John Kerry is a decorated Vietnam veteran, five-term United States senator, 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, and US Secretary of State for four years. His new memoir is Every Day Is Extra.From the transcript of Kerry's Fresh Air interview with Terry Gross:
TERRY GROSS: John Kerry, welcome to FRESH AIR. I want to start with the swift boat campaign against you, which you write about in your memoir. And I want to start here because it's a turning point in how lies, falsehoods that are demonstrably untrue can be used effectively against a candidate. So before we talk about the falsehoods, let's talk about the reality of what happened on your swift boat, the mission that people were talking about when they were trying to call you a liar.--Marshal Zeringue
JOHN KERRY: In the early spring of 2004, a book came out by Doug Brinkley called "Tour Of Duty," which was a book about my service in Vietnam. And a small group of veterans who disagreed with some of the characterizations by Doug Brinkley, not me, rebelled against it and attacked me for it. He used it as a vehicle to try to attack me. It was led by a guy who had actually appeared in my life way back in the antiwar days - 1971 - who had acted on behalf of the White House - the Nixon White House - and attacked back then. But this time they did it by major distortions in the record.
And initially our campaign pushed back against it and corrected the record. My military record spoke very directly to what had happened. The people who were actually on the boats involved in these ambushes in Vietnam in these attacks and incidents spoke to it. But that didn't stop them. They had a strategy. Their strategy was simply to provide alternative facts, to make them up much in the vernacular that we see today. And we answered that as forcefully as we could. We released my military records. We had people speak who were there. And the major media of the nation carried it.
So in the campaign, our advisers believed we had adequately, quote, "answered." The problem was that the right wing got behind this with major funding from some of the very same names who are doing major right-wing funding in the country today. And they started to pick up on these alternative facts and pushed them out there in...[read on]