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Swift boat ads linked to gop Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/9463680.htmhttp://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/nation/9463680.htm
Posted on Sun, Aug. 22, 2004
Anti-Kerry ads have GOP links
Longtime Texas supporters of President Bush have fueled a campaign to discredit John Kerry's war record.
BY KATE ZERNICKE AND JIM RUTENBERG
New York Times Service
After weeks of taking fire over veterans' accusations that he had lied about his Vietnam service record to win medals and build a political career, Sen. John Kerry shot back last week, calling those statements categorically false and branding the people behind them tools of the Bush campaign.
His decision to take on the group directly was a measure of how the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has catapulted itself to the forefront of the presidential campaign. It has advanced its cause in a book, in a television ad, and on cable news and talk radio shows, in an attempt to discredit Kerry's war record, a pillar of his campaign.
How the group came into existence is a story of how veterans with long-standing anger about Kerry's antiwar statements in the early 1970s allied themselves with Texas Republicans.
Kerry called them ''a front for the Bush campaign.'' A series of interviews and a review of documents show a web of connections to the Bush family, high-profile Texas political figures and President Bush's chief political aide, Karl Rove.
Records show that the group received the bulk of its initial financing from two men with ties to the president and his family -- one a longtime political associate of Rove's, the other a treasurer of the George H.W. Bush Library Foundation.
A Texas publicist who once helped prepare Bush's father for his debate when he was running for vice president provided them with strategic advice. And the group's television commercial was produced by the same team that made the devastating ad mocking Michael Dukakis in a tank helmet when he and Bush's father faced off in the 1988 presidential election.
INCONSISTENCIES
The strategy the veterans devised would ultimately paint John Kerry the war hero as John Kerry the ''baby killer'' and the fabricator of the events that resulted in his war medals. But on close examination, the accounts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth prove to be riddled with inconsistencies. In many cases, material offered as proof by these veterans is undercut by official Navy records and the men's own statements.
Several of those now declaring Kerry ''unfit'' had lavished praise on him, some as recently as last year.
In an unpublished interview in March 2003 with Kerry's authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, provided by Brinkley to The New York Times, Roy Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral and a leader of the group, allowed that he had disagreed with Kerry's antiwar positions but said, ''I am not going to say anything negative about him.'' He added, ``He's a good man.''
In a profile of the candidate that ran in The Boston Globe in June 2003, Hoffmann recalled the actions that led to Kerry's Silver Star: ``It took guts, and I admire that.''
George Elliott, one of the Vietnam veterans in the group, flew from his home in Delaware to Boston in 1996 to stand up for Kerry during a tough reelection fight, declaring at a news conference that the action that won Kerry a Silver Star was ``an act of courage.''
At that same event, Adrian Lonsdale, another Vietnam veteran now speaking out against Kerry, supported him with a statement about the ``bravado and courage of the young officers that ran the Swift boats.''
WHEN IT ALL BEGAN
Last winter, as Kerry was wrapping up the Democratic nomination, Lonsdale received a call at his Massachusetts home from his old commander in Vietnam, Hoffmann, asking whether he had seen the new biography of the man who would be president.
Hoffmann had commanded the Swift boats during the war from a base in Cam Ranh Bay and advocated a search-and-destroy campaign against the Viet Cong -- the kind of tactic Kerry criticized when he was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971.
Hoffmann and Lonsdale had publicly lauded Kerry in the past. But Brinkley's book Tour of Duty, while burnishing Kerry's reputation, portrayed the two men as reckless leaders whose military approach had led to the deaths of countless sailors and civilians.
The two men were determined to set the record straight.
''It was the admiral who started it and got the rest of us into it,'' Lonsdale said.
Hoffmann's phone calls led them to Texas and to John E. O'Neill, who at one point commanded the same Swift boat as Kerry in Vietnam and whose mission against him dated to 1971, when he had been recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Kerry on The Dick Cavett Show.
O'Neill had spent the 33 years since he debated Kerry building a law practice in Houston, mingling with some of the state's most powerful Republicans, including Harlan Crow and Bob J. Perry.
Perry, who has given $200,000 to the group, is the top donor to Republicans in the state, according to Texans for Public Justice, a nonpartisan group that tracks political donations. He donated $46,000 to Bush's campaigns for governor in 1994 and 1998. In the 2002 election, the group said, he donated nearly $4 million to Texas candidates and political committees.
Rove, Bush's top political aide, recently said through a spokeswoman that he and Perry were longtime friends, though he said they had not spoken for at least a year.
Crow, the seventh-largest donor to Republicans in the state according to the Texans for Public Justice, also has donated to the Swift boat group. He is listed as a trustee of the George H.W. Bush Library Foundation.
One of his law partners, Tex Lezar, ran on the Republican ticket with Bush in 1994 as lieutenant governor. Lezar, who died last year, was married to Merrie Spaeth, a powerful public relations executive who has helped coordinate the efforts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
Spaeth was a communications official in the Reagan White House, where the president's aides invited her to help former President Bush prepare for his vice-presidential debate in 1984.
When asked whether she had ever visited the White House during Bush's tenure, Spaeth initially said that she had been there only once, in 2002. Last week, Spaeth acknowledged that she had spent an hour in the Old Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex, in the spring of 2003, giving Bush's chief economic advisor, Stephen Friedman, public-speaking advice. Asked if it was possible that she had worked with other administration officials, Spaeth said: 'The answer is `no,' unless you refresh my memory.''
About 10 veterans met in Spaeth's office in Dallas in April to plot their campaign against Kerry. Lonsdale, who did not attend, said the meeting had been planned as ``an indoctrination session.''
IDEAS BECOME FIRM
What might have been loose impressions about Kerry began to harden.
''That was an awakening experience,'' Spaeth said.
The group decided to hire a private investigator to probe Brinkley's account of the war -- to find ''some neutral way of actually questioning people involved in these incidents,'' O'Neill said.
But the investigator's questions did not seem neutral to some.
Patrick Runyon, who served on a mission with Kerry, said he first thought the caller was from a pro-Kerry group and gave a statement about the night Kerry won his first Purple Heart. Runyon said the edited version was stripped of all references to enemy combat, making it look like just another night in the Mekong Delta.
''It made it sound like I didn't believe we got any returned fire,'' he said. ``It was the scariest night of my life.''
What drives the veterans, they acknowledge, is less what Kerry did during his time in Vietnam than what he said after. Most members of the group object to his using the word ''atrocities'' to describe what happened in Vietnam when he returned. As Lonsdale explained it: ``We won the battle. Kerry went home and lost the war for us.
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