	Bob Hostetler > Writing

Repudiation: Past and Present

by Bob Hostetler

It was 1971. John Kerry had served his country in Vietnam and returned to the United States with multiple honors issued by his superiors.

But, as the Boston Globe reported on April 24, 1971, "John Kerry. . . threw his medals over the [White House] fence," saying, "I'm not doing this for any violent reasons, but for peace and justice, and to try to make this country wake up once and for all."

Later that year, in a November 6, 1971, interview with WRC-TV, he said that he and other protestors had decided to "renounce the symbols which this country gives," adding that he "gave back, I can't remember, six, seven, eight, nine." When the interviewer noted that Kerry's medals included the Bronze and Silver Stars and three Purple Hearts, Kerry said, "Well, and above that, I gave back my others."

So, according to the record (though he has vacillated on the issue many times since then), the twenty-seven-year-old veteran repudiated the honors his nation had conferred on him for his military service.

How things change.

Sometime in the last thirty-plus years, Kerry apparently UN-repudiated his former repudiation of those honors. There was no press release or television coverage, of course, but sometime before the July 2004 Democratic Convention, Senator Kerry and his party apparently decided all those honors were a good thing, something to be proud of, and something to run a presidential campaign on.

It's a good thing military honors aren't like citizenship, or Social Security benefits. I understand that when you repudiate those things, you don't just get to "take it all back" if you change your mind.

But, of course, Kerry's activism was over thirty years ago, and renouncing his military service (and then apparently un-renouncing it) has no bearing on what kind of president he would make. Right?

Sure. But what Candidate Kerry chooses not to repudiate-today-does.

Because, of course, everyone knows now (except perhaps those who get their news from CBS) that on April 22, 1971, Kerry also famously accused his fellow American servicemen in Vietnam of committing a myriad of war crimes. In testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he said, "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."

Understandably, many Vietnam vets felt impugned and betrayed by Kerry's comments. Some former POWs have said his testimony was used by their Communist captors to persuade them to confess to supposed war crimes. Some have formed Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, many of whom say they were driven to speak out (once Kerry seized the Democratic nomination) primarily by those 1971 comments before Congress.

To date, Kerry has never repudiated those statements. The medals, yes (albeit, later, no). But his blanket condemnation of his comrades-in-arms, no.

And there's the rub.

What kind of man would renounce his honorable military service…and yet stand by his since-discredited accusation of his brothers in arms? (Yes, Virginia, the discrediting of Kerry's testimony and post-war activism is one reason his campaign is happy to keep his anti-war book, The New Soldier, out of print…and out of sight). Not a man who's afraid to change his mind (he apparently did that when he reportedly posted his medals on his office wall, right?). Not a man who was misled or deceived by others in the radical Winter Soldier organization. Not a man who simply got carried away in his youthful enthusiasm or naiveté.

There are two possibilities, as far as I can make out: either he still believes wholeheartedly in that characterization of himself and his fellow vets as war criminals, or he knows better but figures it would not be politically expedient to recant his accusations now. In either case, that's not something that happened thirty years ago; it speaks to who John Kerry is today. It says volumes about the man who today aspires to be the next president of the United States.

This article appeared in the October 1, 2004 edition of the Hamilton Journal-News.

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