Infamous Kansas City meeting is only one issue . . .

By Marilyn M. Brannan, Associate Editor

Unravelling The New World Order

April 5, 2004

“An assassination plot to kill key figures, including seven Senators who supported the Vietnam War, was proposed during a November 12-15 1971 meeting of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) in Kansas City.”

That statement, published by Jewish World Review at www.NewsAndOpinion.com on March 15 of this year, might not seem particularly startling to individuals who remember the bitter anti-war demonstrations that occurred in the U.S. during the Vietnam war.  (Thomas Lipscomb, “Was John Kerry Silent About Plot to Murder 7 U.S. Senators?”)

However, if one is aware that one of the candidates for the presidency of the United States—Senator John F. Kerry—was actively involved in VVAW at the time and is said to have attended that meeting, it takes on a much darker significance.

The fact that an assassination plot was discussed at the November 1971 meeting of the VVAW is not disputed by veterans who attended the meeting.

Credibility Gap Widens

As bits and pieces of Kerry’s postwar history have surfaced, it has opened a credibility gap that could discredit him with American voters once they are exposed to the details.  Kerry’s campaign spokesmen said several times in March of this year that Kerry “never, ever” attended the VVAW meeting in Kansas City during which members discussed and voted on an assassination plot against pro-war U.S. senators.  Then, when Kerry’s campaign organization was confronted with FBI surveillance records that indicated Kerry was there, the campaign acknowledged his presence, but only as an “historical footnote.”  The whole story, Kerry told a Boston radio station, was “ancient history.” 

Kerry’s campaign seems desperate to disassociate him from the Kansas City meeting. They would like us to “move on,” as we hear so often when flummoxed politicians are confronted by stubborn facts that don’t comport with their message.  But “facts are stubborn things,” as John Adams once noted, and there is the troubling issue of John Kerry’s record of association with anti-war radicals and various individuals who have lied to Congress, to the media, and to the public. There is Kerry’s refusal to release his war records, and the fact that much of his testimony before Congress of U.S. “atrocities” in Vietnam was found to be based on second-hand, undocumented allegation.  Kerry says he was relying on the “highly documented and highly disturbing” stories he heard at a Detroit conference funded by Jane Fonda.  The Naval Investigative Service later found that some of the most grisly testimony there was given by false witnesses.  Kerry  has never renounced the charges he made.

Denials and Dilemmas

As late as March 18 this year, Kerry’s campaign maintained that the Massachusetts Democrat “did not recall the [November 1971] meeting,” although FBI surveillance material and the group’s archives clearly show that Kerry resigned from his national coordinator post at the November 1971 meeting.  In response to a request by the Kansas City Star that campaign staffers question Kerry about the November meeting, Kerry passed the word on March 12 that he “never, ever” attended a meeting of VVAW after a heated public argument with Al Hubbard, the group’s executive secretary, in St. Louis in the summer of 1971.  (Scott Canon, “Kerry Hedges on ’71 Kansas City Meeting,” Kansas City Star, March 20, 2004).

“In full cover-up mode” is how John Fund of The Wall Street Journal describes the Kerry campaign on this issue. He reports that John Musgrave, one of six witnesses who placed Mr. Kerry at the Kansas City meeting, claims that John Hurley, current head of VVAW, called him twice and pressured him to change the story he had already given to a Kansas City Star reporter.  According to Musgrave, Hurley insisted the senator “was definitely not in Kansas City,” and suggested Musgrave “refresh” his memory and “call the reporter back.”

But Musgrave said he did attend the Fall 1971 meeting in Kansas City, his first VVAW session as Kansas state coordinator, and he remembered Kerry attending as well. (Scott Canon, “’71 Anti-war Session: Was Kerry in Kansas City?” Kansas City Star, Mar. 13, 2004) 

Supporting Musgrave’s testimony are VVAW records stored at the Wisconsin State Historical Society that show Kerry quit the organization over “philosophical differences” in the middle of the four-day gathering in Kansas City. 

Additionally, Gerald Nicosia, author of Home to War: A History of the Vietnam Veterans Movement, states that FBI records kept on the VVAW throughout its history indicate Kerry’s resignation was accepted at the Kansas City meeting [November] amid a heated confrontation with Al Hubbard.  A curious footnote to all this is one FBI report which suggests that despite his resignation from leadership, Kerry was willing to work for the group after November 1971 (Scott Canon, “Kerry Hedges on ’71 Kansas City Meeting,” Kansas City Star, Mar. 20, 2004).

Musgrave recalled, according to Star reporter Scott Canon, that Kerry was concerned about the group’s credibility. “Kerry may have resigned shortly after that meeting, or at that meeting, I don’t know . . . We were all aware that he was getting ready to run for some political office.” (Kansas City Star, Mar. 13, 2004)

Kerry’s War Record

In his March 29 article, John Fund commented, “Kerry mentions his service in Vietnam so frequently it has become a running joke on the campaign press plane. But he seldom—if ever—mentions his postwar activities as a national coordinator and principal spokesman for VVAW.” (“Kerry’s Other War Record”) 

Thomas  Lipscomb writes about Kerry’s Vietnam service in “Setting Straight Kerry’s War Record” (NewsAndOpinion.com, March 1, 2004).  He notes that Kerry was assigned to Swiftboat 44 on December 1, 1968, and within 24 hours, he had acquired his first Purple Heart.  He accumulated three of them in four months but did not lose a single day of duty from wounds, according to his training officer.  Lipscomb comments, “It’s a pity one cannot read his Purple Heart medical treatment reports which have been withheld from the public. The only person preventing their release is Mr. Kerry.”

Kerry’s modus operandi during his four months in Vietnam, Lipscomb reports, was to ram his Swiftboat onto an enemy-held shore—at times alone, at other times with a few men—killing civilians and even one wounded enemy soldier.  Kerry has confessed to killing civilians, but paints those civilian deaths as “accidents of war,” claiming that they occurred routinely and with “the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”

“No one denies Mr. Kerry’s four bemedaled months in ‘Swiftboats’ or his seven-months’ service as an electrical officer on board the USS Gridley, during its cruises back and forth to California, or even his months as an admiral’s aide in Brooklyn, before he was able to get out of the Navy six months early to run for office,” Lipscomb writes.

Within four days of earning his third Purple Heart, Kerry applied to take advantage of a technicality that allowed him to request immediate transfer to a stateside post.  Once he was back in the U.S., Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and was appointed to the executive committee by Al Hubbard, who claimed to be a former Air Force captain wounded in Vietnam.

Kerry Before Congress . . . and the Nation

Kerry took an active part in VVAW anti-war rallies such as Valley Forge and the “Winter Soldier” guerrilla theater “atrocity” trials in Detroit.  He testified in April of 1971 before the U.S. Senate as an “authority” on the war crimes he claimed his fellow American servicemen had routinely committed in Vietnam.  Apart from his own “accidents of war” during his four months in Vietnam, there is no evidence that Kerry had any idea of the realities of ground combat, but he had no problem with presenting himself as an authority on the subject. 

Specifically, Kerry claimed that American military personnel “raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephone to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages . . . shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks . . .”  and on and on.

Syndicated columnist Armstrong Williams writes of Kerry’s testimony:  “The images were intentionally vivid. They summed up the brutal and arbitrary nature of  war. . . . Kerry distilled the confusion of war into an easily identifiable sound bite: ‘war crime.’ Along the way he impugned the honor of his fellow soldiers by summing them all up as ‘war criminals,’ thus encouraging savage personal attacks on soldiers returning home from Vietnam. . . .”

Williams continues, “[T]he Geneva conventions that Kerry was so fond of invoking require soldiers to report war crimes. This is common knowledge. The obligation to examine orders for legality, and the duty to disobey unlawful orders is made unmistakably made clear to all officers during their training. As a former Vietnam vet recalled, ‘This was hammered into us, and is the basis of individual culpability in war crimes cases. The individual, especially an officer, can not hide behind the ‘instrument of policy’ defense and claim that he is innocent, or blameless, but the policy is a war crime.’”  (Armstrong Williams, “The Massachusetts Butcher,” TownHall.com, April 5, 2004)

Kerry told senators that 200,000 Vietnamese a year were “murdered by the United States of America.”  A spokesman for Kerry disavows Kerry’s use of the word “murdered,” saying he “never suggested or believed and absolutely rejects the idea that the word applied to service of the American soldiers in Vietnam.”  In response to that, John Fund pointed out that the New Hampshire Sunday News asked, “If Kerry wasn’t saying U.S. soldiers murdered 200,000 people a year, then who in the world could he have meant?  The USO?” (John Fund, “Kerry’s Other War Record”)

By the time Kerry appeared before the Senate in April of 1971, the VVAW had been peddling their atrocity stories for two years.  Soon after his testimony before Congress, Kerry repeated the charges on Meet the Press with his cohort, Al Hubbard.  At the time, Hubbard was Executive Secretary of VVAW.  He was featured in Kerry’s anti-war book, The New Soldier. Later, it was revealed that Hubbard had lied about his military rank, was never wounded in combat and never served in Vietnam.

Another thorn in the side of the Kerry campaign has been the photograph that shows Kerry with the infamous “Hanoi Jane” and others at the three-day anti-war rally at Valley Forge in September 1970.  There were, according to Lipscomb’s account, only eight or nine speakers that day.  Fonda was one of them.  But far from being a “casual” member of the audience as Kerry would have us believe, he was at the time a member of the executive committee of the VVAW, which sponsored the rally; and it was he, not Fonda, who was the lead speaker.

So—Was He There?

One Vietnam War historian, Gerald Nicosia, has told CNSNews.com that John Kerry is lying about key events related to his anti-war activities in 1971. Nicosia happens to be a supporter of John Kerry.  Notwithstanding that fact, Nicosia refutes Kerry’s statements that he did not attend a November 1971 meeting of VVAW at which group members discussed the possibility of assassinating U.S. senators who were still supporting the war in Vietnam.  Nicosia backed up his comments regarding Kerry’s presence at the November 1971 meeting by providing CNSNews.com with the FBI’s redacted files about that meeting.  This was reported by Marc Morano of CNSNews.com (“Kerry Lying About Anti-War Past, Supporter Alleges,” March 18, 2004).

Kerry has repeatedly stated that he had not talked to the discredited Al Hubbard since their Meet the Press appearance in April 1971.  But Nicosia states vehemently that that is untrue, and that there were numerous meetings of the two after that, including a meeting in July 1971 in St. Louis.  Further, he says, FBI files on VVAW and minutes of various VVAW meetings indicate that Kerry likely saw Hubbard in November of that year, as well.  Nicosia says Kerry and Hubbard had a “heated argument” at the St. Louis meeting in July that was “witnessed by 200 veterans.”  Nicosia reports that Hubbard and Kerry “were screaming at each other across the hall.” 

Marc Morano comments that Nicosia seems to be uncomfortable disputing Kerry’s statements.  In his CNSNews article, Morano quotes Nicosia saying, “I am in kind of an awkward position here.  I am a Kerry supporter and I certainly don’t want to do anything that hurts him.  On the other hand, my number one allegiance is to truth.  So I am going to go with where the facts are, and John is going to have to deal with that.  I am having some problems with the things he is saying right now, which are not matching up with accuracy.”

Morano points out that in mid-March 2004, Kerry’s presidential campaign spokesman, David Wade, told the New York Sun that Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting in November 1971 and that Kerry had resigned from the VVAW “sometime in the summer of 1971.”  Numerous attempts by various parties to find a letter of resignation supposedly written prior to the November meeting have been unsuccessful.

According to Randy Barnes, the current head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, John Kerry attended the meeting, voted against the plot, and then orally resigned from the organization.  There is no record that Kerry informed law enforcement at that time or any other time about the assassination plot being considered by his “peace” group. If he did, in fact, resign in horrified protest over the assassination plot, why did he not report the plot to law enforcement?

In February of this year, the Democratic party endorsed claims that George W. Bush had “gone AWOL” during his Vietnam-era service with the National Guard.  Some in the Democrat leadership went so far as to accuse President Bush of desertion.  The media spent days hounding White House spokesmen for records of Bush’s National Guard service. 

It’s time for the media to exercise the same level of scrutiny with respect to John Kerry’s service record and his postwar activities.  There seems to be ample information available—and we believe it’s well worth examining.