"The Book on John Kerry"

An article by David Skinner at The Weekly Standard, dated Feb. 16:

HOW CONVENIENT that Douglas Brinkley's hagiographic "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War" should be hitting bookstores just as Kerry's star ascends in the Democratic primaries. Less convenient, perhaps, is the fact that another Kerry book is getting hot right now: "The New Soldier," published in 1971, for which Kerry shares authorial credit with the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Hot not in sales — only a tiny number of copies seem to be around — but in price....

Anti-Kerry oppo researchers will be disappointed to learn that Kerry wrote very little of the book. It reprints his Senate testimony and includes a brief afterword from him. But the bulk of its pictures and first-person narratives come from VVAW members. The idea for the march, according to Brinkley, was Kerry's, though it grew out of the VVAW's Winter Soldier project, in which Kerry played only a minor role. Along with radical chic royalty like Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, and supported by Sen. Eugene McCarthy and Fr. Daniel Berrigan, VVAW members met in Detroit and testified to atrocities they had committed or been witness to in Vietnam. Allegations included torture, intentional dismemberment, and gang rape (some excerpts are included in "The New Soldier"). The project operated under the thesis that American atrocities like the one at My Lai weren't highly unusual but reflected the routinely criminal exploits of American military leadership and soldiers.

After Senator Mark O. Hatfield read the Winter Soldier testimony into the Congressional Record, he asked for an official investigation. When the Naval Investigate Service did just that, many of the veterans refused to cooperate (despite protections against self-incrimination). One soldier admitted that his testimony had been coached by members of the Nation of Islam; exact details of the atrocity he'd seen now escaped his memory. Several veterans hunted down by Naval investigators swore they had never been to Detroit and couldn't imagine who would have used their identities. (Somehow this episode was left out of the "Winter Soldier" chapter of Brinkley's book, but the details can be found in Guenter Lewy's "America in Vietnam" and in Mackubin Thomas Owens's account in the latest National Review.) ....

(Thanks, Big Trunk.)

[Follow-up: The (In)famous Book Cover.]

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sat. 02/07/04 08:59:48 AM
Categorized as John Kerry & Political.