Swift-vet ad flays ‘Hanoi John’

September 22, 2004

In the latest ad by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Sen. John Kerry is linked to “Hanoi” Jane Fonda as a man America cannot trust because he betrayed his country by consorting with Vietnamese communists.

The sixth television ad by the group of 254 veterans challenging the presidential candidate’s Vietnam war record and activism targets the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Mexico, Nevada and West Virginia with a $1.3 million buy. It also will be shown nationally on cable TV.

It can be viewed on the group’s website.

The text reads:

Even before Jane Fonda went to Hanoi to meet with the enemy and mock America, John Kerry secretly met with enemy leaders in Paris. Though we were still at war and Americans were being held in North Vietnamese prison camps. Then he returned and accused American troops of committing war crimes on a daily basis.

Eventually Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to. In a time of war, can America trust a man who betrayed his country?

Jerome Corsi, co-author of the 527 group’s best-selling book, “Unfit for Command,” has charged Kerry’s 1970 meeting with North Vietnamese communists violated U.S. law.

Corsi, who has studied the anti-war movement since the 1970s, notes U.S. code 18 U.S.C. 953 prohibits a U.S. citizen from going abroad to negotiate with a foreign power.

Campaign spokesman Michael Meehan has insisted Kerry was in Paris on his honeymoon and did not go with the intention of meeting with the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong leaders. Kerry did not engage in the negotiations and was there only for “fact-finding purposes,” Meehan has contended.

But in 1971, Kerry called a press conference in Washington and urged President Nixon to accept the seven-point surrender plan of Madame Nguyen Thi Binh, the foreign minister of the Viet Cong’s political entity.

Corsi and co-author John O’Neill write in “Unfit for Command,” “Had Madame Binh herself been permitted to appear at the July 22, 1971, press conference instead of John Kerry, the most noticeable difference in the argument presented might have been the absence of a Boston accent.”

Kerry was still a member of the Naval reserves when he met with the communist leaders in Paris.

The swiftboat vets fifth ad, launched last week, titled “Dazed and Confused,” charges Kerry’s contradictory explanations of a 1971 protest in which he threw away war decorations is another reason not to trust him.

The previous spot has a similar theme, asking, “How can the man who renounced his country’s symbols now be trusted?”

The first TV commercial quoted Kerry’s Vietnam comrades calling him a liar, questioning his honor, accusing him of misrepresenting his actions for medals and attacking his character.

The group’s second ad, featuring POWs recounting the demoralizing impact of Kerry’s claim that U.S. soldiers systematically committed atrocities.

In the swiftboat vets’ third ad, one of Kerry’s crew members accuses the presidential candidate of lying, charging he falsely claimed to have spent Christmas in Cambodia in 1968.

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