BY CHRISTOPHER HANSON
It's no secret that news organizations in
recent years have treated the personal
character of politicians as a journalistic
free-fire zone. Reporters have blasted
away at virtually every target they could
find -- from young Bill Bradley's
belligerent tactics on the basketball
court to Al Gore's days as a tobacco
profiteer and George W. Bush's alleged
National Guard absenteeism.
Given the journalistic rules of engagement, one can't help
wondering why it took so long for the news media to begin asking
questions about the Vietnam war record of Bob Kerrey. The Medal
of Honor winner was elected governor of Nebraska in 1982, won a
Senate seat in 1988, ran for president in 1992 and considered a
second run in 2000. Yet the public did not learn until April 2001 that
a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of then Lt.
Kerrey's seven-man Navy SEAL commando unit during a raid on a
suspected Vietcong gathering.
The story, unearthed by reporter Gregory L. Vistica and published
in The New York Times Magazine, was disturbing. (A version also
was broadcast on 60 Minutes II.) The magazine quoted one
member of Kerrey's SEAL team, Gerhard Klann, saying Kerrey had
ordered and participated in a massacre of more than a dozen men,
women, and children (including an infant) on February 25, 1969, in
the hamlet of Thanh Phong. 60 Minutes II and other news outlets
quoted Vietnamese villagers who also asserted the killings had been
deliberate.
By contrast Kerrey and five other members of the team said the
civilians had been killed accidentally in cross fire when an unseen
enemy began shooting. In an apparent bid to limit damage to his
reputation, Kerrey gave his version in a speech and TV appearances
before Vistica's story ran. Kerrey was, however, unable to explain
why the dead civilians were found grouped together -- as if they
had been rounded up and shot.
Those killings were preceded by a separate, equally controversial
incident. According to Klann, the SEALs stumbled across three
children, an old woman, and an old man in an outlying hut and
silenced them with knives. He said the old man struggled and
Kerrey held him down so that Klann could finish him off.
According to Kerrey, he did not order or participate in any such
killings and did not see these civilians die. At the same time,
however, Kerrey acknowledged that "Standard operating procedure
was to dispose of the people we made contact with . . . . Kill the
people we made contact with or we have to abort the mission," he
told Vistica. It is unlawful to kill civilians even if letting them live
might jeopardize the mission, according to a section of the Army
Field Manual that Vistica quotes.
Although Vistica deserves credit for breaking the story, one can
only wish that the press corps had uncovered it earlier, when it
might have been useful to voters. It is unclear what would have
happened had the story broken when Kerrey was a candidate. Some
might have refused to vote for him as a war criminal. Some might
have believed his version and voted for him, understanding that
accidental killing of civilians is a sad commonplace of modern
warfare. Some might have voted for him whatever version was true
on the ground that these SEALs were mere instruments of a policy
conceived by higher-ups. This last group of voters might have
weighed Kerrey's political record and potential and judged him
overall to be a far better man than the brass and advisers who set
the killing wheels in motion, misdirecting the patriotic idealism of
brave young men. Whatever their ultimate judgment, voters should
have been able to assess Kerrey knowing his whole war record.
And, in fact, by the time Kerrey ran for statewide office in 1982,
enough was known to raise questions about any former Vietnam
SEAL. Details of the SEALs' secret war in Vietnam had come to
light. These included the use of SEAL teams in the American-run
Phoenix program, which worked to eradicate Vietcong cadres and
village elders aligned with the communist cause. News profiles of
Kerrey during his 1992 presidential race did occasionally include
references to the mission of the SEALs in Vietnam, such as the
following from The Washington Post: "SEALs are . . . specialists in
ambush, kidnapping, sapping, sabotage, assassination and a variety
of other black arts."
The SEALs' role in Vietnam suggested some obvious questions for
reporters to pursue regarding Kerrey. What sort of "black arts" had
this aspiring national leader practiced personally? Did Kerrey's
raiders deliberately target civilians? Or inadvertently kill them?
Instead, there were glowing profiles of Kerrey that focused on
another fateful raid against a suspected Vietcong outpost. This was
the March 1969 operation in which Kerrey had part of a leg blown
off but insisted on staying in command until the skirmish was won.
He was later awarded the Medal of Honor for that operation. The
articles cast Kerrey as the ultimate hero: he had emerged with honor
from a dubious and divisive conflict. In story after story, Bob
Kerrey was the man who overcame the agonizing handicap of a
war wound and the taunts of antiwar activists to work for national
reconciliation. He was "a transformed survivor (and) charismatic
war hero" (Washington Post, January 31, 1992). "The story of
what happened to Kerrey in Vietnam in some ways is reminiscent
of the John F. Kennedy PT-109 legend" (The New Republic,
December 18, 1989). Kerrey came back from Vietnam a "certified
hero . . . . But as he wobbled onto the Philadelphia streets, the
welcome he got was from strangers who called him a baby killer"
(Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1992). The irony of that last
passage would not come into clear focus until nearly a decade after
it had been written.
One can only speculate as to why reporters did not dig out the full
details of Kerrey's war record when he was a candidate.
The answer, I suspect, lies partly in the fact that Kerrey emerged in
national politics in the 1980s. This was a time when the country
was rapidly revising its view of the Vietnam war as indefensible and
embarrassing. This was the period in which the service and
sacrifice of Vietnam veterans were finally acknowledged with a
memorial in Washington and in countless newspaper articles. The
press corps embraced Democrat Kerrey as a symbol of post-war
healing -- a bridge between veterans and erstwhile war supporters,
on the one hand, and former antiwar activists on the other. "He
seems a perfect candidate for the Vietnam generation," as a
Washington Post political reporter, Guy Gugliotta, put it. This was
not a climate that encouraged skeptical exposés about Vietnam
military service.
There was also the mystique of the Medal of Honor itself. It is the
country's highest decoration for bravery and has often been
awarded posthumously. It is generally given for near-suicidal daring
and for those acts of self-sacrifice that we often identify as virtue.
In Kerrey's case, the self-sacrifice included a grievous injury.
Reporters were presumably disinclined to investigate a man who
had lost a leg and suffered years of intense physical pain in service
to his country.
The medal gave Kerrey an aura of magic untouchability. His "Medal
of Honor makes him about the only Democrat the GOP can't
smear," according to David Nyhan of The Boston Globe
(September 10, 1991). "Kerrey is brave -- his Medal of Honor
proves that. He is bold," according to a Los Angeles Times piece
echoing the views of his supporters. "And friend and foe alike agree
that [he] is endowed with charisma -- that magical and mysterious
political potion" (September 27, 1991).
Relatively few articles noted that Kerrey was originally put in for a
lesser medal and that, as he himself said in several campaign
interviews in 1992, the White House upgraded the award beyond
what he deserved because it wanted a p.r. "hero."
Another reason for the lack of journalistic skepticism was Kerrey's
personal appeal. Weary of political showmanship, reporters are
always on the lookout for the rare politician who is "the real thing,"
"the genuine article." Kerrey seemed to be one of the few -- blunt,
appealing, unrehearsed, his identity forged by war and suffering
rather than polls and spin-doctors. He seemed to fit the pattern of
the classic hero transformed by his odyssey from humble youth (he
had been an aspiring pharmacist) to mature and dynamic leader.
Kerrey was thus an "authentic" hero, according to The Washington
Post. His life experience gave him "inner direction" and many saw
in him "a depth and honesty that make him unique," said the Los
Angeles Times.
The idea that a person with such appealing qualities could also be
hiding dark secrets evidently just did not compute in the press
corps. As Jacob Weisberg -- who once wrote a glowing article on
Kerrey in The New Republic entitled "Senator Perfect" -- put it in a
recent Slate on-line commentary: "It has always been easy to
dismiss the perpetrators of war crimes, the Calleys and Karadics, as
moral monsters, people nothing like us. Here we have someone I
knew as a candid, kind, and charming person who turns out to be,
quite possibly, a war criminal . . . . Bob Kerrey is a good person
who evidently did something awful, and possibly something
profoundly evil, on a single day of his life . . . . It shakes our view
of morality itself. If Bob Kerrey could do that, good and evil aren't
fixed within a person for a lifetime."
In 1998, Vistica, then a Newsweek reporter, finally unearthed
missing details in Kerrey's war record. Acting on a tip, Vistica
tracked down Klann, confronted Kerrey, acquired Pentagon
after-action reports on the Thanh Phong raid, and presented the
story to his editors. But the newsmagazine spiked the piece because
-- as the D.C. bureau's Evan Thomas later told reporters -- Kerrey
had opted not to run for president in 2000. This was a very weak
justification, especially considering that at the time Kerrey was still
a United States senator.
Vistica later left Newsweek, taking the story with him. There was a
splash of controversy when it finally ran, but within a couple of
weeks scarcely a ripple could be seen. Kerrey by now had left the
Senate to become president of the New School University in New
York. The story had broken far too late to matter much to the
public. Journalists covering Kerrey believed what they preferred to
believe rather than probing for a truth they didn't want to find --
that in war even the best of us can end up doing terrible things.
Christopher Hanson, a CJR contributing editor, accompanied a
U.S. tank unit in the 1991 invasion of Iraq, covered the 1994
genocide in Rwanda, and reported often on the Pentagon during
twenty years as a newspaper correspondent. He teaches journalism
at the University of Maryland.