When Michael Kranish interviewed George Elliott the other day, he knew from his own book that John Kerry shot the fleeing VC in the back. From Kranish et al (p. 102):

Kerry followed and fired, killing the man. “I don’t have a second question about that, and neither does anybody who was with me,” Kerry recalled of his decision to shoot. “He was running away with a live B-40, and I thought, poised to turn around and fire it.”

This is clearly true despite Kerry’s attempt — in the next sentences! — to deny the description he just gave:

Asked whether that meant Kerry shot the guerrilla in the back, Kerry said, “No, absolutely not. He was hurt. Other guys were shooting from back, side, back. There is not a scintilla of question in any person’s mind who was there [that] this guy was dangerous. He was a combatant, he had an armed weapon.”

So what happened in the Kranish interview of Elliott? Could Kranish have said to Elliott that he didn’t think at the time back in Vietnam that Kerry had shot the man in the back. No, perhaps Elliott said, I didn’t think so at the time. Do you know that Kerry has categorically denied shooting the man in the back, Kranish could have asked. Does that change your opinion, Mr. Elliott? And perhaps that is how this odd phrasing of Elliott’s came into being:

‘’I still don’t think he shot the guy in the back,” Elliott said.

Had it occurred, this questioning would have been completely unethical, since Kranish knew Kerry’s description of the incident, which is he shot a guy who was running away because he feared the guy would turn around and fire, i.e., Kerry shot the guy in the back, despite trying to fuzz it up later. Maybe Kranish didn’t do it this way, and maybe we’ll see a transcript of the conversation to find out what happened. We hope so. However, if it happened in the hypothetical way above, it is shoddy, unethical journalism and worse editing, intended solely to trip a man up, not to arrive at truth.

However, we’re not expecting the Boston Globe to hold itself to high journalistic standards. Here it goes after Drudge:

At the same time, Drudge also erroneously reported that Kranish, a 20-year Globe veteran, had written the introduction to a Kerry-authorized campaign book, “Our Plan for America: Stronger at Home, Respected in the World.”

In fact, Baron said, Kranish had no connection to the Kerry campaign book and did not write its introduction.

Baron noted that earlier this summer Kranish worked with PublicAffairs — the publisher of the Boston Globe biography of Kerry, “John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best” — to write a short introduction to a second project: an independent, unauthorized review of publicly available documents dealing with the platform and policy statements of Kerry and Edwards. That project was in no way connected with the Kerry-Edwards campaign, Baron said.

Independent, unauthorized review: baloney. PublicAffairs explicitly designed its book to look like a Kerry campign promotional document.

You take a look at this cached page from PublicAffairs describing the Kerry-Edwards book with the Kranish introduction, and I dare you to tell me that doesn’t look like an official campaign publication.

Here are their proposals:

 Restoring Jobs and Rebuilding the Economy
 Winning the Peace in Iraq
 Providing Access to Affordable Healthcare
 Defending the American Homeland
 Creating a New Era for America’s Schools
 Helping to Create a Cleaner and Greener America
 Instituting a Principled Foreign Policy
 Making College Affordable for All Americans

Kerry and Edwards: Their Plans and Promises delineates issue-by-issue the promises and the plans of the Kerry/Edwards ticket. In his introduction, the Boston Globe’s Michael Kranish offers penetrating insight into the policies of a Kerry administration, and what they could mean for America.

There’s a lot of CYA going on at the Boston Globe and PublicAffairs. Nobody knows anything. Nobody has even heard of John Kerry or Bob Shrum. We expect that the Globe’s next move, completely unrelated to the Kerry campaign of course, will be to threaten to sue anyone who dares question their integrity. Hey, isn’t that what the Kerry campaign threatened to do to TV stations a few days ago?

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