A TRUTH OF NOVEL PROPORTIONS

JOHN KERRY AND JOHN O'NEILL'S LIFELONG ANIMOSITY IS THE STUFF OF A CHEAP PAPERBACK NOVEL

It is an amazing thing to see. It's so dramatic it seems almost surreal.

We are in the midst of a political drama worthy of a 1970s novel or television miniseries. When it first opened, we didn't know it was happening, but now we are hundreds of pages into it--nearing the end, in fact--and its trajectory seems quite clear.

In March of 1969, after young John Kerry had seen his fill of Vietnam, with 3 purple hearts, a bronze star and a silver star under his belt (or on his chest, at any rate), he left "country" to return "stateside," denounce his fellow soldiers, and begin his long trek toward the White House. Later, in 1971, he squared off on the Dick Cavett show with Navy man John O'Neill, who, no coincidence, had taken command of Kerry's boat after his short stint in it and was mightily perturbed at the things Kerry had been saying about his friends.

The exchange has recently been replayed a few times on C-SPAN, and I highly recommend it to all. It not only offers a window into the souls of the two men, it tells us something shameful about the current state of American discourse. The level of debate on the Cavett show is so far beyond anything we could expect today, it seems almost antique.

Not only is Kerry his usual articulate self--with an insufferable Boston accent that has somehow mellowed over the years--but O'Neill, too, is quick and clever. Both men have the command of the facts over which they dispute, and their disagreements, though sharp, remain on the high ground of two gentlemen debating serious matters of public policy. At that point, either of them could have been in Congress, though Kerry had tried and failed to be, and O'Neill never was.

But more than the style of the confrontation, the substance of their meeting is of vital interest now, as well. They parry and thrust over the actions of America and her soldiers in Vietnam, and both are clearly agonized over the loss of life and the seeming intransigence of the situation itself. O'Neill, then with a group called "Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace," holds firmly to the "stay the course" position, while Kerry seems--though not entirely clearly--to favor (you'll excuse the pun) swift withdrawal of American forces and ceding of the region to the Communists. In fact, Kerry says at one point (I'm paraphrasing here) that we can't stop Vietnam from becoming communist, and we might as well let them do it. Something like that.

O'Neill is clearly in the anti-Communist camp, while Kerry has just as obviously made his bed with Jane Fonda. It is fascinating to watch the back-and-forth with the twenty-twenty hindsight to know whose position turned out to be correct. Particularly telling is the interchange in which Cavett notes that no one has suggested that there would be "a bloodbath" if we were to pull out and asks both whether they think there would be. Kerry hedges a bit, but contends that "history" tells him that it is unlikely that there would be a bloodbath, while O'Neill states that the prior actions of the Vietnamese regime strongly indicate that a bloodbath would likely result from premature withdrawal of American forces.

Today, of course, we know who was right, and it was not the idealistic young Kerry. He admits on the show that there might be acts of revenge, but he seems to dismiss it as too small a matter to worry over in the zeal to bring the boys home.

What did happen after Saigon fell?

For one thing, it is estimated that as many as 65,000 South Vietnamese may have been executed. Tens of thousands were "internally exiled" in re-education camps. And, under the Communists' tutelage, the Cambodian Khmer Rouge slaughtered between 1.5 and 3 million people, depending on whom you talk to, and "re-educated" millions more.

Would you call that a "bloodbath," Senator Kerry? It certainly wasn't the land of bread and roses the Kerry/Fonda crowd was expecting to emerge from the ejection of American forces from Southeast Asia.

Now, our novel has opened with the riveting confrontation between the two men in 1971. An uneasy truce is made, as both move on into their lives--Kerry to public service for the people of Massachusetts, an undistinguished Senator making few waves but plenty of friends in high places, O'Neill to obscurity as a lawyer somewhere.

The book could plod on for hundreds of pages, chronicling Kerry's legendary place in the anti-war myth, his rejection of his medals/ribbons (whatever), his failed first marriage, his "interstitial" period of wild dating in the company of Ted Kennedy and Chris Dodd, and his marriage 8 years ago to the megarich Teresa Heinz (later to be known as "Teresa Heinz Kerry.") O'Neill's part in the book would be to disappear. Perhaps from time to time the narrator might tell us in what proximity the two men were, perhaps not. It matters little, for the sudden explosion of O'Neill back on the scene at the height of Kerry's march to the White House should come as a shock to all.

As he is recovering from surgery (he donated an organ to his own wife), John O'Neill sees John Kerry on television and is horrified to realize that the man might well be on the way to becoming president. Out of obscurity, after years of silence, the man in the white suit from the Cavett show begins to contact other veterans and feel his way toward becoming a political force.

And, in the final pages of the book, lo and behold, he appears! Just as the Great Man has taken his place in the pantheon of war heroes, anointed by the Democratic National Convention, just as he can almost catch sight of the Rose Garden as his own--here comes the long-forgotten interloper to throw down the gauntlet of war. The unwelcome adversary, flanked by 250-plus Swift Boat veterans, 60 of whom provide eyewitness testimony to an unheroic, even manipulative, John Kerry, barrels toward him, unheeding of his hysterical shrieks for lawyers, help, and cover. In a riveting, (but lucky for Kerry, buried by the friendly media) press conference, the band of unloving brothers stands, one by one, to denounce the man who would be president.

At this point, Kerry's tragic flaw--an unrealistic conviction that the presidency "belongs" to him--raises its ugly head, and his campaign begins to unravel. Like the grizzled veteran Gore (who makes a few small appearances, but plays no major role), Kerry's very being is bound up in his quest for the presidency. He believes, to the depths of his soul, that it is his turn, his time. After all, did he not bow to the demands of the pollsters and choose the vice-president the party wanted him to? Did he not obediently learn to love the little puppy? And has he not even gone so far as to consume boatloads of horrid ethnic and regional food (though much of it wound up in dumpsters, quickly replaced by catered French cuisine) to satisfy the requirement of being a "regular guy?"

It's not fair.

The question is where we go from here. The usual form of the novel would speed toward the final confrontation--a moment of reckoning, where old lies are revealed, and the future is awarded to truth and destiny. Such moments in real life are few and far between, but stranger things have happened. The final conclusion of the novel can only be determined by whose side its author is on, and, in some sense, it closes a chapter in America's own understanding of Vietnam.

Will the story end with the vindication of the veterans who "stayed the course," who still maintain that their service--and their war--was right, and good, and honorable? Will the nation finally decide that the worst thing that happened in Vietnam was that we failed to give these brave men the resources they needed to win?

Or will the Kerry character be triumphant, and with him the Hollywood celebrities, academics, and 60s holdover hippies that believe and teach that the Vietnam War was wrong from the outset, that the Vietnamese were destined to become Communists, and we should have let them do it, regardless of what they eventually did to their own people and other Southeast Asians?

The Kerry campaign is now pointing fingers at the Bush campaign, rather a dicey move in a world in which no less than three 527s are run by overt Democratic operatives. But the fundamental problem with Kerry's FEC filing and his insistence in blaming his troubles on Bush is that he is misreading the plot. The presidential campaign is between Bush and Kerry. But Kerry and the DNC made the Kerry campaign a chapter in this novel--a riveting potboiler that has been spooling out for more than thirty years, and whose central conflicts should have been settled before he began a second one.

If Senator Kerry wanted to wrap himself in the flag of his Swift Boat unit, he should have checked to be sure no one else was holding the end of it.

The final chapter of this novel has yet to be written, but when we finally see it, it will almost certainly shape our future attitude about war and about the Iraq war in particular.

The Democrats want to make Iraq "another Vietnam," while at the same time reinforcing their interpretation of Vietnam itself. If Kerry is elected, he will take to the White House with him an attitude about war that cannot but undermine our positions in Afghanistan and Iraq--and, indeed, throughout the Middle East. Should the President retain his seat, however, it will represent the final triumph of patriotism over the hippie generation, sending a message to our adversaries around the world that not only do we have free speech, but the free market of ideas leads to the failure of fringe dissent.

There are few messages more needed in the international arena these days than a clear statement that America is both strong enough to vanquish our adversaries and strong enough to permit dissent. And few more potentially incendiary than a signal to the world that America admits fault in Vietnam and is willing to negotiate its vision of the Middle East with terrorists and Europeans.

Stay tuned for the conclusion of this exciting epic drama.