Some explaining is definitely due
More and more loose ends are unraveling in the Kerry-Cambodia issue

In all the brouhaha over John Kerry's Vietnam service, I have never taken much note about the validity of his decorations, although I have noted a few times that news stories were being printed or broadcast about them. And truth is, I really don't too much care whether Army Special Forces Capt. Jim Rassman got blown out his boat by enemy fire and then was rescued by Kerry, or had one beer to many and fell out.

I understand why these issues matter to others. As I said here,

I wish both sides would shut up about Vietnam and talk about keeping America safe today and tomorrow. But John Kerry has made his Vietnam service the glaring centerpiece of his ability to secure the country as president. As long as he does so he has to expect his service to come under the microscope. Kerry has made his Vietnam service credential his primary presidential qualification. It's both hypocrisy and fantasy for him to expect his opponents give him a pass on it.

But the issue of whether Kerry was in or not in Cambodia on Christmas 1968 matters to me because IMO it cuts directly to whether he is trustworthy. He claimed on the Senate floor in 1986,

"I remember Christmas of 1968 sitting on a gunboat in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by Vietnamese and Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and have the President of the United States telling the American people that I was not there; the troops were not in Cambodia.

I have that memory which is seared - seared - in me, ...

In a 1979 account carried in the Boston Herald, Kerry (same link), Kerry is quoted thus:

I remember spending Christmas Eve of 1968 five miles across the Cambodian border being shot at by our South Vietnamese allies who were drunk and celebrating Christmas.

Glenn Reynolds, BTW, has posted an image of that story; it's so old that there was some question whether it could be confirmed.

Yet Kerry's authorized biographer, Douglas Brinkley, included in his book this excerpt from Kerry's actual Vietnam diary, dated Dec. 24, 1968:

"Visions of sugarplums really do dance through your head and you think of stockings and snow and roast chestnuts and fires with birch logs and all that is good and warm and real. It's Christmas Eve."

That is not what you expect someone near death from allied fire to write. And they aren't: the words were written at Sa Dec, South Vietnam, 55 miles away from the Cambodian border.

Kerry has not addressed this disparity or the accusations he simply lied about Cambodia in order to disparage President Reagan's assistance to Nicaraguan Contras (1986), or vicariously entered Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam piece de resistance, Apocalypse Now (Boston Herald, which he also told, "On more than one occasion, I, like Martin Sheen in 'Apocalypse Now,' took my patrol boat into Cambodia").

Kerry also was quoted by the Washington Post as saying that he ran CIA agents into Cambodia from South Vietnam, which implies strongly, I think, that Kerry meant that he sailed his boat into Cambodia on more than one occasion. So when?

However, three of Kerry's own crew members - his campaign's band of brothers - have stated firmly that they were never in Cambodia or Christmas 1968 or any other day. So do all of Kerry's Vietnam commanders still alive.

It would be a simple thing for the CIA agent(s) Kerry boated into Cambodia to call FoxNews or the NYT and say so, or for records to be gleaned from archives showing whether Kerry's boat sailed CIA agents into the country.

But Kerry and his campaign apparently cannot offer any actual evidence to back up Kerry's decades-long claims. Instead, they are hemming and hawing and playing, "What the candidate meant to say."

But today, on Fox News' "Fox and Friends," Kerry Campaign Advisor Jeh Johnson had this to say to the show's co-host Brian Kilmeade:

JOHNSON: John Kerry has said on the record that he had a mistaken recollection earlier. He talked about a combat situation on Christmas Eve 1968 which at one point he said occurred in Cambodia. He has since corrected the recorded to say it was some place on a river near Cambodia and he is certain that at some point subsequent to that he was in Cambodia. My understanding is that he is not certain about that date.

Just when and where did Kerry say this? My Google searches turned up nothing. So I went to Kerry's own campaign web site and used the site's search feature, searching only for the word, "Cambodia." It yielded exactly two results. One is nothing but a repost of the text of the WaPo story linked above. The other is a summary about Kerry's Vietnam service in which the word, "Cambodia," does not appear; I don't know why it came up as a hit on the search.

If Kerry had done what Johnson said he did - go "on the record" to correct the date - why does not Kerry's campaign site at least link to the record concerned?

I want to know:

In what medium is Kerry directly quoted making these corrections?

When were they uttered by Kerry?

In 1986 Kerry said his 1968 Cambodia Christmas was "seared, seared" into his memory. Why is this memory so indistinct now, to the point that today's story is that he spent Christmas "some place on a river near Cambodia," in Johnson's words? Which river? And how can that be squared with his own diary's account that he was in Sa Dec, South Vietnam at that time?

Until these questions are effectively addressed by Kerry himself, I have to agree with Instapundit reader Daniel Aronstein:

WHAT IF... Porter Goss had lied about going into Cambodia during the Vietnam War repeatedly, over a few decades, in different media, and on the floor of the House)?

Would we want him as DCI? Would he get confirmed? NO WAY!

We should not hold Kerry - who is running for CIC - to a lower standard.

As Glenn said, "Indeed."

by Donald Sensing, 8/11/2004 04:58:17 PM. Permalink |