Another Kerry Big Lie Punctured

One of the core charges that John Kerry’s media-aided campaign made in 2004 and since to delegitimize the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is that its leader John O’Neill, who had opposed Kerry in 1971, was a creation of Richard Nixon’s White House.

I was there, and know better. Until now, the central purported prop for the charge went unrebutted. Charles “Chuck” Colson has now spoken up. It’s time for reputable media, and even Kerry’s advocates if they have any integrity, to cease this charge. Like a dime-novel legend, based on little, this charge has been frequently repeated and embellished by Swiftee critics.

The charge of being a Nixon White House creation is based upon an article that Joe Klein published in the December 2, 2002 New Yorker magazine. Joe Klein passes from Kerry’s speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, 1971:

He was an immediate celebrity. He was also an immediate target of the Nixon Administration. Years later, Chuck Colson-who was Nixon's political enforcer-told me, "He was a thorn in our flesh. He was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil. We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."

Actually, in 1971 I formed Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace (VVJP), which John O’Neill joined, to oppose Kerry. Neither Colson nor the White House “formed” VVJP nor “found” John O’Neill.

In 2004, I contacted Joe Klein and Chuck Colson, to rebut this charge. Neither replied.

Klein has not revealed his interview notes or recording (if there was one) with Colson, so it’s unknown if the quote of Colson is accurate or if it is out of context.

Colson didn’t reply, trying to stay out of the 2004 Vietnam vets taking on Kerry, as he didn’t want to distract from his prison ministry.

Now, Colson has replied, rebutting Klein.

Vietnam veteran Bruce Obermeyer, physics undergrad, MBA, who has worked in aerospace safety at Boeing for decades, wrote to Charles Colson inquiring about the charge: “Can Mr. Colson please clear up the confusion about his involvement with VVJP and the alleged quote.” (Obermeyer has written me, “Unlike John Kerry, I stayed the full year of my tour, and unlike John Kerry, I actually was inside Cambodia, flying missions in the skies over it for a longer period of time than John Kerry's entire tour.”)

This is the reply Obermeyer received February 25, 2008 from Colson’s spokesman:

[W]e forwarded your email to Mr.Colson for his review. He has since read your email and has asked me to reply with his comments:

"No, I have never taken credit for trying to organize something called the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. I discovered Mr. O'Neil, who had just come out of the Navy, and brought him into the White House and worked with him and gave him some encouragement. A lot of people charged that this was really a Nixon front-group that I had started. That's untrue. I hope this helps." - Chuck Colson

See much more, below the fold:

The above covers the bare facts. Below, in detail, to create a historical record (esp. as many primary sources are not on the Internet), are more.

About Vietnam Veterans For a Just Peace (VVJP):

August 27, 2004 I wrote a column for the Augusta Free Press (AFP), “John O’Neill and John Kerry,” in which I described the events of 1971.

(When the Augusta Free Press changed its software, it didn’t transfer in its archives, so the link at http://www.augustafreepress.com/stories/storyReader$25485 is not working. I scanned the article into Word, so it can appear in full at the end of this post.)

Here’s excerpts from my AFP column:

At the time, I had recently returned to civilian life after service with the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Several years before, graduating college and beginning graduate school, out of patriotism and belief in our mission in Vietnam, I had volunteered. I was now living with my mother, working for a relative in a fabric store in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, awaiting the restart of graduate school in the fall of 1971. I was outraged and hurt by Kerry's grandstanding falsehoods. I wrote a long letter of protest about it to the then editor of The New York Times op-ed page, Harrison Salisbury (a respected journalist and historian, and an opponent of the war). Without contacting me, Mr. Salisbury edited my letter and published it as a New York Times op-ed on May 13, 1971….

I started getting supportive phone calls from many other Vietnam vets, saying let's do more to clear our reputations. A letter was forwarded to me from a Vietnam veteran who had been a river-boat commander in the same unit as John Kerry, John O'Neill, who was to soon leave the Navy and who had been denied an opportunity by Sen. Fulbright to rebut Kerry. Other Vietnam veterans represented many thousands of Vietnam veterans in student and local veterans clubs around the country. We formed the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. I borrowed money for airline tickets and some double-up rooms at the YMCA in Washington and for a bargain-basement sport jacket and tie for myself, rented a space at the National Press Club, sent out amateurish press-conference invitations and sat in a phone booth at the Y for 24 hours begging newspaper and TV reporters to come to our meeting on June 1, 1971.

Many did. At the last minute, a representative from the VFW, its reputation hurting for neglecting Vietnam veterans, joined us. We received national press for our rebuttal to Kerry and his gang. John O'Neill effectively debated and rebutted Kerry on Dick Cavett's late-night TV show. Around this time, O'Neill was invited to meet President Nixon. As O'Neill entered the Oval Office, he wisecracked that he had actually voted for Humphrey in '68!

On March 16 of this year, MSNBC aired a review of that time, in which a Nixon Oval Office transcript has Haldeman saying that Colson claimed credit for finding O'Neill and for creating the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. He, nor the White House, absolutely did not.

This lie, repeated in the current press, denigrates a true band of brothers fighting for our reputations against the false war criminal charges made by Kerry that slandered us and our country, and whose lasting negative impressions denied us honor and ease in rebuilding our civilian lives.

Haldeman and Colson may have been trying to curry favor with an intemperate Nixon for their failure to counter Kerry and other anti-Vietnam protestors. Haldeman and Nixon are now dead, and Colson has refused to respond to requests to come clean. The fact is that prior to my New York Times op-ed, virtually no one was defending the reputation of Vietnam veterans.

MSNBC did an extensive investigation of the events in 1971 for an hour special aired on July 25. MSNBC reviewed all and presented many clips from the Nixon Oval Office tapes. MSNBC also conducted many extensive interviews with almost all involved. In one tape, Nixon and advisors are discussing some time in June, after our press conference, that they'd like to help us. Whether they did help get any of the interviews and TV/radio shows we appeared on in the following months, I have no knowledge. Dick Cavett this past week on TV said that he chose O'Neill, and he wasn't at the time aware of any Nixon White House touting. I only know that we only had a very few mainstream appearances, and that I succeeded in raising only about $2,000 from $10 donations from average Americans around the country. Hardly the stuff of purported White House power!

The same night, July 25, CNN also aired an hourlong documentary on Kerry's career. When it came to VVJP, the most they could suggest is that after our press conference, the White House may have supported us.

Individual Vietnam veterans banded quickly together to defend our reputation and sacrifices against the distorted claims of a few hundred radical Kerryites, many of who were proven not to even be Vietnam veterans. From the small donations received from average Americans, I paid off the debts, and we all returned to school and our lives.

The March 16, 2004 MSNBC Brian Williams show carried the charge. As I refer to above, Brian Williams’ then producer, Andy Franklin, followed up over the next months, including a depth of research I can attest to (as he interviewed me at great length, and we discussed his research later), finding nothing to support the charge in the documentary he prepared that was presented the eve of the 2004 Democratic Convention. (Franklin has repeatedly said to me he is critical of the 2004 Swiftee campaign, especially as a distraction from what he felt more current issues.)

Also, the March 16 MSNBC show inferred that the White House got O’Neill on to the Cavett Show to debate John Kerry, on June 30, 1971. “The White House encouraged O’Neill to challenge Kerry to a debate….Two weeks later, the veterans squared off on the popular Dick Cavett show.” In fact, at the VVJP press conference June 1, 1971 at Washington’s National Press Club, I’d said: “We challenge John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to face us in debate. His face has monopolized the airwaves for too long, and his assertions cannot be allowed to go unanswered any longer.”

The inference was rebutted by Dick Cavett himself on C-SPAN’s March 28, 2004 rebroadcast of the debate, which Cavett introduces by referring to the VVJP challenge by me. The challenge was reported in the June 2, 1971 New York Times coverage of the press conference: “The new veterans group…challenged John Kerry of Vietnam Veterans Against the War to a nationally televised debate.” Cavett added on C-SPAN in 2004, it had been his idea to invite O’Neill, not prompted by Nixon’s White House.

About Joe Klein:

Joe Klein is currently a columnist for Time Magazine, and has appeared on TV and numerous magazines.

See the conservative website NewsBusters.org for a play-by-play of Klein’s performances at Time. Before Time, Klein gained fame of a sort by being revealed as the anonymous author of Primary Colors, about disillusionment with a thinly veiled Bill Clinton. Liberal The Nation Washington editor David Corn was not amused:

Yesterday, Joe Klein, who regularly uses his Newsweek column to berate President Clinton as an unreliable, immature, promiscuous baby-boomer, confessed that he was, after all, the author of the novel "Primary Colors," the purportedly "thinly-veiled account" of Clinton's 1992 campaign. Klein, who had repeatedly and adamantly denied that he was Anonymous, finally acknowledged that he had lied -- to his workmates, to his friends and to the public he professes to serve.

Klein's forced admission -- which came only after the Washington Post got the goods on him…

Yesterday Klein defended his previous denials -- such as the one in which he said he would stake his "journalistic credibility" on his statements that he was not Anonymous. He likened such statements to "lying to protect a source." That's an odious comparison, and one which gives the protection of sources a bad name. Klein's con job can only contribute to the already too-high level of public cynicism regarding journalists and journalism. Media consumers will be right to ask, "What else is he (and they) lying about?"

The Washington Post’s Howard Kurtz reported on a book that told of Klein’s relationship to John Kerry.

In his new memoir "No Excuses," veteran Democratic consultant Robert Shrum says Time columnist Joe Klein doubled as a "sometime adviser," and that the Massachusetts senator "craved his approval."

Klein’s fawning December 2, 2002 article in the New Yorker about Kerry (10,867 words), where the questionable Colson quote first appeared with only Klein’s word for it, certainly indicated to Kerry he could depend upon Klein to be in his corner in the major media.

About Wade Sanders:

Wade Sanders is a Swift Boat veteran of Vietnam. He did not serve with John Kerry, but they have a strong friendship. Sanders was a surrogate for Kerry during the 2004 campaign. The Oakland Tribune of September 11, 2004 (not available online, except at Free Republic) reports Sanders’ intemperance:

O'Neill "needs to be confronted with the lies he's fomenting," Sanders said. He likened O'Neill and Karl Rove to Nazi propaganda master Joseph Goebbels, saying they "studied at that man's knee."

I replied:

As a proudly Jewish veteran of Vietnam, I take strong exception (and that's more polite than it deserves) at Kerry's California Veterans for Kerry leader, Wade Sanders, using language that likens John O'Neill to Joseph Goebbels. This is the same as when John Kerry said "The only feeling you could have was that you were like the Germans" in being in Vietnam [Dick Cavett show, 1971]. It is because of Kerry's words and actions then and now, and those like Sanders whom Kerry enlists in leading his campaign, that Vietnam veterans are so outraged, as are so many other citizens. Their brand of gutter smear politics reaches its ultimate low with likening Vietnam veterans to Nazis.

Sanders continues to be fond of calling Swiftees, or in this case their defenders who document the media’s efforts to squelch the Swiftees, as apostles of Goebbels. In 2008, Sanders writes: “The authors of this book apparently channelled the former Reich Minister of Information…”

Sanders has written virtually the same column over and over, wherever he can get it published, bashing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. For example, even at Military.com in 2006, Sanders is still beating his dead horse. Sanders cites the Klein article as evidence that John O’Neill was “ ‘the centerpiece of the Nixon White House strategy to undermine Kerry’ per authoritative reporting on the matter.”

I, and law professor Maimon Schwarzschild, wrote about Wade Sanders in December 2004. Schwarzschild commented on a TV appearance with Sanders earlier in the year:

The odd thing about the fellow, it seemed to me, was his ingrained leftism, coexisting with a perfectly conventional (trial-lawyer) personal style. It wasn't just what he said on the air, which veered into conspiracy theory territory about Bush knowing and approving in advance of ("pervasive") torture and war crimes. Off the air, he was even more revealing. As we chatted with the program host, he reverted repeatedly to the idea that the Iraq war is "racist". (An odd idea, surely?) His eyes lit up almost worshipfully though, when he reported meeting Daniel Ellsberg at some Kerry campaign stop. It was all very much in the spirit of the 60s and 70s anti-war left.

As the directly knowledgeable sources have not gone public, I will not narrate instances I’ve been told of Sanders’ military service that are less than complimentary. Nor has anyone taken the trouble to document Sanders’ relationships in examining government jobs he’s landed.

Sanders is now the Senior Advisor on Veterans and Military Affairs to California’s liberal Democrat Lieutenant Governor, John Garamendi, with whom Sanders served in the Clinton administration. LtGov Garamendi’s official website says:

He [Garamendi] has taken the unusual step of creating a staff position for a Senior Advisor on Military and Veterans Affairs, who is tasked with developing programs that assist California’s Veterans to obtain the services they need to fully re-enter civilian life. Housing, healthcare, job training and education are among the key areas of focus for these programs.

I wish Sanders well with this task. But, here he is, instead, commenting in a February 26, 2008 news article about military equipment of California’s National Guard units that have served in Iraq. (Note: The equipment is not paid for by nor the property of California, but is property of the US Department of Defense.)

In financial terms that means about a billion dollars worth of the state's equipment is now overseas or in other states.

Don't count on uncle sam in paying us back anytime soon.

"I would not hold my breath that we're going to get reimbursement, at least not in the future," said Wade Sanders.

According to the Associated Press, “The Guard has about 200 trucks, Humvees and other items overseas, representing about 5 percent of its total equipment pool. It also is about to lose all 12 of its Chinook helicopters to other states to make up for aircraft those units have sent to war zones.” According to a 2004 Census release, California has 2.3-million veterans. They may benefit more from Wade Sanders paying attention to them than to 5% of California National Guard vehicles.

About Other Media:

Leftist Media Matters was quick off the mark criticizing the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. On May 4, 2004, the day of the Swiftees initial press conference, Media Matters laid out what it called the “partisan ties of Kerry critic.” The press conference was either criticized in the press or, mostly, ignored, spurring the Swiftees to come together to document their case in the bestseller Unfit for Command that turned the Kerry campaign toward defeat. As a chronicler of the Swiftees who was at the May 4 press conference said, “most of the ‘mainstream’ journalists just sat there, with expressions of disbelief or outright anger.”

Getting its date wrong, Media Matters repeated the charge: “O'Neill was a creation of the Nixon administration, as Joe Klein detailed in the January 5 issue of The New Yorker.” Media Matters, according to its own search engine, has returned to the theme of denouncing the Swiftees 255 times.

Byron York wrote about Media Matters:

Media Matters is an avowedly political institution, part of a group of institutions ¬ the Center for American Progress, MoveOn.org, and others ¬ that have become increasingly important in Democratic politics. In 2004, Byron York revealed the origins of Media Matters and the big Democratic party donors who helped Brock bring it to life….

Brock’s donors read like a Who’s Who of those who have financed the new, activist Left. Besides Buell and Hindery, donors to Media Matters include Peter Lewis, chairman of Progressive Corp., who has contributed more than $7 million to the 527s in partnership with his friend, the financier George Soros. There is Democratic activist Bren Simon, wife of shopping-mall tycoon Mel Simon, New York psychologist and donor Gail Furman, California philanthropist James Hormel, and others. Two anti-Bush organizations, the New Democratic Network and MoveOn.org, have also contributed to Brock’s project.

In addition to his donor list, Brock’s staff at times resembles that of a political campaign….

Given all that, it seems fair to say that Media Matters is only partly about the media. It is also very much about defeating George W. Bush.

Whatever its political orientation, Media Matters is what is known as a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, meaning it is tax-exempt and can accept tax-exempt contributions (similar tax-exempt strategies are used by groups on both the left and the right)….

Hillary Clinton takes credit for helping found Media Matters:

It has also now come to light that not only did Hillary Clinton help start Media Matters with former conservative David Brock in charge, she bragged about it to a convention of the far left. At the Daily Kos convention — a gathering of the far, far left — Hillary Clinton said the following:

"We are certainly better prepared and more focused on, you know, taking our arguments, and making them effective, and disseminating them widely... in a lot of the new progressive infrastructure, institutions that I helped to start and support like Media Matters and Center for American Progress."

The significance of this is that Media Matters fed much of the media criticism of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth throughout the 2004 campaign and since. During the 2004 campaign, I traced some Media Matters press releases in words and time to major media reporting. An interesting exercise would be to use the “plagiarism” software common in colleges to check term papers to comprehensively examine the verbatim or paraphrased use of Media Matters utterances in the major media.

Hillary may be chagrined that, despite her help to John Kerry, John Kerry is supporting Barack Obama in 2008. Kerry feels that Obama is being “swiftboated” (using the term in the inappropriate Left’s way as an unfair smear attack, instead as correctly as factually exposing lies and distortions), according to a January 2008 message to Obama supporters, by Hillary and dastardly Republicans.

Indeed, it was reported post-election by Newsweek’s insiders to the Kerry campaign, in the November 15, 2004 issue, that major newspapers were also receiving feed from the Kerry campaign to undermine the Swiftees.

The Kerry campaign did work closely with the major dailies, feeding documents to The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe to debunk the Swift Boat vets. The articles were mostly (though not entirely) supportive of Kerry, but it was too late.

The Kerry campaign, from the first, charged that John O’Neill was a Nixon invention and the Swiftees a Bush campaign invention, neither being further from the truth, as we involved knew, and is well-documented in To Set The Record Straight, from inside the Swiftees’ campaign.

Without listing all the many major media repeats of the charge, let’s turn to the MSM’s leading newspaper, the New York Times, which has continued to carry the charge for Kerry.

In a May 28, 2006 front-page feature, the NYT’s reporter Kate Zernike wrote:

In February 2005, Mr. Kerry's supporters formed their own group, the Patriot Project, to defend veterans who take unpopular positions, particularly against the Iraq war. One of their first tasks was to visit newspaper editorial boards in defense of Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and veteran whose military record has been attacked by Republicans and conservative blogs since he called for pulling the troops out of Iraq….

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.

The Patriot Project’s website, http://www.patriotproject.com/, has gone out of business (its last posting November 25, 2006, fortuitously my birthday!), not surfacing any of its promised evidence proving John Kerry, or John Murtha for that matter, was lied about, nor that John O’Neill was “recruited by the Nixon administration.” What was the Patriot Project’s finances or funding? There is no IRS filing 990 for the Patriot Project at the 990-site GuideStar.org, nor mention of the Patriot Project in the IRS’ Publication 78, updated through December 2007, which lists organizations filing their 990.

Investigative journalist Thomas Lipscomb thoroughly fisked, at RealClearPolitics.com, the NYT Kate Zernike feature. With relevance to the charge dealt with here:

Zernike makes much of the support of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth "backed by Republican donors and consultants," which indeed it was. But she shows no interest in who is backing "the Patriot Project" challenging the Swift Vets claims "formed by Kerry supporters" since February 2005 that is the occasion for her story….

Zernike wastes most of her story simply repeating rather than weighing Kerry talking points: She defines John O'Neill as "a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show." That is a pretty dramatic charge by The New York Times. But the extensive record Zernike apparently missed, including the Times's own archives, shows it is totally untrue. If O'Neill was recruited by anyone for the Cavett Show, it was Bruce Kesler, a Marine veteran whose op-ed O'Neill had come across in the Times and whose "Vietnam Veterans for A Just Peace" O'Neill quickly joined.

Kesler nominated O'Neill for the show. In the CSPAN rebroadcast of the original 1971 Cavett debate during the 2004 campaign, Dick Cavett, who had been on the famous Nixon "enemies list," denied the Nixon Administration had anything to do with setting up the debate or who participated. During the election Kesler gave the entire story to Todd Purdum, but nothing appeared in the Times. Kesler also outlined how the debate had come about in a commentary piece in the Augusta Free Press in August of 2004. And the Kesler challenge for Kerry to debate was carried in the June 2, 1971 New York Times.

I got into Ms. Zernike the day of her article, “NYT’s Is Full Of Kerry,” on the charge among other issues.

In fact, and well investigated and documented, including by a televised interview with Dick Cavett – a supporter of Kerry -- in 2004, it was I who independently founded and led the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace in 1971, it was I who challenged Kerry to debate at our press conference on June 1, 1971, O’Neill was released from active duty in the Navy only a few days before and asked me if he could join us, Cavett says he had no contact from Nixon's administration, and it wasn’t until well after we received national publicity for challenging Kerry’s band of real and fraudulent Vietnam vets that Nixon invited O’Neill to meet.

In another post, I got into Kate Zernike’s two-faced credulity re: Kerry’s invented trip to Cambodia, “Kate Zernike Reporting For Duty.”

Here and here I got into the Patriot Project’s “actionable libel?”

At over 4200 words, and numerous links, hopefully this post will serve the historical record.

Below is my AFP column, in entirety, otherwise no longer available on the Internet.

http://www.augustafreepress.com/stories/story Reader$25485

John O'Neill and John Kerry

Guest View

Bruce Kesler

Special to The Augusta Free Press

How did we get into this catfight today about John Kerry's war and protest record from 35 and 33 years ago?

A New York Times reporter just called me to ask that. I responded that what happened in 1971 was put behind us by those of us who argued against John Kerry then. We wouldn't be raising it now if John Kerry had not continued to now to misrepresent his service and downplay his protests, touting his short service 35 years ago as his major qualification to lead the U.S. and world in these most perilous times.

It was made by John Kerry, for us Americans, a core issue of integrity.

On May 13, John Kerry responded to the question by Alan Colmes of Fox News "What is your slogan, like 'It's the economy stupid?' " with "I'm going to bring truth and responsibility back to the White House."

When your hopefully esteemed editor invited me to write, I said that I would write about what I personally experienced.

In the spring of 1971, John Kerry and a small group of purported and real Vietnam veterans camped out in Washington to protest the U.S. involvement in Vietnam. They received extensive publicity to their vastly overblown charges of pervasive brutality and war crimes by U.S. forces. The antiwar chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, Sen. William Fulbright, featured Kerry at a televised hearing. This one-sided protest publicity demoralized many citizens, and lastingly blackened the reputation and sacrifices of other Vietnam vets that made our reentry into peaceful civilian life unwelcome and harsh.

At the time, I had recently returned to civilian life after service with the Marine Corps in Vietnam. Several years before, graduating college and beginning graduate school, out of patriotism and belief in our mission in Vietnam, I had volunteered. I was now living with my mother, working for a relative in a fabric store in Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, awaiting the restart of graduate school in the fall of 1971. I was outraged and hurt by Kerry's grandstanding falsehoods. I wrote a long letter of protest about it to the then editor of The New York Times op-ed page, Harrison Salisbury (a respected journalist and historian, and an opponent of the war). Without contacting me, Mr. Salisbury edited my letter and published it as a New York Times op-ed on May 13, 1971.

In it, I wrote:

" ... the overwhelming majority of Vietnam veterans and Americans bitterly resent the charge from the left that they are all war criminals .... It is not a crime to be American and young, but it is if one adds to that ignorant, foolish or irrational dialogue as citizens of a democratic government. The antiwar veterans are not ignorant of the facts; they merely use them to form an army of young people marching to their drums, exploiting issues, fears and people for their own ends. That is the crime."

I started getting supportive phone calls from many other Vietnam vets, saying let's do more to clear our reputations. A letter was forwarded to me from a Vietnam veteran who had been a river-boat commander in the same unit as John Kerry, John O'Neill, who was to soon leave the Navy and who had been denied an opportunity by Sen. Fulbright to rebut Kerry. Other Vietnam veterans represented many thousands of Vietnam veterans in student and local veterans clubs around the country. We formed the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. I borrowed money for airline tickets and some double-up rooms at the YMCA in Washington and for a bargain-basement sport jacket and tie for myself, rented a space at the National Press Club, sent out amateurish press-conference invitations and sat in a phone booth at the Y for 24 hours begging newspaper and TV reporters to come to our meeting on June 1, 1971.

Many did. At the last minute, a representative from the VFW, its reputation hurting for neglecting Vietnam veterans, joined us. We received national press for our rebuttal to Kerry and his gang. John O'Neill effectively debated and rebutted Kerry on Dick Cavett's late-night TV show. Around this time, O'Neill was invited to meet President Nixon. As O'Neill entered the Oval Office, he wisecracked that he had actually voted for Humphrey in '68!

On March 16 of this year, MSNBC aired a review of that time, in which a Nixon Oval Office transcript has Haldeman saying that Colson claimed credit for finding O'Neill and for creating the Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. He, nor the White House, absolutely did not.

This lie, repeated in the current press, denigrates a true band of brothers fighting for our reputations against the false war criminal charges made by Kerry that slandered us and our country, and whose lasting negative impressions denied us honor and ease in rebuilding our civilian lives.

Haldeman and Colson may have been trying to curry favor with an intemperate Nixon for their failure to counter Kerry and other anti-Vietnam protestors. Haldeman and Nixon are now dead, and Colson has refused to respond to requests to come clean. The fact is that prior to my New York Times op-ed, virtually no one was defending the reputation of Vietnam veterans.

MSNBC did an extensive investigation of the events in 1971 for an hour special aired on July 25. MSNBC reviewed all and presented many clips from the Nixon Oval Office tapes. MSNBC also conducted many extensive interviews with almost all involved. In one tape, Nixon and advisors are discussing some time in June, after our press conference, that they'd like to help us. Whether they did help get any of the interviews and TV/radio shows we appeared on in the following months, I have no knowledge. Dick Cavett this past week on TV said that he chose O'Neill, and he wasn't at the time aware of any Nixon White House touting. I only know that we only had a very few mainstream appearances, and that I succeeded in raising only about $2,000 from $10 donations from average Americans around the country. Hardly the stuff of purported White House power!

The same night, July 25, CNN also aired an hourlong documentary on Kerry's career. When it came to VVJP, the most they could suggest is that after our press conference, the White House may have supported us.

Individual Vietnam veterans banded quickly together to defend our reputation and sacrifices against the distorted claims of a few hundred radical Kerryites, many of who were proven not to even be Vietnam veterans. From the small donations received from average Americans, I paid off the debts, and we all returned to school and our lives.

In the 1972 campaign, a few VVJPers were active for Nixon. I was not, too busy in graduate school and working, confident Nixon would win over McGovern. McGovern only won Massachusetts, Kerry's home state.

The John O'Neill I knew in 1971 was a humble, sweet, decent guy. It was not until recently that I even found out he'd been tops at Annapolis, and came from a distinguished Naval family. He slept in my mother's roach-infested slum apartment in Brooklyn without any comment (probably a little better than the digs we had in Vietnam). John O'Neill, today, still seems the guy I knew then.

On March 19, 2004, John O'Neill and I had our first contact since those days, when I Googled and called him. My purpose was primarily to interrogate him whether he knew anything that I didn't as to whether, as some were saying in the press, the Nixon White House created the VVJP. O'Neill did not. We then chuckled at how ignorant we were in 1971 about John Kerry's war and protest record, and were only beginning to find out. In 1971, we were interested in the reputation of Vietnam veterans, and secondly on leaving a viable South Vietnam behind.

Bruce Kesler resides in Encinitas, Calif.