The Un-Kerry

More than 30 years after he returned to voluntary, and happy, obscurity as a Houston lawyer, 5 8-year-old John O’Neill is making a primetime comeback. Who’s John O’Neill? He was the Vietnam veteran—a former commander of a Patrol Craft Fast, better known as the Swift boat—who famously debated one John Kerry, a fellow Swift skipper, for 90 minutes on The Dick Cavett Show back in 1971. C-SPAN excavated this particular television gem a couple of weeks ago and re-broadcast it.

In 1971, Kerry was leveraging his military experience for political gain (old habits die hard, eh?) and had recently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the American soldiers who, he believed, habitually committed war crimes. A few months earlier, Kerry had been involved in the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” which proved to be less a serious inquiry into American actions than a rigged indictment of AmeriKKKa. It was later shown that many of the “eyewitness” participants, as well as many of Kerry’s colleagues in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), were frauds who had never been near a battlefield, let alone seen these crimes happen. Undaunted, Kerry claimed in his Senate testimony that these were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” In other words, these alleged horrors were endemic to, and an officially sanctioned corollary of, the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.

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Alexander Rose

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Presidential Election

More than 30 years after he returned to voluntary, and happy, obscurity as a Houston lawyer, 5 8-year-old John O’Neill is making a primetime comeback. Who’s John O’Neill? He was the Vietnam veteran—a former commander of a Patrol Craft Fast, better known as the Swift boat—who famously debated one John Kerry, a fellow Swift skipper, for 90 minutes on The Dick Cavett Show back in 1971. C-SPAN excavated this particular television gem a couple of weeks ago and re-broadcast it.

In 1971, Kerry was leveraging his military experience for political gain (old habits die hard, eh?) and had recently testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee about the American soldiers who, he believed, habitually committed war crimes. A few months earlier, Kerry had been involved in the “Winter Soldier Investigation,” which proved to be less a serious inquiry into American actions than a rigged indictment of AmeriKKKa. It was later shown that many of the “eyewitness” participants, as well as many of Kerry’s colleagues in Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), were frauds who had never been near a battlefield, let alone seen these crimes happen. Undaunted, Kerry claimed in his Senate testimony that these were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.” In other words, these alleged horrors were endemic to, and an officially sanctioned corollary of, the U.S. war effort in Vietnam.