If President Obama truly believes John Kerry can elude his Swift Boat history, he is most likely only deluding himself.
Watching Barack Obama nominate John Kerry to be secretary of state serves as a reminder the radical leftist activists that have hijacked leadership in the Democratic Party continue to operate from an anti-American consciousness that dawned in the late-1960s, condemning the United States, much as did hard-core communists at the time, as an imperialistic military power advancing colonialist aims.
The young John Kerry who condemned the U.S. military in his infamous 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has much in common with the young Barack Obama who expressed admiration for Franz Fanon and Malcolm X when expressing in the pages of his autobiography his particular form of anti-colonial black rage against the United States of America.
Now, with an appointment ceremony Secretary of State Hillary Clinton did not attend in her continuing effort to dodge being forced to give sworn testimony before Congress regarding her role in the Benghazi attack that cost the life of Ambassador Chris Stevens, President Obama has placed John Kerry fourth in the line of presidential succession – after the vice president, the speaker of the House and the president pro tempore of the Senate.
John O’Neill, my co-author in writing the 2004 best-seller “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” has expressed via email that an illness prevents him from taking an active role reorganizing Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth to oppose Kerry’s nomination.
Yet, recently, O’Neill made clear he was very opposed to Kerry’s nomination, as was noted in a recent opinion piece authored in the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 6 by Seth Lipsky, a former member of the Journal’s editorial board, entitled “John Kerry, Secretary of What?”
Lipsky reported O’Neill in an email to him had commented that Kerry was “well qualified to be the secretary of defense … of Cuba or Venezuela,” with O’Neill commenting further that Kerry is “certainly an expert on surrender and can run up a white flag with the best of them.”
Appearing on Sean Hannity’s television show on Fox News Nov. 15, O’Neill excoriated Kerry, saying: “You know, Sean, we lost 58,000 people in Vietnam. I knew a fair number of them, a lot of them from my class at the Naval Academy. They were the best people we ever had. To describe them as the army of Genghis Khan for political advancement is typical of Kerry’s whole career, and it didn’t stop.”
When Hannity asked if Swift Boat Veterans for Truth would come back to oppose Kerry’s nomination, O’Neill’s qualified response was in the affirmative: “We will do the best we can, Sean. I was contacted today, I spoke with three people that won the Congressional Medal of Honor, who will do the very best we can. We’ve got kids – heck, I mean, we have hundreds of thousands of kids who have been engaged in combat or in the armed forces. Can you imagine them counting on John Kerry to protect their back?”
To coincide with Kerry’s confirmation hearings, I plan to author a series of articles to be published in WND, reminding readers of the radical roots of Kerry’s political career, beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, despite advancing exaggerated claims about his three Purple Hearts supposedly earned as a military hero in that same conflict.
In writing these articles, I plan to be speaking only for myself, in that I am not authorized nor will I seek to be authorized to speak for Adm. Hoffman or John O’Neill, or any of the other courageous participants of Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth.
I need to make clear that while I co-authored “Unfit for Command” and was invited to attend meetings held by Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, I myself never served in the U.S. military.
I went to my draft physical in downtown Cleveland in 1968, prepared to be inducted that day, only to be disqualified for medical reasons due to hereditary eczema, an illness I continue to suffer from.
My role with Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth stems back to work I did as a young man in universities.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, I worked in conjunction with law enforcement and military intelligence, participating in research projects conducted by the Civil Violence Research Center at Case Western Reserve University, where I was an undergraduate, and then at the Lemberg Center for the Study of Violence at Brandeis University, where I worked as a research assistant while attending graduate school at Harvard University.
In 1971, I conducted much of the field research that informed military intelligence that John Kerry, in his role as spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was planning to meet privately in Paris with Madame Binh, the chief negotiator for the Viet Cong, despite the fact Kerry was still a Navy reserve officer.
Despite the calumny I continue to take from the political left for my role supporting Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, I remain honored to have been allowed to participate, and I consider the work I did in 2004 opposing John Kerry’s presidential candidacy to have been among the most important work I have done in my life.
In his concluding comments to Hannity, John O’Neill expressed a sentiment I share: “To make [John Kerry] secretary of defense or secretary of state would be a disaster for our national security. It really would be a total forfeiture of the loyalty we owe the troops in the field.”
