U.S. News: 2004's Swift Boat Vets One of ‘Dirtiest Campaigns Ever’

In an issue dominated by rehashing early and modern American campaign history, U.S. News & World Report’s January 28/February 4 issue devoted sympathetic pages to the losing campaigns of two Massachusetts liberals, John Kerry and Michael Dukakis. The cover promised stories on "The Dirtiest Campaigns Ever," and inside the "Down & Dirty" section included reporter Danielle Knight’s story charging the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made allegations about Kerry’s medals had "little or no merit," according to...The New York Times. In an interview with reporter Bret Schulte, Dukakis claimed that it’s all his fault we’re under the worst administration he’s ever lived under, since he failed to beat "old man" Bush in 1988, but he claimed he was the victim of negative ads that he said he failed to rebut.

The Kerry article by Danielle Knight was headlined "Vietnam Vets’ Ad Torpedoes Kerry Image." Knight recounted Kerry marching to the stage of the 2004 Democratic convention declaring "I’m reporting for duty," and noted that the group calling themselves the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth took exception to his memories of combat bravery and his "1971 Senate testimony alleging American atrocities in Vietnam." The ads, reported Knight, raised questions with independent voters who knew little about Kerry. But anyone watching TV in the first half of 2004 saw Kerry repeatedly exploiting his military service as a trump card against President Bush. Then Knight explained how the whole campaign went "viral" and was factually challenged:

Initially, few ads were placed, and they got scant attention, but as soon as the Drudge Report, Fox News, and other media heard about them, the ads quickly dominated election coverage. In the age of the 24-hour cable news cycle, "things got viral very quickly," says Allan Lichtman, a political history professor at American University.

Fact check. Within weeks, news organizations, including the New York Times, said that the group's claims about Kerry's medals had little or no merit (his opposition to the war proved more problematic). "The allegations were bogus, but that didn't matter," says Lichtman. "The public isn't out there fact-checking."

Here’s what Knight does not explain. Professor Lichtman is not some nonpartisan professor. He ran as a Democrat for U.S. Senate in 2006. Knight is correct that the New York Times reported in its news pages that the charges against Kerry’s combat stories were "unsubstantiated." (Clay Waters did extensive work on that at TimesWatch.) But is the New York Times any less partisan than the Senate candidate from Maryland? The first Times story was more focused on probing the connections between the anti-Kerry vets and the Republican establishment than it was on the veracity of Kerry’s combat tales.

The entire controversy over one March 1969 incident – the one on the Bay Hap River used consistently by the Kerry campaign and starring Kerry colleague Jim Rassmann – came down to a he said, he said debate. Kerry’s version became the Navy record. Other vets who were there that day denied there was any gunfire, always the most dramatic part of the Kerry story. So who wins the "fact check" on recounting that day? Who proves the other side wrong, as if someone had a movie camera?

Knight’s fractured history also excludes incidents where Kerry’s stories didn’t meet a fact check. Even Kerry’s historical stenographer Douglas Brinkley didn’t support his wild tale of being in Cambodia in Christmas of 1968, fuming at President Nixon. Kerry also claimed he threw his medals away in a Capitol Hill protest – but the medals he tossed were actually someone else’s.

Then the real whining set in, as a Kerry aide implausibly claimed that the Kerry campaign couldn’t respond because they had accepted public funding. But what about fighting the charges in the news media for free? In reality, the candidate himself tried not to even respond or rebut the charges for several weeks in August of 2004. The Swift Vets group first aired their charges in May, but the major media tried hard to ignore them for months. But Knight recycles the implausible:

But Kerry didn't refute the charges immediately. Tad Devine, a senior campaign adviser, blames the decision to accept public funding, a move that prohibited the campaign from raising additional private funds. Cash spent rebutting the Swift Boat ads would have meant less for fighting Bush. Once the story ballooned, Kerry defended his record by rounding up a group of supportive veterans and launching counter-ads. But the damage was done.

The Dukakis interview was headlined "The Photo Op That Tanked." Bret Schulte lamented "The photo of Dukakis with a dopey grin and a huge helmet aboard a tank was turned into an ad ridiculing him as soft on defense. And the story of Willie Horton, a Massachusetts prisoner who killed a woman while on furlough, was used as a racially charged accusation that Dukakis was no crime fighter." His chat with Dukakis was friendly, and Dukakis was still beating his breast:

How would you describe your legacy?
If I had beaten the old man, we'd never heard of the kid, and we'd be in a lot better shape these days. So it's all my fault.

So, you consider the presidency of George W. Bush your doing?
We'd never be in this mess if I had done a better job. This has been the worst national administration I've ever lived under....

Of all the attacks lobbed at you, what hurt your candidacy the most?
I'm the last guy to tell you that. Certainly the Willie Horton and soft-on-crime stuff. And since the attacks were coming from a guy whose home city, Houston, had a homicide rate four times the homicide rate of Boston, it was inexcusable that I let him get away with this. But I did.

What were you thinking at the time?
There had been a whole lot of polarization in the Reagan years. I thought people were sick of that. But the lesson of '88 is you can't sit there mute while the other guy is pounding you with stuff that's sheer hypocrisy. Bush was part of an administration that had a furlough program that made ours look like the toughest program in America.

What ran through your mind when you saw the Horton ad?
You don't have a lot of time to sit and look at a television. And, a point of fact is that after working 16-hour campaign days, it's the last thing you want to do.

Some analysts believe the image of you in the tank did you in.
That didn't beat me. If we had run a decent national campaign, that wouldn't have had any effect.

Bush used that image in an ad describing you as soft on defense. The irony is that you supported a buildup in conventional weapons like tanks.
I was at the tank factory to make that point, obviously. Now, should I have been in the tank? Probably not, in retrospect. But these days when people ask me, "Did you get here in a tank?" I always respond by saying, "No, and I've never thrown up all over the Japanese prime minister." But, you know, things happen.