In an interview with the Nieman Lab this week, New York Times editor Dean Baquet was asked about how the media are struggling to cover Donald Trump. He noted that this is not the first time during the course of a presidential campaign that the media has had hard time combat untruths, except that his answer was rather revealing:
Ok. Let me stop Baquet right there. It’s worth discussing the Swift Boat allegations, and how this came to be media shorthand for dishonest smears. Over the course of his 2004 presidential campaign, Kerry was forced to admit significant details of his service in Vietnam weren’t true—recall his claim that he spent Christmas of 1968 in Cambodia where U.S. troops were not supposed to be and “I have that memory which is seared — seared — in me.”
Enter the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. While GOP political operatives did eventually get involved with the group, the truth is that the organization was started organically because his fellow swift boat vets were genuinely upset about the way that he characterized his service. In January 2004, Admiral Roy Hoffman read Douglas Brinkley’s campaign biography, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, and was incensed. In the book, Kerry basically libeled Hoffman, saying officer in charge of the swift-boat mission, had “a genuine taste for the more unsavory aspects of warfare” and sought “splashy victories in the Mekong Delta” to get promoted. Hoffman starts working phones asking other swift boaters about Kerry. (Brinkley had to make significant changes to the paperback edition to clarify things, and though he doesn’t mention it in the book, publicly repeated Kerry’s untrue claim he was in Cambodia.) Now Kerry was already infamous among Vietnam vets for his “winter soldier testimony” in 1971 where Kerry testified before Congress, sans any corroborating evidence, about soldiers who “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 fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war.”
Needless to say, fellow Vietnam vets did not appreciate this characterization especially since it was obvious that Kerry was using his notoriety as a veteran turned anti-war activist to jump start his political career at the time. As for his military record, Kerry received three Purple Hearts in less than four months in country without missing a single day of active duty due to his injuries, a feat that is surely unprecedented. Given all this, organized opposition from Vietnam veterans had to be expected, and a majority of Kerry’s contemporaneous swift boat commanders came out against him publicly.
Now this brings us to the most controversial matters. Did Swift Vets get a bit over their skis questioning the circumstances that earned Kerry his Silver Star and Bronze Star? Well, there are definitely arguments to be made that they did. However, the media’s attempts to supposedly prove the legitimacy of his Silver Star citation were pretty incredible. At one point, Nightline sent a camera crew to Vietnam to find witnesses to back Kerry’s version of events. ABC news was actually offering up witnesses in a Communist dictatorship—one that honored Kerry’s antiwar actions in its national museums—and saying they were as credible as American veterans that served in the Vietnam war with Kerry.
As for his Bronze Star, one of the Swift Boat Veteran for Truth leaders questioning Kerry’s medal was Larry Thurlow, who served alongside Kerry the day that he got his Bronze Star. Thurlow, who also won a bronze star that day, swore an affadavit that no one was under fire from the Viet Cong the day Kerry is said to have heroically pulled Lt. James Rassmann out of the water. The Washington Post later obtained official documents from the Navy contradicting Thurlow and confirming Kerry’s story that he was under fire. Thurlow, who apparently never read his own bronze star citation, never wavered in his story that they weren’t under fire. “My personal feeling was always that I got the award for coming to the rescue of the boat that was mined. This casts doubt on anybody’s awards. It is sickening and disgusting,” he told the Post. He added that he would consider his own award “fraudulent” if coming under enemy fire was why he got it.
In a vaccuum, this doesn’t look great, but Kerry receiving three purple hearts in four months is already suspect, and Kerry has a demonstrable record of lying about other details of his service in a way Thurlow and the other Swift Boat vets did not. Further, it’s not the first time he’s had fellow sailors call him out—two men who served with him at the time publicly denied his claim they ever went into Cambodia. And the media certainly didn’t dwell on whether it had been appropriate of Kerry to paint Vietnam vets as sadistic rapists or claim that the distinguished admiral in charge of the Swift Boat mission in Vietnam was encouraging excess violence. Instead, the media lost their minds trying to destroy the Swift Boat vets. On MSNBC interview in 2004, host Lawrence O’Donnell screamed that Swift Vet spokesman and Vietnam vet John O’Neill was a liar — 46 times in 11 minutes.
And so we have the editor of the New York Times citing the Swift Vets as “just false” in the process of wondering why Americans don’t trust the media in the Age of Trump. The answer is that media organizations such as the Times eroded all their credibility trying to elect previous Democratic candidates by telling readers things were definitively false when readers damn well knew that there were substantive facts they were actively choosing to ignore. In fact, “Swift Vets” is now some sort of media pejorative, even though the term is an Orwellian attempt recast and simplify events so as to obscure discomfiting and politically consequential debates that New York Times editors don’t want to have.
If Baquet wants to know why it’s difficult to cover Trump, he should consider the actual facts of the Swift Boat Vets and whether or not the media’s handling of such episodes have undermined their institutional credibility. If you have been sounding the alarm that the media are no longer credible, as some of us have been doing for a while now, then it was only a matter of time before a mountebank such as Trump came along and exploited this lack of trust. And it won’t be the last, unless the media clean up their act and start acting like a press that at least makes a good faith effort not to throw an election every four years.
