2004-12-19 Bruce Kesler-John Kerry |
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On anti-Kerry Vietnam vets
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Bruce Kesler, who gave
permission for jewishsightseeing to reprint his op-ed in today’s San Diego
Union-Tribune, told us that he is only one of many anti-Kerry veterans who
are Jewish. Among others he listed
Steve Sherman of Houston, who leads the Special Forces Association, and Max
Friedman, a Justice Department employee in Washington D.C.
Mentioned beginning on page 13 in Unfit for Duty, the book by John O’Neill and Jerry Corsi that challenged Kerry’s Vietnam War record, Kesler had served as a Marine Corps sergeant in Vietnam between his graduation with a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and his post-graduate work at the University of Pennsylvania. Kesler grew up in an Orthodox home in Brooklyn and resided in
a number of cities during a corporate career that included posts with Olivetti,
Crown Zellerbach, and ITT. He moved
to San Diego County in 1989 where he started his own business.
Today, he is affiliated with three congregations across the Jewish
spectrum from Reform to Conservative to Orthodox. Independent of any letter that you might write to the San Diego Union-Tribune, Jewishsightseeing.com welcomes your comments on Kesler’s column printed below. You may send your comments to sdheritage@cox.net. * * *
The
revolt of the Vietnam veterans By Bruce Kesler By Bruce Kesler In 1971 I organized
Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. John O'Neill enlisted to counter the smears
of American servicemen in Vietnam. No one else spoke up for us, so we had to.
The mainstream press was more diverse than today and we got a spotty but honest
hearing. got a spotty but honest
hearing. Kerry's light dimmed then.
Americans got the message that a motley crew of exaggerators and frauds didn't
speak for Vietnam veterans. We said our piece and went home, back to our
diverse, nonpolitical lives. Meanwhile, anti-Vietnam
war protesters of the 1960s marched through academia and the media to claim its
power as their own. In 2004, they fought to defend their self-image by defaming
that of anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans. In February 2004,
anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans were shocked that he won the Democratic nomination.
The mainstream media blessed this coronation. No one except Kerry and his
advisers really wanted to revisit Vietnam, but they saw it as a way to appeal to
anti and pro-war voters. Kerry's Vietnam veteran
opponents hadn't been in contact for over 30 years, so we searched each other
out. Scott Swett, creator of wintersoldier.com that collected research on
Kerry's protest activities, was an invaluable connector among us, creating an
Internet political network that bound us together. While we knew all too well
about Kerry's anti-Vietnam protest period, we compared notes and surprised
ourselves at the extent of deceptions in Kerry's self-hagiography about being a
sterling war hero. It was intolerable that John Kerry brazenly glorified this
suspect record to centerpiece his few months as a junior officer 35 years ago as
qualification to lead the United States in this most challenging time since the
Cold War. The liberal media
portrayed anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans as a long-planned, far-right funded
conspiracy of liars. That's far, far from the truth. The real story is like the
Minutemen, rising from peaceful lives to spontaneously come together to again
fight for the America we so deeply love. There was little or no
coordination, just mutual support, with each volunteer shooting from behind his
own tree in the same direction. We came to know each other on the field of our
revolt against the false image created by Kerry of himself in the media and the
false image Kerry was instrumental in painting of us and America. John O'Neill got off his
sickbed. He asked me whether I had the contacts and resources to lead as I did
in 1971, which I didn't, and he dug in his own pocket to get the Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth started. Vietnam veterans from every service, and Americans
from every walk of life, joined in and followed O'Neill into political combat. Early in the year a friend
with access to the Kerry campaign warned me it was digging for any kind of dirt
to destroy us. Contrary to the liberal media's story that we surprised Kerry in
August, he thought the mainstream media could succeed in ignoring and stifling
the Swift Boat veterans, and he had long planned a new smear campaign against
us. The surprise to the Kerry
camp and liberal press was that the new media did break through and that Vietnam
veterans could not be intimidated. In August, as reported by Newsweek, Kerry
operatives fed negative documents and talking points to the New York Times,
Washington Post and Boston Globe. Subsequent articles in those newspapers
reflected negatively on the Swiftees. With only one halting
exception, the mainstream media refused to investigate the sworn affidavits of
60 credible witnesses to Kerry's behavior, or to follow up on the abundance of
additional information given them. The New York Times repeatedly used
"unsubstantiated" as its adjective describing the Swift Boat veterans'
allegations without ever exerting its considerable power to investigate. Kerry wasn't pressured by
the mainstream media to reveal his full military records to resolve issues, nor
questioned as to what he was hiding. The mainstream media's zeal in chasing down
every scrap of trivia about Bush's service stands in sharp contrast. That alone
strongly suggested a liberal bias. This behavior by some of
the liberal media was purposeful. The survival of their favored candidate was
endangered by our truth and facts. As important, the self-image of many
reporters was endangered. Their myths of our pervasive evils in defending
Vietnamese freedom, and of their valiant memories of mounting school libraries'
ramparts, could not take the incongruence of exposure. In the campaign to
discredit anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans, some charged that we were reviving an old
vendetta. Actually, we had ignored Kerry until last February. Some charged that
we were refighting a cultural war from the '60s. Again, untrue. Many of us
smoked marijuana, rocked to the same songs, grew the same long hair. We're
Democrats, independents and Republicans. The true post mortem of
Kerry's defeat is simply the last hurrah of simple patriots, amateurishly but
fervently rising up and banding together, with few resources, to defeat the
mainstream media's boy and juggernaut. Polls and the election show we succeeded.
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