Christmas in Cambodia Isn't Going Away--Updated
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I was on the
Hugh Hewitt show today briefly again to talk about Christmas in Cambodia. As many of you probably know, over on the Kerry Haters blog,
Kitty, a reader of ours named L. Larson, and I
were the first to
break the news that Kerry had lied about this incident, about two and a half months before it became the most damaging (to Kerry) incident cited in the book,
Unfit for Command.
As I
blogged yesterday over at KH, Russert asked Kerry about Christmas in Cambodia yesterday on Meet the Press, but failed to follow up with the tough question. In this case, my dream question would be:
"Which boat did you take into Cambodia? Which crew?"
Because that has always been the huge problem with Christmas in Cambodia. It's interesting that the Swiftees used Stephen Gardner in their ad on this subject, because he's a key figure in understanding the trouble Kerry was in long ago on this subject.
You see, Stephen Gardner is the Pete Best of Kerry's Band of Brothers. He's the forgotten man. Kerry's biographer Douglas Brinkley claimed he'd been unable to locate Gardner alone of the men that served on Kerry's Swift Boats. And when Gardner did
pop up, back in March, he told a different story than the other members of Kerry's two crews, a story of a young Lieutenant Kerry who wasn't a hero, but instead a coward.
I can't quote the words and hope to get linked by Hugh, so let's just say that if you click on the link above you'll find Gardner using a word for John Kerry that describes one of the two things that come out of the south side of a north-facing chicken, and it isn't an egg.
But here's the crux. Before Gardner even showed up, Brinkley had abandoned Kerry's Christmas in Cambodia story.
Put yourself in his shoes. You're a famed historian, and you have a statement that Kerry has made on numerous occasions, that he has cited as a critical turning point in his life. It's specific enough (Christmas Eve) and memorable enough (crossing into Cambodia), and you don't put that incident your biography of the man? Why would that be?
The only answer is that when you went around and interviewed the members of John Kerry's crew, nobody recalled going into Cambodia. And this is before you've even found Stephen Gardner, who says no rather emphatically in this commercial cited by
Tim Russert Sunday:
MR. STEVE GARDNER:
John Kerry claims that he spent Christmas in 1968 in Cambodia, and that is categorically a lie. Not in December, not in January, we were never in Cambodia on a secret mission ever.
So what do you do? You go back to your subject and say, "Senator Kerry, we have a problem here." And after some discussion, it is agreed that while your biography of Kerry will contain lots of mentions of Cambodia and how close young John was thereto and therefore preoccupied with the history of, it will contain no mention of an actual incursion into Cambodian territory.
That's pretty much the way the book reads. I don't say that's what happened, but it's at least more likely than the alternative, which is that Brinkley somehow missed hearing about this famed incident in Kerry's life.
Kerry doesn't even try to defend the Christmas Eve story; on Meet the Cuomo Aide he said, "Yes, I did go into Cambodia on a mission. Was it on that night? No, it was not on that night." But, unable to resist the impulse to twist one more time on the barbed wire he's trapped on, Kerry continued:
But we did go five miles into Cambodia. It was on another day. I jumbled the two together, but we were five miles into Cambodia. We went up on a mission with CIA agents--I believe they were CIA agents--CIA Special Ops guys. I even have some photographs of it, and I can document it. And it has been documented.
Caution here: Kerry probably does have photographs that he can claim "document" his story. There are two photographs in the photos section of Tour of Duty that depict Kerry transporting young men in camouflage outfits with lampblack on their faces (and yes, floppy hats) that Kerry could claim he thought were CIA men (although the book identifies the men as Navy Seals).
However, this could get Kerry into even murkier waters. The two photos in the book were taken by Michael Medeiros, a Kerry crew member aboard PCF-94, the boat Kerry went to after his other crew (including Gardner) were rotated out of Vietnam. The problem with Kerry claiming that he took this boat into Cambodia is that Medeiros comes in for special mention in the Brinkley book on page 288:
"According to the invaluable handwritten personal log Michael Medeiros kept of every mission he went on in 1969..."
Heh. Can you say, checkmate?
Some further notes:
1. Hugh asked why the media didn't ask these questions before the election, and why are they asking them now. In response I'd post two more questions: Whom would it have helped for the media to ask those questions before the election, and whom does it help now? The answers of course are President Bush then and Hillary/Edwards/Boxer and the rest of the Democrats angling for 2008 now.
2. I'd like to stress that my personal opinion is that the Swiftees were on the money with most of their charges, but many of Kerry's defenders are probably also describing accurately what they recall. Christmas in Cambodia proved to be a key story in the end because nobody stepped forward and said, "I was there with John Kerry and I agree with the way he says it happened." Nobody.
3. Kerry got himself into further trouble with his explanation of why he was ferrying CIA men up the river into Cambodia:
SEN. KERRY: I still have the hat that he gave me, and I hope the guy would come out of the woodwork and say, "I'm the guy who went up with John Kerry. We delivered weapons to the Khmer Rouge on the coastline of Cambodia." We went out of Ha Tien, which is right in Vietnam. We went north up into the border.
According to Wikipedia, which is reasonably useful on basic historical fact, here's some background on the
Khmer Rouge:
The Communist Party of Cambodia was founded in the early 1950s, although in its early years it remained subordinate to the Communist Party of Vietnam. In the 1970s the Party adopted the name "Party of Democratic Kampuchea," ("Kampuchea" being an alternative spelling of Cambodia), but became commonly known by the French name Khmer Rouge. From the mid 1960s the Cambodian Communists conducted a low-level insurgency along the Vietnamese border, mainly in support of the Vietnamese Communists in their war with the United States.
On March 18, 1970, Cambodia's neutralist ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was deposed while out of the country by a coup d'état, widely believed to have been organised by the United States, which brought General Lon Nol to power. With American financial support, Lon Nol attempted to fight the Vietnamese Communists and the Khmer Rouge insurgency they were supporting.
So it would seem to be very unlikely that the US was supplying arms to the Khmer Rouge. But you know how it is when a little kid is caught lying; the lies continue and grow more incredible.
Kerry's not going away. Neither is his excellent Cambodian adventure.
Update: Tom Maguire
notes the shipping guns to our enemy story. Tom also uses the Wikipedia entry on the Khmer Rouge as his source, and
John Tabin notes that it has already been updated to reflect John Kerry's support. A commenter on Maguire's blog says that Kerry meant to say the Khmer Serai.
