Political Battle Over Vietnam-Era Credentials Has No Winners

It was perhaps the most electric moment in a campaign filled with drama.

The year was 1996, and Massachusetts Sen. John F. Kerry was seeking his third term against charismatic Republican Gov. William Weld. In a debate, Weld was hammering Kerry over his opposition to the death penalty, even for cop killers. Kerry silenced the room with his response.

“I know something about killing,” Kerry said simply. “I don’t like killing. I don’t think the state honors life by turning around and killing.”

That exchange vividly demonstrated how much Kerry, the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, relies on his experience as a Navy combat veteran in Vietnam to define his political identity.

Kerry invariably uses Vietnam to establish his credentials on national security. But as Weld learned, Kerry also uses Vietnam as a shield on issues like crime where Republicans often paint liberals as weak and effete.

The fact that Kerry has shed blood in war is probably his best defense against GOP efforts to portray him as outside the cultural mainstream and too soft to protect the country, as George H.W. Bush did in the 1988 presidential race with Michael S. Dukakis, another Massachusetts liberal, on social issues. “The whole military veteran, war-hero piece is a cultural message,” says one senior Kerry advisor.

Which probably explains why Republicans and conservatives are already working hard to redefine the meaning of Vietnam in Kerry’s life. The goal is to replace the mental picture of Kerry, clean-shaven and solemn-faced, receiving the Bronze Star in his Navy dress whites, with an image of a long-haired Kerry in a grimy fatigue jacket protesting the war in angry street demonstrations.

In recent weeks, conservative activists and Republican House members have taken turns strafing Kerry for his enlistment in the antiwar movement after his return from Vietnam with five combat decorations in 1969. The flashpoint has been a photo showing Kerry sitting near actress Jane Fonda at a rally in Valley Forge, Pa., where both spoke in September 1970.

Kerry’s work with antiwar activists like Fonda “diminishes ... the over 56,000 people that lost their lives [in Vietnam] -- it slaps their families in the face,” Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham (R-San Diego) told the Washington Times last week. Ted Sampley, a former Green Beret and longtime conservative provocateur who runs an anti-Kerry website, says the Democrat through his protests “basically gave aid and comfort to the enemy.”

President Bush’s reelection campaign has kept its distance from these attacks. But last week, it distributed a letter from retired Col. William Campenni, who served with Bush in the Texas Air National Guard.

Most of the letter defended Bush’s service. Yet Campenni also implied that he and Bush had done more to defend the nation than Kerry. “While Kerry was playing antiwar games ... with Hanoi Jane Fonda, we were answering 3 a.m. scrambles for who-knows-what inbound threat over ... the shark-filled Gulf of Mexico,” he wrote.

Politics is a tough business, and getting tougher all the time. But it’s reasonable to ask whether Republicans really want to encourage a debate about whether Kerry honorably served his country during the Vietnam era -- much less whether, as Campenni implied, Bush somehow behaved more honorably.

Whatever else can be said about Bush’s National Guard service, he did not volunteer to go to Vietnam, as he acknowledged recently on “Meet the Press,” though he supported the war. Kerry, despite doubting the war, enlisted in the Navy, volunteered to learn how to pilot the small attack craft known as swift boats and volunteered again for combat assignment in the fierce Mekong Delta after he was initially stationed at the (relatively) comfortable base in Cam Ranh Bay.

Kerry wasn’t Superman in Vietnam. As historian Douglas Brinkley relates in his compelling new book on Kerry’s Vietnam experience, “Tour of Duty,” the young lieutenant had second thoughts when his combat reassignment came through, and he left Vietnam as soon as his third combat wound allowed it. But as Brinkley reports, Kerry did his duty bravely and, as far as possible, humanely, even as the carnage around him solidified his conviction that the war was a mistake.

Kerry’s role in the antiwar movement was also more complex than his critics charge. From a perspective of 30 years, Kerry does seem too quick to apply the label “war criminal” to American officials directing the war.

But overall, Kerry was a moderating influence within the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group he came to lead and the antiwar movement more generally, Brinkley shows. Resisting more extreme elements, Kerry counseled nonviolence and working within the political system. His appearance with Fonda, where the two barely met, came two years before her misguided trip to Hanoi; eventually Kerry quit the antiwar veterans group precisely because he felt it had become too radicalized. “He was always the cautious, conservative voice in the VVAW,” says antiwar leader Sam Brown.

Does that record amount to providing “aid and comfort to the enemy”? Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a Navy flier who spent more than five years in North Vietnamese captivity, says, “I just find that incomprehensible.... John Kerry, by virtue of his service in Vietnam, earned the right to oppose the war if he chose to.”

McCain believes both Bush and Kerry honorably served the country in those years; obviously not everyone will agree or consider the sacrifices of the two men comparable. And the media has an obligation to explore and explain what both men did during those difficult times.

But it’s a safe bet that most Americans, of all ideologies, will agree with McCain and Brown when they say it’s long past time to end the war over the war in Vietnam.

If Kerry and Bush face each other this fall, most voters are likely to care far more about the choices they offer today than the choices they made 30 years ago.

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Ronald Brownstein’s column appears every Monday. See current and past columns on The Times’ website at www.latimes.com/brownstein.