National Public Radio’s Rachel Treisman followed MSNBC and CNN in equating Trump running mate Sen. J.D. Vance’s claim, that Kamala Harris’s running mate Gov. Tim Walz was guilty of “stolen valor,” to the 2004 controversy over the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. That group credibly attacked the brief Vietnam War record of Sen. John Kerry when he ran against George W. Bush for president in 2004.
The headline to Treisman’s written report gives the game away: Vance’s attacks on Walz’s service mirror 'swift boating' of 2004.”
You may recall how the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were tarred by the press for questioning the Vietnam medals and wartime recollections of Sen. John Kerry. Kerry tried to exploit his Vietnam service during his campaign against Bush (whose own military record in the Texas National Guard became a liberal obsession, which backfired infamously on CBS anchor Dan Rather, who set his reputation alight in the journalistic carnage now known as “Rathergate”).
Treisman went even further than the other liberal networks on Saturday morning:
In questioning Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s military record, Republicans are dusting off a political playbook they last used successfully exactly 20 years ago.
There’s even a name for it: swift boating.
The term -- which has since made its way into dictionaries -- refers to an unfair or untrue political attack. It gets its name from a Vietnam War veterans’ group’s smear campaign against John Kerry during his 2004 presidential bid.
Long before Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, he served as a Naval officer during the Vietnam War. He spent four months of 1969 in Vietnam in charge of a type of patrol craft called a swift boat, leaving with multiple combat medals including three Purple Hearts.
Back home, as the war dragged on, Kerry emerged as a leading anti-war activist. In 1971, as the spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he spoke critically and graphically about the war in now-famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
“He was an anti-war activist as well as a veteran, and that combination was a big deal,” says Derek Buckaloo, a professor of American history at Coe College in Iowa who specializes in the Vietnam War and its aftereffects.
Buckaloo was Treisman’s sole source, and a strong anti-Republican voice.
The Swift Boat Veterans claimed Kerry lied about his record and wrote a book, Unfit for Command, accusing Kerry of exaggerating injuries, writing false journal entries and filing phony reports of his heroism to secure medals. Most media simply attacked the group or dismissed the findings as “unsubstantiated,” rarely bothering to actually test the claims for veracity, even after the Swift Boat Vets proved Kerry false on his claim of having spent Christmas 1968 on a secret mission in Cambodia.
Treisman did no investigation, simply forwarding old conventional wisdom.
Their accusations are widely understood to be false. Military records (released by Kerry’s campaign) backed up his combat claims. And while most of the swift boat veterans who spoke out against Kerry did not serve with him directly, the ones who did publicly supported his version of events.
In a 2018 Fresh Air interview, Kerry said his critics “just made things up … left, right and center,” and that the proof his campaign offered was no match for their “alternative facts.”
Treisman finally got around to Vance’s own credible accusations against Walz’s veracity.
After Walz spoke about carrying “weapons of war” in a speech calling for gun control, Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance publicly questioned whether his newly-minted opponent -- a 24-year veteran of the National Guard -- ever went to war.
She noted “Walz has faced questions over the years about the timing of his retirement, months before his unit mobilized to Iraq.” But through Buckaloo, she assured readers that Democrats were not “likely to ignore Vance’s attacks,” quoting the professor: “They realize that you can't just let these things lie, that you've got to respond to them and say: ‘This is unfair, this is scurrilous. This is, to use a word that Tim Walz uses, weird.' ”
Perhaps Treisman underestimated the import of Walz’s self-serving exaggerations: The Harris campaign felt obliged to admit Walz “misspoke” in his 2018 claim about carrying weapons in war. Walz also claimed to have retired at the rank of command sergeant, but quit his unit before it was sent to Iraq, and before completing the requirements to retire with that rank. That error has been scrubbed from the Harris campaign website.
