The Fog of Politics
We'll sum it up for you this way: one man running for president didn't go to Vietnam. Instead, he joined the National Guard.
While serving in the Guard, he was based for a time in Alabama. But documents to confirm that are missing, leading to charges from some Democratic operatives that the president was, at least for part of his service, absent without leave.
Meanwhile, the other presidential candidate went to Vietnam, saw action, got shot, was given medals. Some soldiers who served with Kerry, yet have connections to the Bush presidential campaign, have claimed that Kerry didn't really do anything heroic. They say his wounds were exaggerated. They say his medals were bogus.
With 68 days remaining until the election, this is what the presidential contest has come down to: the Vietnam War. Long a Rorschach test for the Boomer generation, it still cuts a reverberating swath down the American experience. "The war in Vietnam continues to evoke images and representations of an enduring and traumatic nature," states a February 2003 report from the American Studies Resource Center. It "remains a dominant political, social and moral benchmark in the contemporary American cultural consciousness."
The war that ripped America apart more than three decades ago continues to do so now. Both sides in the contest acknowledge that this week of campaigning will be Vietnam-related, 24/7, and that how it unfolds could tilt the contest one way or the other. For the time being, health care, education, terrorism, race relations and the environment will have to take a backseat. Personal biography is colliding with one of America's great unresolved issues, and the spillover is radioactive.
In this political firefight, both sides have sought to claim the higher moral ground: the Republicans claim that Kerry has brought this on himself by making his military experience the focal point of his personal biography. If he didn't want the scrutiny, they say, he shouldn't have talked about it. The Kerry people, meanwhile, have thrown themselves into a Code Red and brought the investigative powers of the Washington Post and New York Times into the mix. Both newspapers have explored the financial, historical and social ties between the soldiers who say they hate Kerry and those who are purchasing the TV ads to give them voice. It's all part of a package, the Kerry forces contend: both this president, and his father before him, have often relied on campaign surrogates to do the dirty job of beating the tar out of their opponents. Conveniently, the Bushes have been able to distance themselves from those doing their dirty work by saying they had nothing to do with it at all.
The anti-Kerry ads are being purchased with so-called "soft money" by nonprofit groups. Outside the orbit of the presidential campaigns themselves, these ads don't have to be approved by the candidates. About all the candidates can do is verbally condemn an ad if they think it hits below the belt; beyond that, they have no power to jerk an ad off the air. But the question is worth asking: has Bush condemned this specific ad? No. Instead, he said he favors removing all soft-money ads from the airwaves.
As the arguments escalate, we are being told many things about John Kerry. We are told he shot himself to fake his wounds. We are told he wasn't really fired upon. We are told that when he turned his Swift boat to shore and killed a Viet Cong soldier, the soldier wasn't really a Viet Cong but a young boy. We are told that, contrary to Kerry's claims, he may not have been in Cambodia on a mission around Christmastime. Of all the claims made by his opponents, it is this last one that Kerry has not adequately answered.
Did Kerry lie as to his whereabouts that Christmas? Did he exaggerate?
You know, he may have. But you know what else? In the final analysis, the two men running for president have very different résumés. One went to Vietnam, saw action, got shot and received medals. The other did not go to Vietnam, joined the National Guard, spent part of his service in Alabama, but hasn't adequately proven that he showed up. These facts are indisputable.
Politics is often the art of confusion and deception. Like war, its fields are blanketed by fog. But even we are able to see which candidate served his country more.
Comments (0)