Kerry Slept in Georgetown While Vietnam Buddies Camped Out

During Thursday night's debate, Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry had his best moment when he was challenged over the major anti-war protest he organized in 1971 after returning from Vietnam.

"I could not be more proud of the fact that when I came back from that war, having learned what I learned," said Kerry, "that I led thousands of veterans to Washington, we camped on the [Capitol] Mall underneath the Congress, underneath Richard Nixon's visibility."

Kerry told the debate audience that while Nixon tried to "kick us off" the Mall, "we stood our ground and said to him, 'Mr. President, you sent us 8,000 miles away to fight, die and sleep in the jungles of Vietnam. We've earned the right to sleep on this Mall and talk to our senators and congressmen.'"

However, as noted Friday by top radio talker Rush Limbaugh, while the vast majority of protesters did spend the night on the Mall, Kerry himself relocated to more comfortable environs.

In December, the International Herald Tribune reported that "detractors" of the Massachusetts Democrat "have long claimed that Kerry himself slept comfortably in Georgetown. . . . [Longtime Kerry friend George] Butler confirms that Kerry spent part of the time at his house in Georgetown, working the phones and lining up support."

The Democratic front-runner's accommodations during those nights of protest wasn't the only detail that set him apart from his fellow demonstrators in the group he ran: Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Scott Camil, a former VVAW leader, told the Boston Globe last June that Kerry's patrician image was derided by others in the group, which was mostly composed of working-class veterans.

The ambitious protest leader, it seems, would show up for meetings in neatly pressed clothes, a look that irked his less aristocratic compatriots.

In one particularly revealing anecdote, Camil told the Globe that a VVAW member "had tried to reach Kerry by telephone and was told by someone, presumably a maid, that 'Master Kerry is not at home.' At the next meeting, someone hung a sign on Kerry's chair that said: 'Free the Kerry Maid.'"

Washington Times

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
December 6, 2002

John Kerry's war record As Sen. John Kerry, Massachusetts Democrat, considers a bid for the White House, Americans should know a few things about him that he might prefer go unmentioned - and I don't mean his $75 haircuts.

When Mr. Kerry pontificated at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Veterans Day, a group of veterans turned their backs on him and walked away. They remembered Mr. Kerry as the anti-war activist who testified before Congress during the war, accusing veterans of being war criminals. The dust jacket of Mr. Kerry's pro-Hanoi book, "The New Soldier," features a photograph of his ragged band of radicals mocking the U.S. Marine Corps Memorial, which depicts the flag-raising on Iwo Jima, with an upside-down American flag.

Retired Gen. George S. Patton III charged that Mr. Kerry's actions as an anti-war activist had "given aid and comfort to the enemy," as had the actions of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. Also, Mr. Kerry lied when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the White House fence; he later admitted they weren't his. Now they are displayed on his office wall. Long after he changed sides in congressional hearings, Mr. Kerry lobbied for renewed trade relations with Hanoi. At the same time, his cousin C. Stewart Forbes, chief executive for Colliers International, assisted in brokering a $905 million deal to develop a deep-sea port at Vung Tau, Vietnam - an odd coincidence.

As noted in the Inside Politics column of Nov. 14 (Nation), historian Douglas Brinkley is writing Mr. Kerry's biography. Hopefully, he'll include the senator's latest ignominious feat: preventing the Vietnam Human Rights Act (HR2833) from coming to a vote in the Senate, claiming human rights would deteriorate as a result. His actions sent a clear signal to Hanoi that Congress cares little about the human rights for which so many Americans fought and died.

The State Department ranked Vietnam among the 10 regimes worldwide least tolerant of religious freedom. Recently, 354 churches of the Montagnards, a Christian ethnic minority, were forcibly disbanded, and by mid-October, more than 50 Christian pastors and elders had been arrested in Dak Lak province alone. On Oct. 29, the secret police executed three Montagnards by lethal injection simply for protesting religious repression. The communists are conducting a pogrom against the Montagnards, forcing Christians to drink a mixture of goat's blood and alcohol and renounce Christianity. Thousands have been killed or imprisoned or have just "disappeared." The Montagnards lost one-half of their adult male population fighting for the United States, and without them, there might be thousands more American names on that somber black granite wall at the Vietnam memorial.

As Mr. Kerry contemplates a run for the presidency, people must remember that he has fought harder for Hanoi as an anti-war activist and a senator than he did against the Vietnamese communists while serving in the Navy in
Vietnam.

MICHAEL BENGE
Foreign Service officer and former Vietnam POW (1968 to 1973)
Washington

I had a chance recently to talk with a pastor who's of the same era as Mr. Kerry.

In fact, he was a divinty student at Harvard in the late 60s

I teasingly called him a 'dope-smoking hippy', and he laughed and said, 'Oh, I was liberal, all right, but I was married and my wife was pregnant. We lived in married housing and you didn't have the same crowd in there you had other places on campus. We at least tried to be serious."

Again, I teased him and said, "Ah. No dope, OK. But you were a liberal, so you went to the demonstrations, right?"

"Yes," he said, "I went to some... but I'll tell you why I stopped going. There was this fellow who was all full of the anti-war vitriol, filled with the hate, and he'd get everyone all riled up and mad, and the sit-ins and all that. I was risking everything to be there- missing class, missing work, away from my wife- and I thought that it was worth it, that we were actually accomplishing something. Well, one time this guy had got the whole place riled up, it was madness! and I wanted to ask him something. And so I followed him, because he slipped out at the height of the frenzy. He was about 20 feet ahead of me, sprinting, and all of a sudden he jumps into this red sports car and zips away. And I watched him, and I thought, what the... this is nuts! This kid doesn't care about this stuff! He's on his dad's dime! I was so mad at him! And at myself for doing it!"

The pastor's face was creased with anger- still- at having been 'had' so many years ago.

"I tell you what I did do. Partly of shame, and because we were so damn broke. I joined the army, as a chaplain, that's how I paid the rest of school. And I feel like I did some good, especially with some of those kids who came home..."

Figures. Kerry's an aristocrat, through and through. He's not fooling anybody, and it will become more evident as he pursues the nomination.

Does anybody have the details of the action for which Kerry won his silver star? There's a longstanding tradtion that when the wealthy and powerful actually get anywhere near combat, they wind up with medals much more highly ranked than their deeds deserve. LBJ got a silver star for being a passenger on a transport plane. JFK was decorated, rather than being courtmartialed for losing his ship due to stupidity.

If Kerry did something that genuinely merits a silver star, I'll apologize. But everything else about him indicates that he's a tin-plated phony.

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