Swift rebutting

John Kerry, still trying to set his military record straight.

Three decades after the Vietnam War and nearly two years after Mr. Kerry's failed presidential bid, most Americans have probably forgotten why it ever mattered whether he went to Cambodia or that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of making it all up, saying he was dishonest and lacked patriotism.

But among those who were on the front lines of the 2004 campaign, the battle over Mr. Kerry's wartime service continues, out of the limelight but in some ways more heatedly — because unlike then, Mr. Kerry has fully engaged in the fight. Only those on Mr. Kerry's side, however, have gathered new evidence to support their case.

The Swift boat group continues to spend money on Washington consultants, according to public records, and last fall it gave $100,000 to a group that promptly sued Mr. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, for allegedly interfering with the release of a film that was critical of him.

Some of the principals behind the Swift boat group continue to press their claims. John O'Neill, the co-author of the group's best-selling manifesto, "Unfit for Command," criticizes Mr. Kerry on television talk shows and solicits money for conservative causes and candidates. In a South Carolina newspaper, William Schachte recently reprised his allegation that he was aboard the small skimmer where Mr. Kerry received the injury that led to his first Purple Heart, and that Mr. Kerry actually wounded himself.

Swift boat message boards and anti-Kerry Web sites still boil with accusations that Mr. Kerry fabricated the military reports that led to his military decorations.

Mr. Kerry, accused even by Democrats of failing to respond to the charges during the campaign, is now fighting back hard.

"They lied and lied and lied about everything," Mr. Kerry says in an interview in his Senate office. "How many lies do you get to tell before someone calls you a liar? How many times can you be exposed in America today?"

His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat. While it would be easy to see this as part of Mr. Kerry's exploration of another presidential run, his friends say the Swift boat charges struck at an experience so central to his identity that he would want to correct the record even if he were retiring from public life.

Mr. Kerry portrays himself as a wary participant in his own defense, insisting in the two-hour interview that he does not want to dwell on the accusations or the mistakes of his 2004 campaign. "I'm moving on," he says several times.

But he can also barely resist prosecuting a case against the group that his friends now refer to as "the bad guys." "Bill Schachte was not on that skimmer," Mr. Kerry says firmly. "He was not on that skimmer. It is a lie to suggest that he was out there on that skimmer."

He shows a photograph of the skimmer being towed behind his Swift boat, insisting that it could barely fit three people, himself and two others. "The three guys who in fact were in the boat all say he wasn't there and will tell you he wasn't there," he said. "We know he wasn't there, and we have all kinds of ways of proving it."

Mr. Kerry has signed forms authorizing the Navy to release his record — something he resisted during the campaign — and hired a researcher to comb the naval archives in Washington for records that could pinpoint his whereabouts during dates of the incidents in dispute. Another former crew member has spent days at a time interviewing veterans to reconstruct every incident in question.

In the end, I hope Kerry's supporters are able to get more media outlets to finally admit that the evidence undermines every one of the Swift Boat liars' claims. But also in the end, I doubt it will mean much to many Attention Deficit America.

But it's certainly a lesson for future campaigns. The Swift Boat campaign began as an effort to show that Kerry was unpatriotic, a betrayer of his fellow vets for going to Capitol Hill to testify against the Vietnam War. That didn't work. Kerry's "last man" speech was just too powerful and the war in Iraq even in the Summer of '04 was beginning to look less and less certain of an easy victory. And by then the lies that got us to Iraq were taking on an early 1970s look and feel.

And the Kerry campaign had been prepared to deal with the realities of his past. They knew going in that his protests against the Vietnam War would be used by the opposition. What they didn't prepare for was that the reality of his service -- service that had been well-documented -- would be turned on its head.

That did work. Plenty of gullible idiots (I've spoken to a lot of them) bought the Swift Boat claims that Kerry's service wasn't a rebuke to George AWOL Bush, but rather evidence that he was a liar and a coward.

I'm not sure how any campaign can prepare to defend itself against outright lies. Lies that are then picked up by the media and, even if the media is skeptical, the reports they publish do give the lies a certain establishment credibility. And when Fox News and MSNBC lavish even more attention on the liars, it may be nearly impossible to counteract, unless the candidate devotes all of his time rebutting the false claims.

The Republican Party understands this very well.

The veterans group, led by Mr. O'Neill, a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971, began its campaign in early 2004 by criticizing Mr. Kerry's protests against the Vietnam War. But backed by Republican donors and consultants, they soon shifted to attack his greatest strength — his record as a military hero in a campaign against a president who never went to war.

Naval records and accounts from other sailors contradicted almost every claim they made, and some members of the group who had earlier praised Mr. Kerry's heroism contradicted themselves.

Still, the charges stuck. At a triumphant gathering of veterans in Fort Worth after the election, Mr. O'Neill was introduced as the man who "torpedoed" Mr. Kerry's campaign; the Swift boat group spent more than $130,000 for a "Mission Accomplished" celebration at Disney World. The president's brother, Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida, sent a letter thanking the "Swifties" for "their willingness to stand up to John Kerry." Even people within the Kerry campaign believed that the attacks had cost their candidate the presidency.

And I imagine that even this Times story, which I think is a pretty important tutorial on organized dirty tricks, will probably be morphed by the same punditocracy so easily manipulated by these tactics into yet another sad tale of John Kerry's sore loserness, a man obsessed with what he did 30 years ago, a candidate too cowardly to release his naval records during the campaign.