O’Neill leads charge against Kerry’s ‘lies’

John E. O’Neill is the former Swift Boat commander in Vietnam who has led a rapid-fire assault on Democratic presidential nominee Sen. John Kerry, causing a media furor and an angry response from both the Kerry campaign and the candidate himself.

He has called Mr. Kerry a liar, said he falsified his war records to receive combat medals and scurrilously tarnished the reputation of other Vietnam veterans for political gain. He accused the Massachusetts Democrat of having serious character flaws that made him unfit to serve as commander in chief.

As the most visible face of the newly formed Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Mr. O’Neill has led the charge to counter what he and his fellow members have called “the false war crimes charges John Kerry repeatedly made against Vietnam veterans who served in our units and elsewhere, and to accurately portray Kerry’s brief tour in Vietnam as a junior grade lieutenant.”

“It was important for me to be involved in this because everything is not just politics,” Mr. O’Neill said yesterday in a telephone interview. “All of us spent a year of our lives in Vietnam and the truth of what happened and what we did is important.

“Kerry is a guy who deeply lied about what happened and that has been demeaning to those of us who were really there. He misrepresented his record and ours in Vietnam, and there’s no question some names on the Vietnam Memorial belong to him once he began to criminalize our troops and give voice to the anti-war movement,” he said.

Democrats have portrayed Mr. O’Neill as a shill for the Bush campaign, but he says he is not a partisan and he actually voted against Mr. Bush in 2000, supporting Al Gore, and Ross Perot in 1996.

But just who is John O’Neill and why is he saying those things?

The answer to that question is best summed up by the Swift Boat veterans organization itself, which began its newest and undoubtedly last mission for one single reason: “For more than thirty years, most Vietnam veterans kept silent as we were maligned as misfits, addicts and baby killers. Now that a key creator of that poisonous image is seeking the presidency, we have resolved to end our silence.”

Roy Hoffmann, a retired rear admiral who is one of the founders of the Swift Boat Veterans, which formerly was known as the “Group of Twelve,” as in 12 months’ duty rather than the four served by Mr. Kerry, called Mr. O’Neill “a very intelligent man … with an impeccable record as far as being a man of integrity.”

Adm. Hoffmann described himself as chairman of the organization, but called Mr. O’Neill “the brains.”

Mr. O’Neill, a 1967 cum laude graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and now senior partner at a Houston law firm, served as a Swift Boat commander in Vietnam in 1969 and 1970 as part of Coastal Division 11.

Receiving two Bronze Stars and other decorations, he succeeded Mr. Kerry as commander of PCF-94.

Under Mr. O’Neill’s command, PCF-94 was fired on several times as it patrolled near the Cambodian border, as well as the Uminh and Namcan forests in southern Vietnam. He said his boat patrolled an area about 100 yards outside the Cambodian border for nearly three months.

But his current criticism of Mr. Kerry is not new — not to this year or to this presidential campaign.

He first challenged Mr. Kerry on the U.S. role in Vietnam in a 90-minute debate in June 1971 on the “Dick Cavett Show” — just two months after Mr. Kerry, then a new member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, had mesmerized the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a national television audience with gruesome tales of Vietnam War atrocities.

Story Continues →