Sen. Bob Kerrey's Life Was Ruined by Mass. Liberals

Clinton/Gore Strikes Again; What Is NY Times Attempting Now?

By J. Edward Pawlick
June 2001

When I was a rifleman in Korea in 1953, it was rumored we would be sent to Vietnam. The French were losing that country to the Communists.

Harry Truman's bumbling war with China in Korea had just been ended by President Eisenhower within a few months after taking office. Thank goodness that Ike was too experienced to send me and other soldiers to another land war in Asia.

I couldn't believe my ears twelve years later in 1965, to hear that the liberals from Massachusetts were drafting American boys and sending them to fight in Vietnam. (Our soldiers would average 19-years-of-age in that war.)

The liberals had taken charge in 1960 when John Kennedy became President. They were soon looking for a way for Kennedy to save face after the disaster at the Bay of Pigs. He was advised by a member of the National Security Council: "It is very important that the government have a major anti-Communist victory to its credit ... the odds are still in our favor [in Vietnam]." A few months later, JFK told a reporter, "Now we have a problem in making our power credible and Vietnam looks like the place."

In November 1961, Kennedy sent 7000 troops to Vietnam as guards (the first American soldiers to be sent there). When he became frustrated with the lack of progress, he ordered the CIA in 1963 to stage a coup against the head of our ally, South Vietnam. This led to the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem. It was one of the worst mistakes in our nation's history. Kennedy himself was murdered three weeks later.

Bobby Kennedy was always a hawk on Vietnam. He had assured the public in 1962 after a trip to Vietnam, "We are going to win." He was a hawk until he decided to run for president in March 1968 when he suddenly changed sides and began to attack the teenagers that he and his brother had sent to die in Vietnam.

He and other advisers from Massachusetts had helped Lyndon Johnson take us into a land war in Asia. The advisers included the "whiz kid" from the Harvard Business School, Robert McNamara, who had been head of the Ford Motor Company and was now Secretary of Defense. Also included were the Bundy brothers, William and McGeorge, who were in the Defense Department and National Security.

Poor Bob Kerrey

That's why poor Bob Kerrey and many other boys landed in Vietnam. The liberals of Massachusetts had sent them to a war they were not allowed to win, in a strange country where the enemy hid behind women and children. And then the liberals asked them, "What are you doing? We hear you're killing people."

As our Senator John Kerry wrote last month in the Globe, "It is never too late for Americans to understand the anger that many Vietnam veterans, myself among them, felt toward the body-counting, career-promoting leaders sitting safely in Washington ... But what else is it when the children of America are pulled from front porches and living rooms and plunged almost overnight into a world of sniper fire, land mines, ambushes, rockets, buddies going home in body bags, explosions in the night, sleeplessness, and the confusion created by an enemy who was sometimes invisible firing, and sometimes right next to you smiling? ... Slowly, the truth was understood. The faults in Vietnam were those of the war, not the warriors."

It wasn't that we were on the wrong side. We were on the right side, but it was a fight that, for many reasons, belonged to the Vietnamese, not Americans.

Politics of Clinton/Gore and N.Y. Times

The New York Times says it first questioned Sen. Kerrey in 1998, only days before he was to announce whether he would run against Al Gore for the Presidency. Obviously, the Times believed it had a story which would stop Kerrey from competing with Gore. It says it searched "thousands of pages of classified and unclassified" material that "had been boxed up since the war." Who in the Clinton/Gore administration gave the Times access to classified material?

The Times appears to believe that Kerrey is a figure who should be removed from national politics. It continues to publicize this story.

The story is about a young man who was sent to fight an army which put women and children in front of them as shields. An army which gave guns to women and children and told them to kill the Americans.

The two Vietnamese people who are speaking against Kerrey are a woman who was married to an enemy soldier and another who was twelve at the time. All of the civilians had been warned to evacuate the entire area. But the enemy had apparently ordered innocent people into the area as targets. Why was this wife of a Viet Cong soldier able to hide and the others not? There is also one member of Kerrey's squad who is saying things against the whole squad. The Times reports that his testimony "suffers from inconsistencies."

Why is the New York Times publicizing the word of these two Vietnamese? Are they trying to destroy the image of American soldiers? What is their mission in this?

The Times printed in an editorial in 1962 that Vietnam "is a struggle this country cannot shirk." It continued to support the war until public opinion went against it.

Sen. Kerrey has been tormented all these years by discovering that some of the people he killed in the dark were women and children. What more does the New York Times want to do to this man?

And let's not forget that this powerful source of information owns both the Boston Globe and the Worcester Telegram.

Globe Editorial Repeats Liberal Lie

The Boston Globe wrote last month that the war in Vietnam was "pursued for more than a decade by the best and the brightest in four successive US administrations."

But Eisenhower did not send me or anyone else to Vietnam. He helped the Vietnamese fight their own battle against the Communists as many other countries were doing at that time throughout the world.

Richard Nixon couldn't just pack up the troops and leave the area. He inherited the quagmire from Lyndon Johnson. After Nixon did leave and South Vietnam fell, a million or more people in Cambodia and other parts of the area were killed. Those were good people who had trusted the liberals in America and had been betrayed.

It was Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who "pursued" this war.

But don't wait for any Massachusetts liberal to admit it, much less the former political editor for the Boston Phoenix, Renee Loth, who now writes the editorials that appear in the Globe.