Dornan Assails ‘Scummy’ Lies About His War Record

California Rep. Robert K. Dornan, gesturing wildly and his voice quavering with anger, delivered an extraordinary 38-minute House floor speech Wednesday defending his military record against what he said were “scummy” lies spread by Rep. Tony Coelho (D-Merced), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

“I’m setting the record straight and I beg your pardon for telling you more than you want to know,” Dornan (R-Garden Grove) told colleagues at the end of a rambling narrative in which he vividly described scrapes with death he says he faced as an Air Force pilot in the 1950s and as a journalist in Vietnam.

Coelho triggered the dispute last month while stumping in Santa Ana for Assemblyman Richard Robinson (D-Garden Grove), Dornan’s Democratic challenger in the Nov. 4 election. At a press conference, he accused Dornan, a fiery conservative known for his hawkish rhetoric, of exaggerating his resume to make it appear that he had faced combat in the Korean and Vietnam wars. In fact, Coelho charged, Dornan had a chance to fight in both wars “but decided not to and ran away.”

Though both Dornan and Robinson agree that the military record should not be an issue in the campaign, it has taken center stage in a so-far low-key contest.

Dornan has fixed on the allegation, ignoring advice from some aides to let the controversy die. In fact, the Dornan camp actually has escalated the dispute, accusing Robinson of misrepresenting Dornan’s military record in Vietnam and stressing that Coelho, who suffers from epilepsy, never served in the military.

Coelho, a hard-nosed political strategist, insisted that his attacks on Dornan were well founded. But he also acknowledged that he was trying to bait Dornan into focusing on the issue as a way of showing that the Republican was too distracted by matters unrelated to the needs of Orange County.

“The more Dornan wants to talk about that (the military record) the better it is (for Robinson),” Coelho said. Asked why he thought Dornan defended his record so vociferously, Coelho said: “I don’t know whether it’s guilt or he just protesteth too much.” Coelho has claimed that in official biographies Dornan has tried to give the impression that he was a combat pilot in Korea. Dornan was an Air Force pilot during the Korean War years, but never flew in combat.

Responding to Coelho, Dornan said he would have been willing to face combat in both Korea and Vietnam but was glad that he had never had to draw blood. Dornan described crashes he had survived on domestic training flights in the 1950s and said he was almost captured by Communists as a journalist in Vietnam.

“Tony Coelho is baiting me for not killing people, and coming from a flaming liberal like him, that’s weird,” the Orange County congressman said.