The other side of the story.
The Kerry campaign, seeking to control the political damage on a day when a new batch of biographical ads touting Kerry's military service was hitting the airwaves, arranged for two of Kerry's crewmates to appear at a later news conference and declare that Kerry was a consummate leader who braved bullets and aggressively took on the enemy. The Kerry campaign also handed out documents it said showed that the news conference was handled by a public relations firm with ties to the Republican Party and President Bush.
One of Kerry's fellow patrol boat skippers, Wade Sanders, defended Kerry and compared the statements of Kerry's commanders to the investigations of suspected communists by Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s, saying the commanders should be asked, ''Have you no decency?"
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Two of those officers, former lieutenant commander George Elliott and former Coast Guard captain Adrian Lonsdale, stood by Kerry's side when questions were raised during the 1996 Senate campaign about whether Kerry deserved the Silver Star.
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Eight years ago, Elliott, who wrote up Kerry for the Silver Star, rebutted suggestions that Kerry shot a retreating enemy in the back in that encounter, providing crucial support in the closing days of a hard-fought Senate race between Kerry and then-Governor William F. Weld.
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Calling themselves Swift Veterans for Truth, the officers who criticized Kerry yesterday urged him to allow the Department of Defense to release all his military and medical records. The aim of that request appeared to focus on questions such as the one raised by Hibbard about the first Purple Heart. The veterans said they wanted the records released by the Navy, not by the campaign, to ensure that the public can see everything in Kerry's file. Michael Meehan, Kerry's spokesman, said the campaign has released everything in the Navy file.
Meehan said the commanders were motivated by partisan politics and noted that a lead organizer, John O'Neill, had ties to the Republican Party stretching back to the Nixon White House. The Kerry campaign showed reporters a photo of O'Neill meeting with President Nixon in 1971 and copies of favorable evaluations of Kerry by Elliott and Hibbard.
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The Kerry campaign said in a statement, however, that one of the news conference's organizers, Merrie Spaeth, was ''tied to the Bush campaign's underhanded tactics to smear John McCain in the 2000 Republican presidential primary." The Kerry campaign said Spaeth is the widow of Harold Lezar, who ran in 1994 with Bush as a candidate for lieutenant governor. Spaeth was director of media relations for President Reagan.
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In contrast to the commanders, all but one of the 15 or so men who served under Kerry's command have spoken highly of the senator, and many have said they eventually came to understand his opposition to the Vietnam War. ''John Kerry never backed down," crewmate Del Sandusky said yesterday. ''His philosophy was, `Attack, attack, attack.' "Link
