UNFIT TO COMMAND
E P I LO G U E
John Kerry never saw them coming: not the book, the ads, or the
250 veterans of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. When the DRUDGE REPORT broke the story, an enraged spokesperson who was traveling with Kerry told DRUDGE, “They hired a goddamn private investigator to dig up trash!”
1 The next day, Senator John McCain, without having ever studied the charges, called the Swiftees “dishonest and dishonorable.”
2 Several days later, the New York Times declared the group to be a “shadow party” of the GOP.3
None of these unjustified attacks mattered to the Swiftees. They knew these attacks were not true. But more important, none of it mattered to the American people who wanted to find out the truth for themselves. In a few weeks, Unfit for Command was #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list, #1 on BarnesandNoble.com, and then #1 on the New York Times list for four weeks in a row. And even though in those early days when the Swift Boat vets could only afford to buy airtime in a handful of markets, polls showed that roughly half of Americans already saw or knew of the ads.
The truth was out.
From Minor Annoyance to Full-Scale Attack
At first, the Kerry campaign tried to treat the book and the ads as an irritation. They ignored the charges; dodged questions. It didn’t work. The Kerry camp then launched an orchestrated plan to discredit the Swift Boat vets. Television stations that aired the ads were threatened
with lawsuits. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth was accused of being run and funded by Republicans. The Kerry camp “googled” coauthor Jerry Corsi and used his statements in an Internet discussion forum to attack his character. They accused co-author John O’Neill of holding a thirty-year-plus vendetta against John Kerry. They demanded that Regnery, the book’s publisher, pull the book off the shelves.
None of it worked.
Now the Kerry campaign is engaged in an all-out effort to brand the vets as liars, even though they do not have any evidence that the vets lied about the charges. The Kerry camp is hoping that if they repeat it often enough, Americans will come to accept it. But so far, this strategy hasn’t worked either. Indeed, it may already be too late. We believe that truth has won.
The Liberal Media Falls in Step
The liberal mainstream media employed a parallel strategy. First, they ignored the Swift Boat vets, and then dismissed the charges. All the while, they gave tremendous play to those attacking President Bush. The NBC Today Show, for example, gave Kitty Kelley’s anti-Bush book three straight mornings of airtime, but refused to interview the authors of Unfit for Command even once. NBC was more than willing to provide a forum for an author whose chief source denied the book’s account, but they ignored Unfit for Command even though the latter relied on documented evidence and multiple eyewitness accounts from veterans who had signed affidavits.
Then Dan Rather and CBS enjoyed a holiday from the truth. They proclaimed that they had documents criticizing President Bush’s National Guard service, charges that were accepted as fact by the mainstream media and widely reported. Even when it was quickly and universally concluded that the documents were forgeries, CBS stuck by their story for weeks. While CBS dismissed the meticulously documented Swift Boat charges, they continued to defend their fraudulent documents until poor ratings made it impossible to do so. Perhaps the most telling example of the liberal media’s bias was the condescending manner in which they treated the Swift Boat veterans.
Pat Oliphant’s cartoon depicting them as illiterate drunks4 was an insult to veterans old and young. And yet, there was virtually no media outcry. On the NewsHour, Tom Oliphant declared that Unfit for Command was not up to journalistic standards.5 From what we’ve seen in the press, we believe the book’s standards are higher.
In this epilogue, our goal is to review the key arguments of the book that have been under attack and the statements the Kerry camp has made in response to the charges. There are still many unanswered questions. We are confident that after reviewing the summary and documentation, as well as Kerry’s statements, readers will conclude that the charges in the book are not a “pack of lies” as Kerry claimed.
Unfit for Command presents serious charges backed up with serious research. We intend for this epilogue to reinforce that conclusion.
Epilogue 3
The Purple Heart Hunter
Unfit for Command charged that John Kerry’s first Purple Heart involved an accidentally self-inflicted superficial wound suffered on a training mission—the “Boston Whaler Incident.” The book asserts that Kerry launched an M-79 grenade too close to some rocks along the shore, causing a tiny piece of shrapnel to lodge loosely in his arm.
The Kerry camp’s first salvo was to charge that the physician quoted in Unfit for Command, Dr. Louis Letson, was not the physician who treated John Kerry. In the letter written by Marc Elias, general counsel of the Kerry campaign, to various television stations planning to air the first Swift Boat Veterans for Truth commercials, Mr. Elias placed Dr. Letson’s name in quotation marks, subtly raising doubt about Louis Letson’s qualifications. Mr. Elias also charged that Dr. Letson did not attend Kerry’s wound because Dr. Letson’s name did not appear on Kerry’s sick call sheet. Instead, Mr. Elias noted, the person who signed the medical report was J.C. Carreon, since deceased. The Kerry camp contended that Dr. Letson was lying in his affidavit when he claimed that Kerry’s wound was superficial and that the shrapnel was removed with tweezers, the injury requiring no more medical treatment than the application of topical antiseptic and a band-aid.6
Dr. Letson quickly replied that J.C. Carreon was a lower-ranking corpsman who regularly assisted him at the sickbay and affirmed his initial report. Many vets who served at Cam Ranh Bay came forward to confirm that Dr. Letson was indeed the division’s physician. Furthermore, Dr. Letson had approached his local Democratic Party chairman about Kerry’s self-inflicted wound even before the controversy began. As for the hostile fire, those on the mission with Kerry, including Retired Rear Admiral William L. Schachte, the officer who commanded the Boston Whaler that evening, all maintained there had been no enemy fire.
4 Epilogue
Kerry’s surrogates next claimed that Schachte was lying, and that he was not on the boat. But Schachte in an in-depth interview with reporter Robert Novak, proved his credibility:7 “Kerry nicked himself with a M-79 [grenade launcher].”
Schachte said in a telephone interview from his home in Charleston, S.C. He said, “Kerry requested a Purple Heart.” Schachte, also a lieutenant junior grade, said he was in command of the small boat called a Boston whaler or skimmer, with Kerry aboard in his first combat mission in the Vietnam War.
The third crew member was an enlisted man, whose name Schachte did not remember.
Two enlisted men who appeared at the podium with Kerry at the Democratic National Convention in Boston have asserted that they were alone in the small boat with Kerry, with no other officer present. Schachte said it “was not possible” for Kerry to have gone out alone so soon after joining the swift boat command in late November 1968.
Kerry supporters said no critics of the Democratic presidential nominee ever were aboard a boat with him in combat. Washington lawyer Lanny Davis has contended that Schachte was not aboard the Boston whaler and says the statement that Schachte was aboard in Unfit for Command undermines that critical book’s credibility.8 (emphasis added)
Epilogue 5
Novak also interviewed Swift Boat veterans Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis, two Kerry supporters who claimed to be aboard the skimmer that night. But neither Zaladonis nor Runyon has ever asserted that they saw enemy fire. Novak also interviewed Tedd Peck and Mike Voss who confirmed to him that Schachte was the originator of the technique to use the skimmer in missions designed to flush the Viet Cong out on the banks of the waterways along the Mekong River so larger boats could move in and destroy them; both men also confirmed to Novak that Schachte was always aboard the skimmer when it was used in such missions.
Unable to discredit the rear admiral’s account, the Kerry camp then engaged in an ad hominem assault. The strongly pro-Kerry Media- Matters.org, for instance, noted that Admiral Schachte had contributed $8,500 to federal candidates or national political organizations since 1997, of which $6,750 went to Republican candidates or the Republican Party, including donations of $1,000 to George Bush in each of his 2000 and 2004 presidential campaigns.9 To leftist critics, Admiral Schachte’s political contributions disqualified him from giving a truthful affidavit.
As the controversy over the first Purple Heart progressed, a previously overlooked passage from Douglas Brinkley’s campaign biography came to light. The date of the skimmer incident was December 2, 1968. According to Brinkley, Kerry had written in his private journals that on December 11, 1968, just after he turned twenty five, his crew had not yet come under enemy fire, even though the date was nine days after the skimmer incident, when Kerry had claimed he was wounded by enemy fire.
Regarding the events of December 11, 1968, Kerry wrote the following journal entry:
<<<They pulled away from the pier at Cat Lo with spirits high, feeling satisfied with the way things were going for them. They had no lust for battle, but they also were not afraid. Kerry wrote in his notebook, “A cocky feeling of invincibility accompanied us up the Long Tau shipping channel because we hadn’t been shot at yet, and Americans at war who haven’t been shot at are allowed to be cocky. 10>>>
Taking at face value Kerry’s description of December 11, 1968, he and his crew had not yet experienced enemy fire, a statement that sounds like an implicit admission that the injury for the first Purple Heart was not suffered under enemy fire.
The Final Admission
John Hurley, veterans coordinator for the Kerry campaign has now admitted that it is possible that Kerry’s first Purple Heart was awarded for an unintentional self-inflicted wound.
UNANSWERED QUESTIONS FOR KERRY
1. What really happened in that incident on December 2, 1968?
2. How did you end up getting this Purple Heart? From whom?
3. Why was a Purple Heart issued only after Hibbard and
Schachte left?’
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