Recent Presidential Elections

2004 Election

Jim Rassmann

The [Swift Boat Veterans for Truth] adverts show several sailors who served on a US Navy swift boat during Vietnam saying that Senator Kerry was "no war hero", but was a man who lied to get his Purple Heart medal and could not be trusted.

"When the chips were down, you could not count on John Kerry," a veteran, Larry Thurlow, said in one of the advertisements.

But none of the men in the adverts actually served on the same Swift boat as Senator Kerry, who has invited Vietnam veterans to share his campaign platform several times and told his party that he was "reporting for duty" when he accepted the Democratic nomination for president.

The adverts were funded by a Vietnam veterans group and a Republican property developer from Houston, Bob Perry, who donated $100,000 towards their cost.

Steve Schmidt, a spokesman for the Bush campaign, attempted to distance the president from the advertisements.

"The Bush-Cheney campaign has never and will never question John Kerry's service during Vietnam," Mr Schmidt said. "The election will not be about the past, it will be about the future."

But Senator McCain said in an interview that the Bush camp had attacked his war record during the Republican primaries in 2000. "It was the same kind of deal that was pulled on me," he told Associated Press.

Later, Senator McCain said the Bush campaign had denied any involvement but then added: "I can't believe the president would pull such a cheap stunt."

The advertisements will run in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin - three so-called swing states, where the electoral outcome is uncertain.

The Kerry camp said the adverts were showing on a very limited basis in cheaper TV markets, a practice known as a "vanity buying" because the real value in the advertisements is the media attention they attract (Brook 1-2).

As polls began to suggest that the charges were beginning to damage Mr Kerry's presidential chances, his campaign headquarters hit back, screening an advertisement accusing the Bush campaign of masterminding the veterans' campaign.

The Kerry camp also organised for other veterans who had served with him to give their accounts. "He deserved every one of his medals," said Del Sandusky, who piloted Mr Kerry's Swift boat (a 50-foot aluminum patrol craft) for nearly three months in the Mekong delta.

Another former navy veteran, Jim Baker, told journalists: "He was the most aggressive officer in charge of Swift boats."

Mr Bush was intensively questioned by reporters on the issue as he emerged from a military strategy meeting at his Texas holiday home in Crawford. "I think Senator Kerry served admirably and he ought to be proud of his record," he said.

"But the question is who is best to lead the country in the war on terror?"

…

The Kerry campaign has taken its claims that the Bush camp is behind the Swift Boat Veterans to the federal election commission, arguing that the Republicans are illegally coordinating the veterans' efforts. It claims that Bush campaign workers were found handing out flyers about the veterans (Borger 2-3).

Factcheck.Org: Swift Boat Claims “Are Contradicted” By Former Crewmen, Navy Records. Factcheck.org reviewed several of the claims made by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and found that they were “contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records”:

A group funded by the biggest Republican campaign donor in Texas began running an attack ad Aug. 5 in which former Swift Boat veterans claim Kerry lied to get one of his two decorations for bravery and two of his three purple hearts.

But the veterans who accuse Kerry are contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen, and by Navy records.

One of the accusers says he was on another boat “a few yards” away during the incident which won Kerry the Bronze Star, but the former Army lieutenant whom Kerry plucked from the water that day backs Kerry's account. In an Aug. 10 opinion piece in the conservative Wall Street Journal, [Jim] Rassmann (a Republican himself) wrote that the ad was “launched by people without decency” who are “lying” and “should hang their heads in shame.”

Jim Rassmann, a veteran who served with Kerry in Vietnam, defended Kerry's record and affirmed “John Kerry's courage and leadership saved my life.” Rassmann went on to condemn the “Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush” who “are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam”:

[Rassmann:] Now, 35 years after the fact, some Republican-financed Swift Boat Veterans for Bush are suddenly lying about John Kerry's service in Vietnam; they are calling him a traitor because he spoke out against the Nixon administration's failed policies in Vietnam. Some of these Republican sponsored veterans are the same ones who spoke out against John at the behest of the Nixon administration in 1971. But this time their attacks are more vicious, their lies cut deep and are directed not just at John Kerry, but at me and each of his crewmates as well. This hate-filled ad asserts that I was not under fire; it questions my words and Navy records. This smear campaign has been launched by people without decency, people who don't understand the bond of those who serve in combat. [The Wall Street Journal, 8/10/04] ((Feldman and Grouch-Begley12).

Early in September 2004 our Florence Area Democratic Club President, Betty Crooks, persuaded Jim Rassmann to speak about his experiences with John Kerry during the Vietnam War and his impressions of the presidential campaigns that Kerry and George Bush were waging. Rassmann was and remains a resident of Dunes City, nine miles south of Florence. Standing in the back of the room, I (Harold Titus, then secretary of the Democratic Club) videotaped his presentation. I noticed while doing so that there appeared to be no press coverage. The next morning I phoned the local newspaper, the Siuslaw News, to ask if they had had a reporter at the event. No, they had not. The person they had assigned to cover the event had been unable to attend. “Then it falls upon us to report what was said,” I answered.

The following is what I submitted to the newspaper.

Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts

Jim Rassmann, former Special Forces officer whose life John Kerry saved in Vietnam, retired Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Deputy, local resident and international orchid authority, spoke last Friday to interested citizens at the Events Center. His appearance was sponsored by the Florence Area Democratic Club.

Mr. Rassmann became involved in Senator Kerry’s campaign because of his particular concern about the forthcoming election. “I felt for the first time in my life I had to do something [politically].” A registered Republican until this year, Rassmann has always voted for the man he believed was the best presidential candidate. This year George Bush is not that candidate.

Attending orchid conferences throughout the world, Rassmann has witnessed both the apprehension and the disdain that foreigners harbor toward the president. “How have you and the U. S. gotten into this situation? You’ve got a cowboy in the White House. He is incompetent,” Rassmann has been told. In Germany, England, France, Japan, South America, everywhere that he has gone the reaction has been the same. These people are “looking to us for the same sorts of ideals that we’ve put forward ever since World War I. We are a country that stands for justice, … law, … fair play. We are a country that does not torture prisoners.” People are frightened of us. The decision we make Nov. 2 “is going to show the rest of the world what we are all about.” They will “be watching very, very closely.”

Rassmann spoke at length about his Swift Boat experiences.

In March of 1969, in charge of 30 Chinese and Vietnam nationals at the very southernmost tip of South Vietnam, Rassmann conducted military operations for thirty days with Navy Seals and several swift boat commanders, one of whom was John Kerry, with whom he would be associated for two weeks. The boats were operating at the confluence of two large rivers and the many canals running perpendicular to them. The area was largely mangrove swamp. Jungle came right to the edge of the rivers. It was a very dangerous area. “I got ambushed a lot. I got in a lot of fire fights.”

On March 13 Rassmann was on John Kerry’s boat. They discovered amongst a few huts a large cache of rice buried in the ground. He and Kerry blew up much of the cache by dropping into a hole four hand grenades. One of Rassmann’s mercenaries was blown to pieces. “John Kerry among some of his crew policed up all the parts … [He] was not an officer who was afraid to get his hands dirty."

They motored off to an adjacent area and came under fire. The boat to Kerry’s left hit a mine. Five to seven seconds later Kerry’s bow gunner had his M-16 disabled. He yelled for another weapon. Rassmann, carrying a spare, moved toward him along the narrow left side of the boat. A smaller explosion under the boat sent Rassmann sailing into the river and Kerry hurtling across the pilothouse into the bulkhead.

Rassmann went to the bottom of the river to wait for the other swift boats to pass. “As soon as I cleared the surface, I started getting fired at.” He headed under water for one of the banks. “Every time I’d come up for air I’d get shot at … They were AK’s [the enemy’s weapon, not the sailors’ M-16s] … I could hear the AK’s fire [an unmistakable sound]. Five or six breaths later I came up and here are the boats coming back towards me. I distinctly remember two boats. I didn’t see any of the others.”

Critics have claimed that other boats were ten feet to ten yards behind him.

Rassmann swam toward the center of the river. “I didn’t see any other boats other than” the two, Kerry’s boat in the lead. “I grabbed a hold of the boat’s scrabble net on the bow” and started climbing. Because of the shape of the hull, Rassmann was not able to get over the top. Under fire, Kerry ran out of the pilothouse, got down on his hands and knees, reached under the bow and pulled Rassmann aboard. “A lot of things that have been said since then about that incident,” – for instance, that the boat had not been under fire -- have “been shown to be fabrications.”

Rassmann believes that the problem that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth and other Kerry critics have has nothing to do with the way Kerry performed his duty in Vietnam. It has to do with “the fact that John … spoke out against [the war and] the Nixon administration’s policies” saying that “American troops had admitted to committing atrocities.”

Certain Vietnam veterans have called Kerry a traitor. Rassmann stated, “Kerry didn’t commit treason. [He] exercised his First Amendment right to criticize our government.” Kerry said that American servicemen were committing war crimes. “He didn’t say that all of them were, like some people would have you believe. He quoted people who had talked to him and told him what they had done themselves. He talked about things he knew about firsthand. He talked about what he had done in regard to free fire zones.”

“We have books [written by] people that have spent years researching all of this and they say to a man that these acts were going on.” Kerry did what needed to be done.

Rassmann spoke about a young MP named Darby who had worked at Abu Ghraib Prison in Baghdad. Analogous of Kerry’s speech before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Darby had made a copy of the CD containing photographs of prisoner abuse. He slipped it, subsequently, under the door of an investigator charged with uncovering evidence of alleged abuse. Darby’s house and that of his sister have been vandalized. “Terrible things have been said about him in print … Is he a traitor? If you believe he is a traitor, you’re in the wrong country,” Rassmann forthrightly declared.

Last week a group of retired senior officers criticized the investigations about prisoner abuse thus far completed. They said that the findings are essentially “a cover-up.” They say that there is such a thing as command responsibility. About the president’s conduct of the Iraq War, Rassmann stated that “George Bush is directing things for political reasons. And it’s to our detriment. We have 140,000 people over there, and every single one of them is either our son, our daughter, our brother or sister, our father or mother, and we’re responsible for them. The only way we can effect that responsibility is when we vote on Nov. 2.”

Answering questions from individuals in the audience, Rassmann discussed the incident that earned Kerry the Silver Star. An enemy soldier had fired a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) at Kerry’s boat, wounding a crewman. Kerry drove the boat into the bank and chased after, fired at, and killed the retreating soldier. Rassmann explained that an RPG “has to go a certain distance before it becomes armed.” Acting as he did, Kerry had denied the enemy soldier that distance, thereby saving his boat and the lives of his crewmen.

The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth have lied about that incident, too. They “know that John Kerry lied. [But] none of them were there.”

Former Special Forces friends have told Rassmann that the Republican opposition has targeted him. “People are seeking any possible way … to discredit me.” People looking for discrepancies in what he says have followed him from presentation to presentation. He has been accused of being gay. They have claimed that “Teresa Kerry has paid me a lot of money to do this for John Kerry.” The latest accusation is that thirty-five years ago he and Kerry agreed to “scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours,” in other words, that he agreed to put in for Kerry’s citation and Kerry to put in for Rassmann’s purple heart.

Rassmann is understandably angry about the lying. He is additionally upset that people are “not working harder to learn about what’s going on. … They don’t seem to care. A lot of them have made up their minds already. You talk to them and it doesn’t seem to me that they know the issues. We have so few people who read the paper anymore. They get their news from these sound bites on TV and they seem to be perfectly happy with doing that.”

At the beginning of his presentation, Rassmann said that he had toured the Events Center parking lot looking for Bush/Cheney bumper stickers. He had been hopeful that there would be “Bush fans” present for him to attempt to persuade. As this gentlemanly veteran sees it, we are “all in this boat together and the boat is the United States and it is very important that we come to some decision based on a dialogue, or a debate, or even an argument, if you will. I’d hate to be preaching to the choir.”

The Siuslaw News printed an account of the event September 18. I was very displeased with it. I had expected my long article to be edited but not the way it was. Additions, based (I am assuming) from information provided the newspaper by other people who had attended, were made that I considered unnecessary. The newspaper was careless about its use of quotation marks. Some of the sentences – attempts to paste together statements that I wrote – were clumsy. I especially disliked the newspaper article’s ending. I told Betty Crooks that I was thankful that my name had not been attached (Titus 1-3).

Works cited:

Borger, Julian, “Bush Hails Kerry's 'Admirable' War Record.” The Guardian, August 24, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2004/aug/24/uselections2004.usa

Brook, Stephan, “'Dishonest' Anti-Kerry Ads Cause a Storm.” The Guardian, August 6, 2004. Web. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2004/aug/06/advertising.uselections2004

Feldman, Marcus and Grouch-Begley, “Fox News Kicks Off ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign against John Kerry Ahead of Possible Defense Post.” Media Matters, November 14, 2012. Web. https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-friends/fox-news-kicks-swift-boat-campaign-against-john-kerry-ahead-possible-defense-post?redirect_source=/research/2012/11/14/fox-news-kicks-off-swift-boat-campaign-against/191387

Titus, Harold, “Rassmann Tells Florence Citizens the Facts.” Draft Article Sent to the Siuslaw News, September 2004.