What You Don’t Know About John Kerry

With his win in Iowa, Sen. John Kerry could be on his way to the White House. But most Americans are unaware of the real Kerry.

Here are facts and quotations that reveal the character of the new Democrat leader.

# Denouncing America with ‘Hanoi’ Jane: Although Wesley Clark and others have attacked former front-runner Howard Dean as a draft-dodging ski bum, Kerry is far more complex than the simple war hero he portrays himself as.

He became a celebrated organizer for one of America's most extreme appeasement groups, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He consorted with the likes of “Hanoi” Jane Fonda and Ramsey Clark, Lyndon Johnson’s radical former attorney general.

He attended a seminar bankrolled by Fonda in Detroit in February 1971. Watching 125 self-proclaimed Vietnam veterans testify at a Howard Johnson’s about atrocities allegedly committed by U.S. forces, the man who would be president later said he found the accounts shocking and irrefutable.

Dubbed “The Winter Soldier Investigation,” the protest attracted minimal media attention, according to the Los Angeles Times, because Fonda insisted it be held in the remote Michigan city rather than the less “authentic” Washington, D.C.

Still, the event gave Kerry an idea for a protest that was sure to be a media smash, and he immediately set out to organize one of the most confrontational protests of the war.

Operation Dewey Canyon III began on April 18, 1971, when nearly 1,000 Vietnam veterans and people claiming to be veterans gathered on Washington’s Mall for what they called “a limited incursion into the country of Congress.”

The group staged mock firefights on the steps of the Capitol and Supreme Court and defied U.S. Park Police after the Department of Justice issued an injunction barring it from camping on the Mall.

# Those evil American soldiers: Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971, Kerry claimed that U.S. soldiers had “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, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam.”

# ‘We are not the best’: In his testimony, Kerry claimed there was no communist threat and said: “In 1970 at West Point Vice President Agnew said ‘some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse,’ and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion, and hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country ….”

U.S. Veteran Dispatch noted in 1996: “Kerry's testimony, it should be noted, occurred while some of his fellow Vietnam veterans were known by the world to be enduring terrible suffering as prisoners of war in North Vietnamese prisons. Kerry was a supporter of the ‘People's Peace Treaty,’" a supposed ‘people's’ declaration to end the war, reportedly drawn up in communist East Germany. It included nine points, all of which were taken from Viet Cong peace proposals at the Paris peace talks as conditions for ending the war.”

# Throw as I say, not as I do: On that same day he led members of VVAW in a protest during which they threw their medals and ribbons over a fence in front of the U.S. Capitol.

Kerry later admitted the medals he threw were not his. To this day they hang on the wall of his office.

# Communist stooge: The communist Daily World delightedly published photos of him speaking to demonstrators and boasted that the marchers displayed a banner depicting a portrait of Communist Party leader Angela Davis, on record stating, “I am dedicated to the overthrow of your system of government and your society,” the New American recalled in May 2003.

“By frequently participating in VVAW’s demonstrations, Kerry found himself marching alongside what the Boston Herald Traveler identified as ‘revolutionary Communists.’ While noting that known Reds had openly organized these events, the December 12, 1971 Herald Traveler reported the presence of an ‘abundance of Vietcong flags, clenched fists raised in the air, and placards plainly bearing legends in support of China, Cuba, the USSR, North Korea and the Hanoi government.’"

Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry says: “As a national leader of VVAW, Kerry campaigned against the effort of the United States to contain the spread of Communism. He used the blood of servicemen still in the field for his own political advancement by claiming that their blood was being shed unnecessarily or in vain.

“Under Kerry's leadership, VVAW members mocked the uniform of United States soldiers by wearing tattered fatigues marked with pro-communist graffiti. They dishonored America by marching in demonstrations under the flag of the Viet Cong enemy.”

Sen. John McCain revealed that his North Vietnamese captors had used reports of Kerry-led protests to taunt him and his fellow prisoners. Retired General George S. Patton III angrily noted that Kerry’s actions had “given aid and comfort to the enemy.”

In recent years when Kerry has exploited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial for photo opportunities on Veterans Day, some veterans, still outraged by his betrayal, have turned their backs on him.


# The book he doesn’t want you to see: When Kerry ran for election to the U.S. House of Representative in 1972, “he found it necessary to suppress reproduction of the cover picture appearing on his own book, The New Soldier. His political opponent pointed out that it depicted several unkempt youths crudely handling an American flag to mock the famous photo of the U.S. Marines at Iwo Jima,” according to Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry.

“Suddenly, copies of the book became unavailable and even disappeared from libraries. But the Lowell (Mass.) Sun said of the type of person shown on its cover: ‘These people spit on the flag, they burn the flag, they carry the flag upside down, [and] they all but wipe their noses with it in their efforts to show their contempt for everything it still stands for,’” the New American reported.

Even today it is hard to find this infamous photo and book.

# Friendly with the enemy: Kerry’s fondness for Vietnam’s communist dictatorship, one of the most oppressive in the world, continues.

As chairman of the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, created in 1991 to investigate reports that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam, Kerry badgered the panel into voting that no American servicemen remained in Vietnam.

“[N]o one in the United States Senate pushed harder to bury the POW/MIA issue, the last obstacle preventing normalization of relations with Hanoi, than John Forbes Kerry,” noted U.S. Veteran Dispatch.

“But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992,” reported the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity, “when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.”

The “odd coincidence,” according to FrontPageMagazine.com, involved a deal worth $905 million.

Jeff Jacoby, the token conservative columnist at the Boston Globe, notes that Kerry continues his apologia for Vietnam's never-ending atrocities. "Far from taking the lead on the Vietnam Human Rights Bill, he has prevented it from coming to a vote. He claims that making an issue of Hanoi's repression would be counterproductive."

Kerry is also a fan of China’s communist dictatorship. “On May 19, 1994, five years after Tiananmen Square, Kerry spoke on the Senate floor against linking China's Most Favored Nation trade status to its human rights record,” Slate reported.

Kerry said: “China is the strongest military power in Asia. We need China's cooperation. We cannot afford to adopt a cold-war kind of policy that merely excludes and pushes China away.”

Limiting China's MFN status “would make us a bit player in a production of enormous proportions. We possess no stick, including MFN, which can force China to embrace internationally recognized human rights and freedoms.”

# More extreme than Hillary and Kucinich: Among the White House wannabes, long-shot Rep. Dennis Kucinich has the reputation of holding the most left-wing congressional voting record. In fact, this “honor” goes to Kerry.

According to American Conservative Union, Kerry has a lifetime rating of 6 percent, compared to 13 for the demolished Rep. Dick Gephardt, 14 for Sen. John Edwards, 15 for Kucinich and 19 for Sen. Joe Lieberman.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Tom Daschle score 13 percent. Only the likes of Sens. Teddy Kennedy and Barbara Boxer have more left-wing records than Kerry. In contrast, Sen. John Breaux, one of the upper chamber’s few remaining moderate Democrats, has a 46.

# Drive as I say, not as I do: Like Al Gore and other self-described environmentalists, Kerry has a radical agenda that would devastate the U.S. economy in favor of the likes of communist China, yet he enjoys the gas-guzzling modern conveniences that greens denounce. Kerry, a delegate to the environment-destroying Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, left-wing activist Teresa Heinz, the multimillionaire widow of GOP Sen. John Heinz), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000, has attacked President Bush for withdrawing from the anti-U.S. Kyoto Protocol. This treaty, which then-President Bill Clinton had signed, would impose severe restrictions on the United States but not Third World polluters that already enjoy huge trade surpluses with the U.S.

However, although Kerry spouts the party line on anti-U.S. ecopolicy, he doesn’t like to practice what he preaches. Kerry was humiliated in April 2002 when photographed attending a rally against energy independence and then heading back to his SUV, the symbol of all that is evil to self-described greens.

# Bone to pick: Bush-hating conspiracy theorists find it alarming that the president, like his father, was a member of the secretive Skull and Bones society at Yale University. Another alum of this club: John Kerry.

# Get out your wallets: One reason Kerry and Edwards did well in Iowa: Losers Dean and Gephardt admitted they'd repeal all of the president's tax relief. However, although Kerry has taken credit for middle-class tax cuts, child tax credit and relief of the marriage penalty, he voted against them, GOP.com disclosed.

"Kerry will have to expend an awful lot of time and money to convince people that he's not the classic Massachusetts liberal," Larry Sabato, a respected political analyst at the University of Virginia, told the Associated Press in December 2002. "And that's going to be tough, because mainly he is."

# Waffling on Iraq: Kerry has the tough job of wooing Howard Dean’s anti-war Democrats despite his support of the war in Iraq. His favorite tactic, claiming the president outfoxed him, doesn’t hold up to scrutiny.

On “Meet the Press” in late August, Tim Russert played a tape of Kerry addressing the Senate in October 2002 with a hard-line speech declaring Iraq “capable of quickly producing weaponizing” of biological weapons that could be delivered against “the United States itself.”

Kerry insisted: “That is exactly the point I’m making. We were given this information by our intelligence community.”

However, as columnist Robert Novak noted, “as a senator, Kerry had access to the National Intelligence Estimate that was skeptical of Iraqi capability. Being tricky may no longer be as effective politically as it once was.”

No doubt Dean, Lieberman, Clark and other rivals will now use these and other details to do to Kerry what the Democrats did to Dean.

While I have other problems with Kerry, the actions he took after serving in the illegal and dirty Vietnam War helped to save hundreds if not thousands more American lives due for the Nixonian ritual slaughter which would have occurred if noit for the American retreat in '75, not to mention countless Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Laotian lives.

The specter of death which the above poster tempts and apparently worships, and whose visage is most recognizable in colonialist style wars, is a false god but one these idiots will follow nonetheless. This insanity to drag us all along to their hellish firestorm is un-American and pathetic.

"This insanity to drag us all along to their hellish firestorm is un-American and pathetic."

Since when has it been considered "un-American" to attempt to unite the people behind a common cause, one, mind you, that the majority of Americans already support? Or to point out the hypocrisy of anti-war politics?

But yet, in your eyese it must certainly be patriotic to piss on the flag, or to write a book about how you'd enjoy doing so.

Your flashy language really ultimately only reduces to a half-hearted attempt to denounce the author as disloyal when in reality, you're taking the truth and inverting it. Typical really.

Once again on indymedia: Day is proclaimed to be night.

Explain how bankrolling Hanoi Jane Fonda helped to "save American lives"? I've really got to hear this one!

You incredible morons.> hypocrisy of anti-war politics?<
hypocrisy of the new privateering class of cut throats. But now they wear ties and suits. Worthless babble from the riechtards.
War may be a tool to keep the property class in power but only heartless fiends would promote the practice.

More lamenting from the washed up commies. Imagine that! A commie calling the bourgeoisie "heartless fiends"! That's worth a chuckle. The Soviet Union went tits up commie. Get over it. We won, they lost. Such is life. No get back to work. Your boss owns "the mean of production", not you. He ain't payin' ya good money to sit there yappin' on the internet all day neither!

Read the Constitution you right wing dolts! Rewriting history in your slimy fashion will not take away my, or anyone elses First Amendment rights.

You worship death. Are you afraid even to name your god?

Pathetic.

Fuck the Vietnam War!

Go ahead! Throw your vote away!! HAR!!!

Read it. There's a nice little blurb in it talks 'bout dealing with treasonists. Last I heard, there were more than enough eye witness acounts to bring Hanoi Jane and her affiliators up on charges. I imagine, if one chose, a stretch could be made to include Senator Kerry in the indictment...

Kerry and Jane Fonda tried to save Vietamese and American lives. Johnson and Nixon were ready to throw them away in a bloodbath.
By the way, the Boston Herald-American was a vicious right-wing rag. Hardly anyone in Boston read it - it was for affluent, WASP Republicans in suburbia.

Exactly how was that? By cavorting with the enemy? By riding on VC gunboats that routinely fired upon American planes? By coming home and proclaiming she brought great news from "our fellow Communist brothers and sisters"? By accepting slips of papers with scribbled social security numbers on them, from war prisoners the VC paraded out for display, to show how humanely they were being treated, and then by turning those desparate attempts of communication over to the VC captors, resulting in the beating and death of numorous American war prisoners? By propagandizing for the North Vietnamese on radio? By calling American veterans "baby killers"? Or by ultimately appologizing for her ridiculous and traitorour behavior during that era?

Please tell us Meyer London...exactly how did Jane Fonda save even a single American life? How did John Kerry? Feel free to cite a specific example. There are hundreds of accounts of how she got people beaten and killed. Doubtful there's even a single account of how she's EVER saved ANYONE'S life........

Kerry, Fonda, and thousands of other people helped to build a massive anti-war movement in this country that finally involved millions of people. The pressure this movement maintained on the Nixon Administration, combined with the battlefield successes of the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army almost certainly ended the war sooner than it would otherwise ended and thus saved Vietnamese and American lives. What is so hard to understand about that?

Top pentagon planners were told to prepare for a ten year war with 60,000 killed a week after JFK was assasanated.

I guess we all owe a debt of gratitude to Hanoi Jane for pulling us out of the fire, once again. I'm sure the thousands of Vietnam vets still alive today are all shedding a tear right now for Ms. Jane's unselfish acts of patriotism.

Wars come and wars go regardless of the efforts of people like Hanoi John & Jane. They are merely the opportunists that take credit mobilizing the masses, when in fact the masses self-mobilize when they see fit, with little help from scumbags like the Hanoi twins.

Even a cursory review of history reveals this to be true. Who do you give credit to for ending any number of mankind's thousands of wars throughout history? I guess Jane Fonda saved us from ourselves on those bloodlettings too...

Name a single solitary battlefield success that the VC inflicted upon American troops! You must be high. The VC NEVER...I REPEAT ... NEVER defeated our forces on the battlefield.

And the day American forces pulled out of that cesspool was the day that armpit of the world lost the war itself, not us. Look at the place today. That place was and IS lost to the world, and probably will always be lost.

It is a crying shame that even a single American life was spent on that crappy part of the world. That war should have never happened, I agree with you there. But it was fought in good faith by those men that shed their blood, and I for one refuse to piss all over there memories like you sick and twisted miscreants.

The lowest circle of Dante's hell is reserved for each of you...

"The war in Vietnam was a defeat for the United States in its fight against Communism. However, it was not lost by the American fighting men but by the Politicians and the yellow journalism of the American media."

"The Tet Offensive of 1968 was a major defeat for the NVA and VC. They would have probably sought for peace, if it were not for the yellow journalism of the U.S. media. The media proclaimed the defeat as a major victory for the NVA and VC. The turmoil that proceeded this reporting caused President Johnson to make a decision not to run for a second term and increase the demand to pull out American troops from Vietnam. The reporting also gave the leaders in North Vietnam hope in a victory, reaffirming that their will is stronger then the United States."

Obviously, you know nothing about military history. The number of large scale battles won, like the number of casualties, often bears little relation to who wins a particular war. I hope I'm not breaking something new to you , but the British won most of the battles in the Revolutionary War in America, and Napoleon won most of the battles in Spain and Russia. But who won those wars in the end?
The Vietnamese won by inflicting an unacceptable number of losses on the US over a number of years, and by demoralizing the invading troops, many of whom were drug addicts and some of whom were outright fraternizers with the "enemy" by 1970. This, combined with the anti-war movement in the US (which was hardly spontaneous but required an enormous amount of work to put together) brought and end to the imperialist adventure in southeast Asia.

Because there was sufficient domestic pressure to force the US to withdraw. It's hard to blame people for not seeing the bigger picture, but it was still the right thing to do and the US would easily have won given another year or two.

Actually the anti-war forces were mounting in the American heart land.., as the sons came back crazy, injured or dead.
The police weren't militarized enough or the public conditioned to overt violence against its own citizens yet. The media wasn't in the pocket so deep with the military in those days either.
Embedded reporters indeed. A nearly virtual honeymoon.
Slurping noises going on all the time with the moans of pleasure for those high salaries.

"Obviously, you know nothing about military history. The number of large scale battles won, like the number of casualties, often bears little relation to who wins a particular war. I hope I'm not breaking something new to you , but the British won most of the battles in the Revolutionary War in America, and Napoleon won most of the battles in Spain and Russia. But who won those wars in the end?"

The British surrendered entire armies to the colonials during the Revolutionary War. For instance, on October 17th, 1777 General John Burgoyne surrendered an entire British Army which assisted in moving the French into the dispute after news of the victory reached Paris. On October 9th, 1781 General Cornwallis got his ass handed to him at Yorktown, where he ultimately surrendered to General George Washington. These are the ultimate reasons the Brits lost the Revolutionary War. Nothing like these blatant ass-kickings were EVER inflicted upon the American forces in Vietnam.

Much the same analysis can be applied to your citation of the Napoleonic wars.

The U.S. left Vietnam not because we lost any battles or the war. We left because ultimately it was collectively decided that the war was not worth winning, in the cost of lives and dollars. It's like haggling over a three-legged bird dog. You offer five dollars and the guy wants ten. At some point you walk away. Fuck him. Let him keep the lame animal.

"The Vietnamese won ... by demoralizing the invading troops, many of whom were drug addicts and some of whom were outright fraternizers with the "enemy" by 1970. "

How do you live with yourself, day after day tearing down the memories and souls of those that believe in this life and in freedom enough to fight and die for it? Weaving your own tapestries of prevarications and flying them high like a corpse on the pike of Vlad the Impaler? You're nothing less than a disturbing person. Are you a pacifist? I don't doubt you can answer that question in the affirmative without branding yourself a hypocrite, but then again you routinely and casually demonstrate your lack of shame, so I'd not put it past you...

There is no shame in depicting history as it actually happened. The shame lies upon those who sent so many to their deaths in that horrific war and on those who supported it to the very end - defeat.

...Meyer London is an admitted Marxist.

So that automatically means he has only a nodding acquaintance with history.

What I can't understand is why he's not ashamed of the fact.

nonanarchist

A failure following a failed dogma. He's a f***ing disgrace to the man and woman who raised him (unless he grew up ina an orphanage which still would not excuse his contemptible lies).

...he can serve as a bad example.

"Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Marxists..."

nonanarchist

P.S.: We'd better be careful. He's gonna put us on his "list" for "re-education" after the Revolution.

At least spell my name right, Meyer.

n o n a n a r c h i s t

If you repel the invader and secure your borders, then, technically, you've won the war. The VC did that. The fact that they went Commie and that we wouldn't trade with them would support this assessment, no?

Had America won the war, we would have occupied the nation and reconstructed it, and installed a leader of some sort. That's what we've done in all our other victories. Since this didn't happen, we can surmise that we did not win the Vietnam war.

One thing we learned in that war, is that you can have some awesome kill ratios and still lose. Moreover, mass killing on the scale of Vietnam acutally causes mass PTSD and significant demoralization on the part of the soldiers doing the killing.

The truth about Vietnam will be forgotten, I think, for a long time, just like the Philippine-American War and its horrors. (The *what*? The link has more info.) Just like the Civil War and it's bloodshed (that's only been revisited in the past decade).