Boston
THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION will culminate tonight in Boston with John Kerry’s acceptance speech and a nine-minute mini-documentary that chronicles his life. The short film, produced by documentarian James Moll, will include film that Kerry shot during his time in Vietnam. The footage has long been the subject of controversy, with some members of Kerry’s unit alleging that the future senator captured the images with his political career in mind.
Those allegations will be featured in a forthcoming book, called Unfit for Command, that has raced up the Amazon.com bestseller list–from #1,318 to #2 in one day–after being prominently featured on the Drudge Report.
I’m uncomfortable with those charges. On the one hand, the Kerry campaign has chosen to make Vietnam an issue in this campaign; one could argue that this invites such scrutiny. And I have no problem with Kerry’s fellow soldiers airing their grievances, particularly about his painful (and some would say slanderous) words about the actions of his colleagues in Vietnam. Kerry no doubt painted with too broad a brush in describing the crimes committed by some soldiers in Vietnam. The resentment many veterans still harbor at Kerry’s antiwar rhetoric upon his return is understandable.
But for me, the bottom line is this: John Kerry served his country and deserves credit for doing so. So I woke up this morning intending to write a piece making that point. I retrieved an article written some two years ago by Bill Keller–then a columnist, now executive editor–of the New York Times. (Although the politics at the Times have not changed much since Keller took it over from Howell Raines, Keller is widely regarded as an insightful, fair-minded journalist.)
In a previous column Keller had, in his words, “mocked” Kerry for “pulling out a movie camera after a shootout in the Mekong Delta and re-enacting the exploit as if preening for campaign commercials to come.” Kerry’s staff protested that characterization and invited Keller to watch the film in question with Kerry. Keller did. And on September 7, 2002, he wrote that “the senator’s movies are not self-aggrandizing. Mr. Kerry is hardly in the film and never strikes so much as a heroic pose. These are the souvenirs of a 25-year-old guy sent to an exotic place on an otherworldly mission, who bought an 8-millimeter camera in the PX and shot a few hours of travelogue, most of it pretty boring if you didn’t live through it.”
Fair enough. But what struck me about the article–reading it today, hours before the film airs in at the convention and in millions of homes across the country–was something Kerry told Keller about the footage from Vietnam.
“I have no intention of using it.”
Here’s the entire one-sentence paragraph, as written by Keller:
Is this just another example of a Kerry flip-flop? The public record suggests it might be worse.
According to a July 29, 2002, article written by Andrew Miga of the Boston Herald, who was covering Kerry’s campaign for reelection to the Senate: “A slick 14-minute biographical campaign video that precedes his speeches features footage of his Vietnam days. He’s shown as a rifle-toting naval officer on patrol in the Mekong Delta.”
Was it the same footage Kerry later told Bill Keller he had “no intention” of using? It was, according to an account in the Washington Post on July 2, 2002: “There were scenes of a young, rifle-toting Kerry and of river patrols in Vietnam, some of the footage shot by Kerry himself, when he was a decorated young naval officer.”
At a veterans rally for Kerry on Monday, former Senator Max Cleland, himself a highly decorated Vietnam, spoke in glowing terms about Kerry’s service.
“John Kerry has already, in many ways, defined himself many years ago, when there were no cameras watching,” he said.
But the cameras were, of course, watching. And whatever Kerry’s “intentions,” the world will see what they captured tonight.
Stephen F. Hayes is a staff writer at The Weekly Standard.
