Peter Beinart says "The medals and the Cambodia charges are partisan hack stuff, cynically repeated in service of the greater Republican good." This is in this week's TRB, which can be classified "partisan hack stuff, cynically repeated in service of the greater Democratic good."
Beinart's usually a little better than this, but he misses the point entirely:
Put aside the claims that John Kerry doesn't deserve his Vietnam medals--claims debunked in newspaper after newspaper, claims that, as the Los Angeles Times recently editorialized, "no informed person can seriously believe." Put aside the question of whether John Kerry was in Cambodia on Christmas Eve 1968, as he has (probably incorrectly) claimed. As Slate's Fred Kaplan notes, Kerry's diaries say he was "patrolling near the Cambodian line" on that day. (At least one of his crewmates says it was "very hard to tell.") Does that distinction really constitute an important campaign issue?
The reality is that there is a lot of thoroughly undiscredited material in there. The dailies have taken some swipes at the SwiftVets, questioned their funding and found inconsistencies on a few charges. The might have debunked more if they hadn't tried so hard to ignore it for the first few weeks.
In Cambodia, near Cambodia -- y'know it's all water over there! It's not like Manhattan -- or even the Hamptons! My response is: "Let's put Senator Kerry five miles from the White House next January."
It matters because it's important to his defining story, seared into his memory, the time when he knew he could no longer trust his government. If he wasn't there, the whole story caves. "I was in a big fight at the club last night and I busted a guy's lip. Only I wasn't there at all, I was 'near' there, five or fifty miles away." Kind of loses the narrative integrity, does it not?
Beinart makes a good point that we really should discuss the value of our efforts in Vietnam. This conservative would take that argument any day of the week. I watched the Kerry testimony on C-Span the other night and I was appalled at how little he cared for stopping Communism or serving the South Vietnamese. It seems they're just a bunch of gooks who can't understand the difference between freedom and despotism -- they just want to grow their rice!
Then the pot disparages the kettle:
Calling Kerry unpatriotic is a useful way of delegitimizing his allegations without disproving them. Some of the organizers of the Winter Soldier Investigation have been discredited, but most of the testimonies themselves have not. Miami University Professor Jeffrey Kimball, one of the most respected Vietnam historians, says, "On the whole, the Winter Soldier Investigations established that some Americans committed atrocities in Vietnam. Claims that their testimony has been discredited are unwarranted." Another prominent historian of the war, Wayne State University's Mel Small, says, "Most of the evidence of atrocities presented by the [Winter Soldier] vets remains unchallenged to this day."
Is this "The Nation?" Is Alger Hiss innocent? I expected better from TNR.