One of the stories from the just completed Presidential campaign that historians will debate for many years is the effect that the Swift Boat Veterans had on the just completed Presidential campaign. Here are earlier posts on the Swift Boat Veterans.
This John Fund article on OpinonJournal.com is a useful review of the story of these Vietnam veterans groups that raised doubts during the campaign about John Kerry’s fitness to serve as commander in chief. The setting for the story is the Restoration Weekend, an annual gathering of political activists that David Horowitz organizes. Mr. Horowitz is a former left-wing radical who opposed the Vietnam War effort as an editor of Ramparts magazine, but who is now conservative writer and political activist.
The article does a good job of summarizing the Swift Boat Veterans’ activities during the campaign, and includes the following insightful observation:
As the evening proceeded and one Vietnam veteran after another shared the story of how veterans felt compelled to attack Mr. Kerry for his 1971 testimony branding fellow veterans as war criminals, former CBS News correspondent Bernard Goldberg leaned back in his chair in amazement.
“I think some of them are too intense,” he told me. “But screwing with these guys by accusing them of atrocities was one of the biggest mistakes John Kerry ever made. Thirty years later he woke a sleeping giant.”