Zeev's Turnips Talk Politics (ZTTP)

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Kerry’s Dishonorable Discharge


28 October 2004
By Earl Lively

There is overwhelming evidence that John Kerry got a dishonorable discharge from the Navy, and that, as a result of such discharge, he was stripped of all of his famous but questionable Navy awards and medals. And the kicker? The evidence is on his website!

Kerry’s oh-so-clever handlers evidently depended on the ignorance of the public and the press about military records when they posted his 1978 “Honorable Discharge from the Reserves” on his site as part of a carefully selected partial release of his Navy records (the Navy says it is still withholding about 100 records). However, one diligent reporter, Thomas Lipscomb of the New York Sun, saw through the scam and exposed it in a story on October 13.

Predictably, the major media has shunned the story.

What Mr. Lipscomb noticed (and I overlooked when I first read the document) was the date of the posted discharge, Feb. 16, 1978. This was six years after Kerry’s six-year (1966-1972) commitment to the Navy ended. The anti-war detractor of our military did not re-up for another six-year term in 1972, so why the delay of his discharge? The only logical conclusion is that the 1978 honorable discharge was a second discharge given to replace an earlier undesirable discharge.

I was a colonel assigned as Director of Operations of Headquarters, Texas Air National Guard when George W. Bush was a lieutenant in the Air Guard. Since 1999, I have been besieged by the media, from the London Guardian to CBS’s Sixty Minutes, NBC, the Boston Globe, and others, with allegations and questions about Lt. Bush's service in and discharge from the Texas Air National Guard and USAF. I recently appeared on Fox & Friends twice to shoot down CBS’s phony memos about Lt. Bush and allegations about his discharge.

In the interest of fairness and equal time, it is time that scrutiny of John Kerry's discharge(s) is demanded.

Senator Kerry has said that his medal certificates were reissued because he lost them (and his dog ate his homework, I suppose). Rewards are certified in one’s permanent personnel record jacket. If you lose a medal, you can get a replacement medal if your records show the award. The only way awards would have to be reissued is if they were rescinded and deleted from your records. And this narrows the possibilities down toward a dishonorable discharge, rather than a lesser form of undesirable discharge. As Mr. Lipscomb noted, “There is one odd coincidence that gives some weight to the possibility that Mr. Kerry was dishonorably discharged. … (W)hen a dishonorable discharge is issued, all pay benefits, and allowances, and all medals and honors are revoked as well. And five months after Mr. Kerry joined the U.S. Senate in 1985, on one single day, June 4, all of Mr. Kerry's medals were reissued.”

The experience of my thirty-plus years in the Navy, U.S. Air Force, and Air National Guard tells me that the late-issued honorable discharge was obviously a cover-up whitewash. Ditto for the re-issuance of Kerry's medals shortly after he became a member of the "Ol' Boys Club" in the Senate.

One of the top dogs in that club, Sen. John Warner, has amnesia about "any representation" about Kerry receiving a less than honorable discharge, even though he was Nixon's Secretary of the Navy when Kerry delivered his diatribe against the Navy and other services in the Senate in April, 1971. In May of 1970, Kerry conferred with the Viet Cong in Paris, and in July of 1971, he demonstrated in Washington to sell their peace proposal—while he was in the Naval Reserve. This variety of amnesia is common among Republicans asked to stand up and testify to Democrat crimes and injustices (see the GOP Senators' "support" of the House impeachment prosecutors).

The Nixon/Ford presidency gave way to Democrat President Jimmy Carter in 1977, which tends to explain the six-year delay in getting the revised discharge. Mr. Lipscomb adds some insight:

“Mr. Carter's first act as president was a general amnesty for draft dodgers and other war protesters. Less than an hour after his inauguration on January 21, 1977, while still in the Capitol building, Mr. Carter signed Executive Order 4483 empowering it. By the time it became a directive from the Defense Department in March 1977 it had been expanded to include other offenders who may have had general, bad conduct, dishonorable discharges, and any other discharge or sentence with negative effect on military records. In those cases the directive outlined a procedure for appeal on a case by case basis before a board of officers. A satisfactory appeal would result in an improvement of discharge status or an honorable discharge.”

A document on Kerry’s website is a form letter from W. Graham Claytor, Carter’s Secretary of the Navy, which grants his Honorable Discharge. .http://www.johnkerry.com/pdf/jkmilservice/Honorable_Discharge_From_Reserve.pdf .

Secretary Claytor’s letter says that this action to award an Honorable Discharge Certificate is taken in accordance with Title 10, U.S. Code, Sections 1162 and 1163, which deal with grounds for involuntary separation of a reserve officer and provide for the action of “a board of officers” to examine an officer’s records and review previous actions. Obviously, this was the aforementioned board for appeal resulting from President Carter’s executive order.

Unless Lt. Kerry had previously received an undesirable discharge, he had nothing to appeal and would not have come before this board.

When he became a Senator in 1965, his clout as a senator got his medals back, even though Reagan was president, but the restoration of the medals was one more piece of evidence, as Mr. Lipscomb noted, that his previous discharge was dishonorable.

The Navy is stonewalling Freedom of Information Act requests by Judicial Watch for the rest of Kerry's records—not surprising, because ever since the Tailhook flap, the Navy has had a P.C. virus. Feminist Rep. Patricia Schroeder (Dem-CO) figuratively castrated the Navy's top brass, and the Navy cringed from political correctness. Pressure and morale at the top was so low that a Chief of Naval Operations committed suicide. The Navy doesn't want to admit that it succumbed to political pressure to restore honors stripped from a discredited turncoat. In hiding the truth, the Navy Department dishonors even the lowest-ranking sailor who ever swabbed a deck.

It is time for those who care about the truth, and about the integrity of our electoral system, to demand all of the facts hidden in the records of the man who may be elected President.

Earl Lively
Colonel, USAF (Ret.) / Texas ANG Phone: [phone] [e-mail]