November 16, 2004
The Chicago Sun-Times
Of all the targets of vitriol and attempted ambushes during the presidential campaign, I most admired John O'Neill of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth for his calm determination to stand his ground on his charges against John Kerry's Vietnam service in Unfit for Command, the book he co-authored.
O'Neill was called a ''liar'' to his face on a number of TV appearances, and, on an Oct. 14 ''Nightline,'' ABC-TV's Ted Koppel actually sent a crew to Vietnam to film alleged eyewitnesses in order to disprove one of the accounts -- how Kerry won his Silver Star -- in Unfit for Command.
Casually, ABC news director Andrew Morse mentioned that ''the Vietnamese require an official minder to accompany journalists on reporting trips.'' The minder-censor from the Communist totalitarian state was there to ensure that the ''eyewitnesses'' stuck to the government script.
On camera, O'Neill told Koppel: ''You went to a country where all the elections are 100 percent elections, and you relied on people that were enemies of the United States'' for this "testimony." O'Neill repeatedly showed Koppel how the supposed eyewitnesses contradicted Kerry's own accounts in the past.
At first, the mainstream media had ignored the charges of the Swift Boat Veterans. Alison Mitchell, deputy national editor of the New York Times, admitted to Editor & Publisher that she's ''not sure that in an era of no-cable television we would even have looked into [the Swift Boat story].'' Cable television and the Internet allowed the public to examine both sides of the Swift Boat Veterans stories.
Moreover, in an Aug. 22 Washington Post story, reporter Michael Dobbs noted -- as O'Neill has -- that ''although Kerry campaign officials insist that they have published Kerry's full military records on their Web site (with the exception of medical records shown briefly to reporters earlier this year), they have not permitted independent access to his original Navy records.''
When Dobbs tried to get those records through a Freedom of Information request, he was told by the Navy Personnel Command that the full file -- consisting of at least 100 pages -- could not be released unless Kerry himself signed a Standard Form 180 granting permission. To this day, Kerry has not signed that release form.
In his story of one contested episode during Kerry's service in Vietnam, Dobbs found that the edge was toward Kerry's version, but that in Dobbs' extensive interviews, the accounts by both Kerry and his Swift Boat opponents ''contain significant flaws and factual errors.'' Only Kerry refused to be interviewed for the story.
Among the relatively few reporters who have engaged in substantial research on the contentions of both sides, the most painstakingly persistent has been Thomas Lipscomb in his reports in the Chicago Sun- Times and the New York Sun. Lipscomb has found much that credits O'Neill's charges, and so have I. Former publisher of Times Books and an old-fashioned journalist, Lipscomb is an insistent fact-checker, dogged until he's ready to file his story. Accordingly, a Lipscomb report on the front page of the Nov. 1 New York Sun begins:
''A former officer in the Navy's Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve has built a case that Senator Kerry was other than honorably discharged from the Navy by 1975. . . . The [subsequent 1978] 'honorable discharge' on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry's record.''
If I were still teaching journalism, I would have the students study Lipscomb's article as an example of the quality of research that complex stories require, but do not often get during the hurried reporting in the present 24-hour news cycle.
A few other reporters have taken the time to find out more about the so-called Bush operative John O'Neill. In both the Aug. 28 New York Times and Los Angeles Times, a careful reader would have discovered that O'Neill voted for Democrats Hubert Humphrey and, years later, Al Gore for president. And his favorite presidential candidate this year was John Edwards. Also, O'Neill has described George W. Bush as an ''empty suit.''
Yet, on Election Day, historian Douglas Brinkley -- who wrote a hagiographic book on Kerry, Tour of Duty, triumphantly told the Financial Times that the mainstream media have ''exposed Kerry's critics as liars and frauds.'' I would not take a course with that careless historian, but I respect O'Neill for his courage and his public service for having enabled many Americans to look much more closely as John Kerry's presidential qualifications. And, indeed, the Swift Boat Veterans did a lot to keep Kerry from the Oval Office.
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