March 6, 2004
IT'S NOT THE DEFERMENT, BUT THE DESTINATION:
Revealed: how 'war hero' Kerry tried to put off Vietnam military duty (Charles Laurence, 07/03/2004, Sunday Telegraph)
Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.
The revelation appears to undercut Sen Kerry's carefully-cultivated image as a man who willingly served his country in a dangerous war - in supposed contrast to President Bush, who served in the Texas National Guard and thus avoided being sent to Vietnam.
The Harvard Crimson newspaper followed a youthful Mr Kerry in Boston as he campaigned for Congress for the first time in 1970. In the course of a lengthy article, "John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress", published on February 18, the paper reported: "When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy.
You can't blame the poor guy for wanting to avoid service--in better days he and W could have paid some lower class schlub to serve in their place--but going to France? That's outrageous.
MORE:
Kerry unrepentant for pro-Hanoi activism:Local paper described him as 'closest thing to a male Jane Fonda' (J. Michael Waller , March 6, 2004, WorldNetDaily)
As a lieutenant junior grade, Kerry skippered a CTF-115 swift boat, a light, aluminum patrol vessel that bore a passing resemblance to PT-109. He thought he'd arranged to avoid combat.Posted by Orrin Judd at March 6, 2004 10:58 PM"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," he later would tell the Boston Globe. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling, and that's what I thought I was going to do."
All Kerry has to appeal to voters beyond the hard-core Dems is his Vietnam hero status. If holes/questions are raised about that and not answered he's not looking too good.
Posted by: AWW at March 7, 2004 12:58 AMKerry may have tried to avoid serving, and tried to avoid combat once in the Navy, but in the end, he rose to the occasion at least twice.
He really is a war hero.
Whether that has any bearing on being prepared to be President of the US, is an open question.
Based on Presidential elections since 1976, the voters seem to think not.
I agree that harping on questions about Kerry's military service unto itself will be an ineffective strategy in the end. Kerry's problem is he wants people only to consider his history from 1966-70 and then -- poof! -- ignore the next 30 years and go immediately to his vote for the last Clinton defense budget in 2000. The Bush people would be better off just saying that since Mr. Kerry wants to bring up the past, here are all of his past votes and political positions between 1971 and 1999 that the voters might be interested in reviewing.
Posted by: John at March 7, 2004 8:39 AMHis military record is fair game since he brought it up. And his record is questionable.
Posted by: Genecis at March 7, 2004 12:47 PMActually, it would seem that JF***K's Vietnam record is consistent with all the rest of his career-- he flip-flopped from anti-war to gung-ho to anti-war as the situation dictated.
As for that service itself, from what I've heard, it's beginning to sound like he was the kind of commander who sets out to either be a "hero" or get killed, and who'd ended up getting "fragged" if he hadn't accoplished the first in such a short time.
Posted by: Raoul Ortega at March 7, 2004 6:29 PM