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Winter Soldiers Investigation
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In '71 Antiwar Words, a Complex View of Kerry
By TODD S. PURDUM

Published: February 28, 2004


ASHINGTON, Feb. 27 — On April 22, 1971, John Kerry, a decorated 27-year-old Navy veteran of two tours in Vietnam, electrified the Senate Foreign Relations Committee with his passionate testimony against the war, and with tales from fellow veterans about "the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do" in Southeast Asia.

Summarizing the accounts of American soldiers he had heard at an antiwar conference in Detroit weeks earlier, Mr. Kerry said the men told how "they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam."

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As both a veteran and anguished opponent of the Vietnam War, Mr. Kerry has spent years working to square the circle of a conflict that divided his generation, and the nation. Now, his old words have come back to haunt his presidential campaign, as conservative backers of President Bush question whether Mr. Kerry is "a proud war hero or angry antiwar protester," as National Review Online recently asked.

The full picture is complex. In 1970 and 1971, Mr. Kerry was among the most prominent spokesmen for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, whose major patrons included the actress Jane Fonda, and which later staged takeovers of public buildings and walkouts from Veterans Administration hospitals. But when Mr. Kerry was involved, contemporaries recount, he often took steps to moderate the group's actions, believing it was better — for it, and him — to work within the political system that he ultimately sought to join. When he organized the mass march on Washington that resulted in his Senate testimony, Ms. Fonda was nowhere to be seen.

"I think Kerry made a big effort not to have me invited to participate in that," Ms. Fonda said in a telephone interview this week. "Because I think he wanted the organization to distance itself from me, that I was too radical or something." She added: "I went to North Vietnam in July of 1972, so it was not even `Hanoi Jane' yet, but I was still considered a lightning rod and radical. He knew that they had to get the attention of Congress, and he didn't want any unnecessary baggage to come with them."

Asked for comment, Mr. Kerry replied through his campaign spokeswoman, Stephanie Cutter, that he had made an effort to limit the protest to veterans.

For many Democrats, part of Mr. Kerry's appeal lies in the very fact that he both served in, then opposed the war, giving him the cachet of gallant warrior and principled dissident.

But many critics see Mr. Kerry's words as impugning the honor of all who served in Vietnam, and in recent weeks, they have circulated a picture of him seated a few rows behind Ms. Fonda at an antiwar rally in Valley Forge, Pa., and taken pains to note that she helped sponsor the "Winter Soldier Investigation" in Detroit, to which Mr. Kerry referred in his Senate testimony.

Official Republican spokesmen have largely refrained from attacking Mr. Kerry's antiwar activities, focusing instead on what they say is his failure to adequately support national security programs over the years. "I have not highlighted it, but it is public testimony," the Republican National chairman, Ed Gillespie, said this week. "People have talked about it."

Mr. Kerry was so concerned that the April 1971 protest in Washington be nonviolent and legal that he faced criticism from fellow members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, who were growing more radical. He opposed the group's plan to sue President Richard M. Nixon to end the war, and in November 1971, he left it, citing "personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy."

In January 1972, after the group's protesters took over the Statue of Liberty, Mr. Kerry said in an interview with The New York Times that he had left to work on "electoral politics" and that the departure of moderates like himself had contributed to the organization's shift toward militancy. While the organization claimed 20,000 members, he said, it actually had fewer than 1,000 active participants.

Later in 1972, when protesters from the group including Ron Kovic, the disabled veteran later played by Tom Cruise in "Born on the Fourth of July," disrupted the Republican Convention, Mr. Kerry watched them on television.

"There was a lot of resentment against John because he wasn't more radical," recalled Bobby Muller, a friend from those days who now heads the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, recalled.

Mr. Muller, a paraplegic from a bullet wound that severed his spinal cord, added: "Most of the guys in V.V.A.W., quite frankly, were former enlisted guys, and represented, visually, a counterculture presentation. Kerry would wear a coat and tie."

That is not to say that Mr. Kerry's antiwar actions did not arouse intense passions, then and now. For example, Mr. Kerry has been criticized for throwing away only the ribbons representing his Silver and Bronze Stars and three Purple Hearts, while keeping his actual medals and tossing out someone else's medals during the most dramatic part of the protest march outside the Capitol.

In his first campaign for Congress in 1972, Mr. Kerry was bitterly attacked for having published a book, "The New Soldier," whose cover showed a group of bearded veterans holding the American flag upside down in a kind of antiwar Iwo Jima pose. The Kerry camp tried to explain the flag's position as the international signal of distress, but he lost soundly and the defeat scarred him. In an interview last fall, Mr. Kerry seemed at one point to suggest that he thought his antiwar activities had doomed his political career.

It is an open question whether Mr. Kerry's past will hurt him now, but his words to the Senate remain a special lightning rod, especially because he described soldiers' actions as "not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command."

Douglas Brinkley, the author of "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War," a sympathetic new book based on Mr. Kerry's wartime diaries and letters, described that aspect of Mr. Kerry's Senate testimony as "the low moment of Kerry's week of protest."

The Detroit meeting had drawn relatively little press notice, Mr. Brinkley said, and Mr. Kerry and other organizers of the march on Washington were determined to draw attention to their cause. The idea of American soldiers engaged in brutal acts was much in the news; Lt. William L. Calley Jr. had just been convicted of the murder of Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.

But Gary Solis, a former Marine lieutenant colonel, Vietnam veteran and expert on war crimes who is an adjunct professor at the Georgetown University Law Center here, said Mr. Kerry had made a grave error.

"Sure it's true," Mr. Solis said. "Sure there were people raped, ears cut off and so on. Each one of the things that he mentioned happened, in some cases I know, and in others I'm confident. But when you put them all together in one sentence and say this was well known at every level of command, it impugns, it seems to me, everyone who fought over there and it gives the impression that everyone who fought over there was a war criminal and that's just not true."

Mr. Kerry concluded his 1971 testimony by demanding, "Where are the leaders of our country?" and his spokeswoman, Ms. Cutter, said: "Clearly, in his testimony, he defended these soldiers and their actions as the fault of the war, not the warriors."

Some of the testimony at the Winter Soldier Investigation was later discredited, and Mr. Kerry has since said he did not witness atrocities.

A recent poll by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey found that Mr. Kerry's antiwar activity was mostly a concern to people who had already made up their minds against him, just as Mr. Bush's wartime service in the Texas Air National Guard was mostly a concern of those who already opposed him.

But for better or worse, Vietnam retains a powerful hold on American life.

"These are wounds that take a long time to heal, and they're wounds that the right wing, in my opinion, doesn't really want to heal," said Ms. Fonda, who has no recollection of meeting Mr. Kerry in the 1970's but was impressed by his speeches then. "I think most of the people who are going to vote for Bush were never going to vote for Kerry anyway," she added. "And the other people aren't going to be affected by this, `Oh, he was connected to Hanoi Jane.' "



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