic candidate of embellishing his accounts of combat and inflicting wounds on himself to win medals — has been revealed to be riddled with inconsistencies and supported by wealthy Texans with links to the George Bush family and the president’s long-serving political mastermind, Karl Rove.
But the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group pressed on with its campaign on Friday by launching a television advert.
Evidence also emerged that its accusations against Kerry had drawn blood.
A new CBS poll gave Bush a 57% to 33% lead over Senator Kerry among war veterans, who had been evenly split only a fortnight ago.
Old war becomes new battleground
What Kerry did or did not do 35 years ago, when he was commanding a swift boat (a river patrol craft), has become the nastiest, hardest-fought battleground of the campaign over the past few weeks.
Clashes a generation ago in the Mekong delta have received closer scrutiny than much of the current fighting in Iraq, and have pushed debates about the economy and healthcare off the front pages.
The Kerry campaign has found itself on the defensive on an issue it thought was an easy winner. The Democratic party convention in late July became a showcase for the candidate’s four months in combat, to sell him as a wartime leader and inoculate him against Republican attacks labelling him ”soft on defence”.
The implicit aim of the strategy was to force a comparison with Bush’s Vietnam War record. Bush avoided combat by joining the Texas Air National Guard and has not been able to answer questions on whether he showed up for all his flying obligations.
The anti-Kerry veterans timed their move to coincide with the Democratic convention, publishing a book and releasing a TV ad to air their claims. The Kerry camp initially tried to shrug off what it saw as an empty smear campaign and left the task of rebutting the allegations to the ”Band of Brothers”, the candidate’s crewmates from his Vietnam days.
But while reluctant to divert its campaign, the Kerry camp is also painfully aware of the fate of Michael Dukakis, the Democratic candidate in 1988 whose post-convention lead in the polls was pulverised by a blitz of derisive and contentious advertising by his opponent, Bush’s father.
Dukakis has long been faulted by party strategists for not hitting back faster.
By Thursday, the faction in the Kerry campaign advocating a more robust response won the upper hand, and he spoke out denouncing Swift Boat Veterans for Truth as ”a front for the Bush campaign”.
”The fact that the president won’t denounce what they’re up to tells you everything you need to know — he wants them to do his dirty work,” Kerry said. The White House denied any link but has so far declined to condemn the campaign.
Money from Texas
An investigation of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth by The New York Times, however, found that much of the group’s money and political expertise came from a circle of wealthy Texans close to the Bush dynasty and its political machine.
Bob Perry, a house construction millionaire, provided $200 000. He has helped Rove groom and fund a string of Texas Republicans, culminating in Bush.
Merrie Spaeth, a public-relations specialist who helped coordinate the Swift Boat campaign, was a Bush fund-raiser in 2000. She also played a role in his particularly nasty primary election battle against Senator John McCain that year.
Another big money backer, Harlan Crow, is a friend of Bush Snr and a trustee of the foundation running his presidential library.
Backfiring on White House
Meanwhile, the deconstruction of the Swift Boat Veterans claims is showing signs of backfiring on the White House and its supporters.
One of Kerry’s main accusers, Larry Thurlow, commanded a nearby navy boat at the time of a famous incident in which Kerry pulled a US soldier from a river. Kerry won a Bronze Star for bravery under fire, but Thurlow claimed there had been no hostile gunfire at the time. His claim was called into question, however, when the Washington Post got hold of a copy of the citation for Thurlow’s own Bronze Star for his actions that day, which referred to enemy fire several times.
Three more veterans were found to have made statements praising Kerry’s wartime courage before they were recruited to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth this year.
But it is still far from clear whether the backlash will do more harm to Bush than the damage that has been inflicted on Kerry in a few short weeks. — Guardian Unlimited Â