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Bush's lie about the run-up to war also doesn't stand alone. His campaign has peddled a string of dubious and bogus assertions about Kerry's record, including claims that he voted for (name-any-number-of) tax increases or that he opposed weapons systems (without noting that leading Republicans, including former Defense Secretary Dick Cheney, also had considered them obsolete or excessive).
Even more troubling, Republicans have smeared Kerry's war record, including raising unfounded questions about whether he earned the Bronze Star that he won for heroism and at least one of his three Purple Hearts. A well-financed front group, called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, spearheaded these attacks with assistance from operatives close to George W. Bush's campaign.
As these anti-Kerry veterans spun out their story, much of the national press corps fell into line. CNN competed with Fox News to promote the dubious claims as serious news.
However, several major newspapers, including the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, examined the historical record and exposed the group's claims as deceptive and contradictory. Many of the anti-Kerry veterans were not in position to know what the circumstances were on Kerry's boat when he swung it around and rushed back to pull Jim Rassmann, a Special Forces soldier, out of the water. Rassmann has said Kerry's boat was taking small-arms fire, an account that matches what others on board have said and what the Navy's contemporaneous records show.
The smears were particularly ugly because whatever anyone thinks of Kerry, it was well-known that serving as captain of a swift boat in the Mekong Delta was one of the most hazardous assignments in Vietnam. The casualty rate for those junior officers was staggering. Anyone who captained one of those boats into enemy territory demonstrated extraordinary bravery, regardless of the details of any engagement.
But the conservative news media and mainstream outlets, such as CNN, let themselves be used to promote the dubious charges. The impact on Kerry's reputation has been devastating, sending him into freefall in national polls.
Deniability
For his part, George W. Bush refused to specifically denounce the attacks on Kerry, saying only that all political advertising from independent groups should be banned. In effect, Bush equated the dishonest swift boat veterans' attacks against Kerry's war record with questions raised by some liberal groups about how Bush slipped past better-qualified candidates to get a position in the Texas Air National Guard and then failed to fulfill even those duties.
Sinking to even a lower level, Republicans also sneered at Kerry's three Purple Hearts for Vietnam War wounds, implying that he was a faker. Former Republican Sen. Bob Dole suggested falsely that Kerry had won two Purple Hearts on the same day and didn't even bleed, though Dole later issued a half-hearted apology for his remarks.
As Bush stayed in the background maintaining his "deniability," his Republican allies continued to hammer home the "theme" of Kerry's supposed cowardice, distributing band-aids with purple hearts at the Republican National Convention. Republican delegates wore these band-aids on their chins, cheeks and hands as a way to mock Kerry's wounds. The band-aids were handed out by Morton Blackwell, who runs a Virginia training school for Republicans called the Leadership Institute.
Blackwell honed some of his own propaganda skills as a special assistant for public liaison for President Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Blackwell participated in "public diplomacy" or "perception management" operations that were designed to sell the American people on the need to support hard-line rightist regimes in Central America to crush leftist insurgencies.
In one of those Reagan-Bush propaganda operations, the White House warned that if leftist rebels gained power in Central America, the United States would be flooded with "feet people," hundreds of thousands of Central American refugees. The effectiveness of this "theme" - playing on the racial and ethnic fears of white Americans in the Southwest - had been tested by Reagan's pollster Richard Wirthlin. Although the argument was dubious since Central Americans already were fleeing into the United States to escape the violence inflicted by the region's brutal right-wing security forces, Reagan added his voice to the "feet-people"
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