Sunk
When the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth capsized John Kerry’s presidential campaign, much of the unfriendly fire came from Texas. Here’s how, in their own words, another band of brothers—and a few sisters—changed history. Or, at least, rewrote it.
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BERNIQUE: There were men who patrolled the river with me who were scared to death. And then there were men like John who had guts, who fought with me, who I could count on, who I knew had my back. He showed courage; I want to emphasize that.
The Media Blitz
In August the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth made their first commercial with Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, Washington’s preeminent Republican advertising firm. (The firm’s founder and president, Greg Stevens, produced the devastating Dukakis-in-a-tank ad for George H. W. Bush’s 1988 campaign.) It featured the Swift Boat Veterans’ assessments of Kerry: “John Kerry has not been honest.” “He is lying about his record.” “John Kerry is no war hero.” “John Kerry betrayed the men and women he served with in Vietnam.” “He dishonored his country.”
WEBSTER: The commercial went up a few days after the Democratic convention, and it got some interest, but not the play you saw later, when it was on TV around the clock. Then the Kerry campaign filed a complaint with the FCC to have it pulled, and that’s when it went gangbusters. I literally could not answer the phone fast enough; it was not physically possible to return all the calls that came in. Fox News was playing the ad over and over again, as was MSNBC. There was a very steady drumbeat on talk radio as well.
SPAETH: The mainstream media wouldn’t deign to cover the Swifties until we ran our first ad. It ran in three states for just one week, but it had a bigger impact than we had anticipated. We hadn’t known when we shot it in early July that Kerry would turn the Democratic convention into a Vietnam retrospective. But when he made his military service the centerpiece of the convention, that made us much more relevant.
RICK REED, partner, Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm: The first ad helped them raise revenue, which led to us making subsequent ads. The ads ran in battleground states like Ohio, New Mexico, Wisconsin, and West Virginia as well as in central and northern Florida, where there is a large retired military population. There is empirical evidence that the ads had a pretty substantial impact: Kerry’s numbers took a huge hit during the month of August.
O’NEILL: Just as everything was really starting to heat up, Unfit for Command came out on August 12. I had finished a draft on June 30, and the publisher rushed it into print. It was number one on the New York Times best-seller list for four weeks, which I took great delight in, I must tell you. It gave me the opportunity to go out and defend the book, while all of our guys were out defending our ads. We had, at times, more than fifty people giving interviews around the country. We had multiple press conferences in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. Sometimes we had eight or nine people in the same day on talk radio, on cable television, and giving print interviews.
HURLEY: The charges were so outrageous, so patently false, that we initially assumed that no one would believe them. Never before in the history of this country had any veteran’s military record been subjected to this kind of attack. If you told our guys who are over in Iraq right now earning Purple Hearts and Bronze Stars that in the year 2040 someone was going to come forward and challenge their medals and discredit and dishonor what they’re doing, you would have some very depressed troops on the ground.
BEGALA: Kerry’s problem was twofold. First, he didn’t respond at all, so the charges went unrebutted for weeks. Second, when he did respond, it was linear and literal; he defended his war record. The better approach would have been to do what Clinton did when he was attacked: Describe the attack as an attempt to smear him so he couldn’t do the work the American people wanted him to do. Here’s what Kerry should have said: “Lately you may have seen ads trashing my record in Vietnam. I was there. I know what happened, and I’m proud of my service. The reason they’re trashing my record is because they can’t defend their record of trashing our economy, our health care system, and our respect and reputation around the world. Those are the issues I’m going to focus on—in this campaign and as your president. Anything else is just trash talk.” I sent ad copy like that to the Kerry campaign. They never ran such an ad. Instead, they ignored the attacks and then allowed their campaign to be hijacked back to 1971.
WEBSTER: We pretty much dominated the news cycle during the month of August. In September we decided to bypass big media and go straight to regional newspapers and radio. We didn’t care how small they were. We started getting incredibly long articles that were running on page A-1 and hitting every message we had, and there was no one in town from the Kerry campaign to rebut it. We always tried to have a local veteran give the interview so that readers could say, “Hey, look. He’s from Canton, Ohio, too.” Then the headlines usually read something like “Local Swift Boat Vet . . .” or “Native Son Speaks Out Against Kerry.” When we saw how successful that was, we decided to do a media tour, and we ended up taking it to every swing state: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico, West Virginia, New Hampshire, and, at the end, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa.
SPAETH: At the end of the day, the American people might not remember the specific details of why Kerry wasn’t deserving of this medal or that medal. But there were enough pieces of the message that were simple, that people could remember—and they cast doubt on Kerry’s ability to serve as commander in chief.
CHAD CLANTON, senior communications adviser to the Kerry campaign; Waco native: You know, it was Mark Twain who said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.” That’s what happened here. I’m not going to Monday-morning-quarterback what we did; we had a great team. But one lesson I learned is that the best way to knock down a false charge isn’t with rapid response but rapid attack. Because in the world of 24-hour news, where you have Web sites and blogs and mass e-mails and the news of the day can change every hour, you have to strike first.
Election Day
By November 2 the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth had spent more than $19 million on television advertising, with $5.1 million devoted to Ohio alone. A survey conducted after the election by GOP pollsters found that 75 percent of voters in twelve battleground states had seen or heard of the group’s ads and their allegations.
SPAETH: Right up until Election Day, the Kerry campaign was insisting that this all led back to the White House. They basically told reporters I was coordinating these attacks with the administration, and the Washington Post and CBS reported that. Salon portrayed me as Karen Hughes’s evil twin. Then the New York Times, of course, printed a story with an organizational chart that had me at the center. Their proof that I was working with the White House was that I’m a friend of Kay Bailey Hutchison’s and Kay had been a client of Karl Rove’s, ergo Rove was directing the whole thing. Wick Allison, the publisher and editor of D Magazine, had the funniest take on it. He wrote in his column that the mainstream media had learned the astonishing fact that Texas Republicans know each other.
WEBSTER: We organized a conference call on the night of the election, at ten o’clock Central time. Somewhere between forty and fifty people were on that call. You could barely make out what people were saying, except every now and then you’d hear “It looks like we got Florida!” or “Does anybody know what’s going on in New Mexico?” At about ten-thirty, one of the guys from Reed Curcio, the ad firm, got on the line and said, “I was able to talk to someone in the Bush campaign—we can talk to them now, because the election has taken place—and I just heard that Karl Rove told Bush, ‘You got Ohio.’”
HORNE: It was a pretty joyous conference call. There were some tears that night.
O’NEILL: Some friends of mine from the Navy were over at my house that evening. I had a bottle of port from 1970, the year that I served in Coastal Division 11. After the conference call, we opened up that bottle of port and drank it in remembrance of our friends in Vietnam. I was tremendously relieved about the election. I felt that the country had dodged a bullet. I think we all shared a sense that we had done our duty.
PICKENS: I don’t know how you measure how much influence these Swift Boat guys had on the election. Somebody’s smart enough to figure that out, but I’m not. All I can tell you is this: I don’t run into George Soros very often, but the next time I see him, I want to tell him that I got a hell of a lot more for my money than he did for his.
My Library
