Keep an eye on the big picture
Gene Lyons

Posted on Wednesday, September 15, 2004

No, George W. Bush isn’t Big Brother. Nor have we reached the "war is peace" stage of the 2004 presidential campaign, although Dick Cheney’s recent vote-Republican-or-die warning was a step in that direction.

George Orwell’s anti-utopian satire, "1984," modeled upon Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, depicted state control of mass media somewhere very different from where we’ve arrived. Americans are deluged with so much information, many can’t tell fact from fiction. Ironically, one result can be a state of mind Orwell alled "collective solipsism," the unthinking belief that truth is whatever the party line says it is.

Another is corrosive cynicism that says that since all politicians lie and the press can’t be trusted, it’s all a mystery. That way lies the death of a democracy already on life support. Consider recent media flaps over the presidential candidates’ long-ago military careers. No, military experience shouldn’t be a requirement for public office, but I don’t agree with those who say re-fighting Vietnam-era controversies is foolhardy. See, it’s a character issue. Who showed up, who took a powder? Who’s been mostly telling the truth about his military record, who’s been fudging?

The controversy also is a case study in how news media function under pressure.

First came the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, funded by Texas oil men and construction moguls with long-standing ties to Bush. Surely they can’t all be GOP partisans, Bob Dole said. In fact, they are.

Knight-Ridder recently reported how the organization was put together. Houston lawyer John O’Neill, first recruited to attack John Kerry by President Richard Nixon, hooked up with GOP political operative Merrie Spaeth. After raising cash, they hired a private eye, who canvassed thousands of swift-boat veterans for men who resented Kerry’s anti-Vietnam war activism. If that’s your issue, they’re your guys.

But most served "with" Kerry only in the loosest sense; the majority appear never to have met him.

One conservative columnist derided Kerry’s "band of brothers" as "handpicked," but didn’t mention who did the picking: the U.S. Navy, in 1968. All swiftboaters making appearances for the Kerry campaign served on his boat—everybody who did but one. That has to mean something.

Reporters who probed allegations that Kerry’s medals were undeserved have falsified them by every known method. Consider fellow swift-boat commander Larry Thurlow. He claimed that no firefight took place during the incident that earned Kerry the Bronze Star. He said Kerry’s rescue of Special Forces Sgt. Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River took no courage. But Rassmann, a Republican, remembers enemy fire. So does
everybody on Kerry’s boat.

Turns out Thurlow earned the Bronze Star in the same action. The citation says his boat was shot full of holes. Confronted with the evidence, Thurlow claimed that his ex-wife took the documents. Besides Kerry’s crew, three sailors, including a crewman on Thurlow’s own boat, have disputed his account. None supports him. Now Thurlow says Swift Boat TV ad producers pressured him to say that Kerry fled from action
that day, but he refused. It’s a sad story.

Then there’s CBS News’ discovery of "CYA" memos allegedly written in 1972 by Lt. Col. Jerry Killian, Bush’s Texas Air National Guard commander, ordering him to take a flight physical he never took and expressing unease with political pressure being exercised on Bush’s behalf. Fearing damage to the president’s fly-boy image, the "Drudge Report" and other conservative Web logs sprung into action, citing "experts" who called the memos forgeries written on a computer, not a 1970s-era typewriter.

Almost overnight, CBS’ competitors ran with the story. Upon further review, those experts turned out to be all wet. The documents could have been written on IBM Selectrics, common office equipment. More elaborate objections were raised. Expert opinion aside, certitude is impossible on typography alone. CBS is standing fast, citing lots of circumstantial evidence.

So what to think? Keep your eye on the big picture. As USA Today points out, "Neither the White House nor former officers in the Texas National Guard have challenged the central assertions in the documents: that Bush’s performance as a pilot was under scrutiny by commanders beginning in 1972 and that Killian, his supervisor, was unhappy with him." It found another purported Killian memo challenging Bush’s flight certification. At the same time, The Associated Press has learned, Bush was downgraded from piloting F-104 fighters to flying second seat on T-33 trainers. Next, he was grounded altogether. CBS News appears determined to find out why. By now, it has almost as much at stake as the White House, which has clearly dissembled about Bush’s military record. Remember, CBS broke the first story disproving the administration’s assurances of "no warning" before 9/11. It also exposed the abuses at Abu Ghraib.

Somebody’s going to win this fight, and somebody’s going to lose it.

• Free-lance columnist Gene Lyons is a Little Rock author and recipient of the National Magazine Award.
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