IT TOOK A LOT OF DIGGING, but my producer Duane was able to find the audio from John Kerry's 1971 appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I played the entire 19 minutes for my radio audience on February 17, and the reaction via the phones and email was uniform: Disliking John Kerry for his actions and words of 33 years ago is not a rare thing, especially among Vietnam veterans and active duty military.
Does this reaction matter? In the California primary it might. According to the 2000 Census, there are 1,122,528 Vietnamese Americans, 447,032 of whom live in California. (Texas is home to 12 percent of Vietnamese Americans--134,961, to be exact.) This subgroup of the California electorate might find very interesting John Kerry's answer to a 1971 question from Senator George Aiken on the effects of an immediate U.S. withdrawal from South Vietnam. Here's Kerry:
"But I think, having done what we have done to that country, we have an obligation to offer sanctuary to the perhaps 2,000, 3,000 people who might face, and obviously they would, we understand that, might face political assasination or something else."
John Kerry obviously did not understand the plans of the Communists, as the numbers of the North's victims ranged far above his estimate of "perhaps 2,000, 3000." In fact, more than 130,000 took to the boats, a million more fled overland, and more than 750,000 were forced into "re-education camps." Next door in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror claimed 2,000,000
lives.
I wonder how John Kerry's antiwar record will play in Orange County, California's Little Saigon? Or to the state's approximately 70,000 Cambodian Americans? Kerry backers point to his youth when he made his statement to the Senate's Foreign Relations Committee. But the massacre at Hue, when the communists executed thousands as they lost control of the city they had initially overrun in the Tet offensive, was well known and ought to have been understood by Kerry when he tossed off his estimate of likely victims of political terror if the United States cut and ran.
Among veterans and active duty military, the picture is more difficult to read, though Kerry's strength in this quarter has been overstated by a media all too ready to buy the "band of brothers" theatrics that Kerry has been staging at each campaign stop. Every time Kerry invokes his real heroism in Vietnam, a network announcer should intone the opinions of Paul Galanti, quoted in the February 17, 2004, Los Angeles Times:
"Paul Galanti learned of Kerry's [1971] speech while held captive inside North Vietnam's infamous 'Hanoi Hilton' prison. The Navy pilot had been shot down in 1966 and spent nearly seven years as a prisoner of war."
"During torture sessions, he said, his captors cited the antiwar speeches as 'an example of why we should cross over to [their] side.'"
"'The Viet Cong didn't think they had to win the war on the battlefield,' Galanti said, 'because thanks to these protestors they were going to win it on the streets of San Francisco and Washington.'"
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