Dear “Diary” — The Washington Post Questions John Kerry’s Version of Events
The subtitle of the WaPo piece is “Critics fail to disprove Kerry’s version of Vietnam War episode,” proving once again that the headline writers’ union is more left than the newspaper business as a whole. The WaPo piece is work head and shoulders above the weak stuff peddled by Michael Kranish, who never learned “follow up question” at J school.
The notion that critics “fail to disprove” is completely accurate, but the court of public opinion is not a court of law. There is new and entertaining material in the article, like this description of Kerry writing about some carnage in battle:
“I never want to see anything like it again,” Kerry wrote later. “What was left was human, and yet it wasn’t — a person had been there only a few moments earlier and . . . now it was a horrible mass of torn flesh and broken bones.”
In “Tour of Duty,” these thoughts are attributed to a “diary” kept by Kerry. But the endnotes to Brinkley’s book say that Kerry “did not keep diaries in these weeks in February and March 1969 when the fighting was most intense.” In the acknowledgments to his book, Brinkley suggests that he took at least some of the passages from an unfinished book proposal Kerry prepared sometime after November 1971, more than two years after he had returned home from Vietnam.
In his book, Brinkley writes that a skipper who remains friendly to Kerry, Skip Barker, took part in the March 13 raid. But there is no documentary evidence of Barker’s participation. Barker could not be reached for comment.
Brinkley, who is director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans, did not reply to messages left with his office, publisher and cell phone. The Kerry campaign has refused to make available Kerry’s journals and other writings to The Post, saying the senator remains bound by an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley. A Kerry spokesman, Michael Meehan, said he did not know when Kerry wrote down his reminiscences.
This is a most amusing catch. Imagine that, a “catch” in the Washington Post: no wonder panic is setting in at Kerry’s campaign HQ. Even the Post is beginning to stand up on its hind legs. Within three paragraphs, we have the following: (1) the implication that Kerry is writing fiction, or at least later, self-serving recollections at a time when he has already come out of the closet as anti-war; (2) Brinkley being caught somewhere between shoddy work and assisted fabrication; (3) both Brinkley and Kerry diving for the tall grass when Post reporters dare follow up on the glaring inconsistencies. Keep going, Mr. Michael Dobbs.
The Post is not doing the work of the SwiftVets in this piece, but neither is it covering up, and it is clearly willing to practice some journalism in asking questions that deserve asking. Unlike the pathetic NYT, this is a real and worthy beginning, particularly if it serves as just that: a beginning.
We dare permit ourselves a shard of hope in this case because Michael Dobbs knows he is being strung along and probably deceived. Imagine you’re a reporter at one of America’s most elite broadsheets. The candidate’s biographer has gone radio-silent, the candidate says he can’t let you see original documents because his very own biographer won’t permit it, and you can’t get an answer from the campaign. What would you think? As the Governator wisely said when he apologized pre-emptively for also being the Gropenator: where there’s smoke, there’s fire.