May/June 2001

WAR WOUNDS:
BOB KERREY AND THE PRESS

BY CHRISTOPHER HANSON

It's no secret that news organizations in recent years have treated the personal character of politicians as a journalistic free-fire zone. Reporters have blasted away at virtually every target they could find -- from young Bill Bradley's belligerent tactics on the basketball court to Al Gore's days as a tobacco profiteer and George W. Bush's alleged National Guard absenteeism.

Given the journalistic rules of engagement, one can't help wondering why it took so long for the news media to begin asking questions about the Vietnam war record of Bob Kerrey. The Medal of Honor winner was elected governor of Nebraska in 1982, won a Senate seat in 1988, ran for president in 1992 and considered a second run in 2000. Yet the public did not learn until April 2001 that a dozen or more Vietnamese civilians died at the hands of then Lt. Kerrey's seven-man Navy SEAL commando unit during a raid on a suspected Vietcong gathering.

The story, unearthed by reporter Gregory L. Vistica and published in The New York Times Magazine, was disturbing. (A version also was broadcast on 60 Minutes II.) The magazine quoted one member of Kerrey's SEAL team, Gerhard Klann, saying Kerrey had ordered and participated in a massacre of more than a dozen men, women, and children (including an infant) on February 25, 1969, in the hamlet of Thanh Phong. 60 Minutes II and other news outlets quoted Vietnamese villagers who also asserted the killings had been deliberate.

By contrast Kerrey and five other members of the team said the civilians had been killed accidentally in cross fire when an unseen enemy began shooting. In an apparent bid to limit damage to his reputation, Kerrey gave his version in a speech and TV appearances before Vistica's story ran. Kerrey was, however, unable to explain why the dead civilians were found grouped together -- as if they had been rounded up and shot.

Those killings were preceded by a separate, equally controversial incident. According to Klann, the SEALs stumbled across three children, an old woman, and an old man in an outlying hut and silenced them with knives. He said the old man struggled and Kerrey held him down so that Klann could finish him off. According to Kerrey, he did not order or participate in any such killings and did not see these civilians die. At the same time, however, Kerrey acknowledged that "Standard operating procedure was to dispose of the people we made contact with . . . . Kill the people we made contact with or we have to abort the mission," he told Vistica. It is unlawful to kill civilians even if letting them live might jeopardize the mission, according to a section of the Army Field Manual that Vistica quotes.

Although Vistica deserves credit for breaking the story, one can only wish that the press corps had uncovered it earlier, when it might have been useful to voters. It is unclear what would have happened had the story broken when Kerrey was a candidate. Some might have refused to vote for him as a war criminal. Some might have believed his version and voted for him, understanding that accidental killing of civilians is a sad commonplace of modern warfare. Some might have voted for him whatever version was true on the ground that these SEALs were mere instruments of a policy conceived by higher-ups. This last group of voters might have weighed Kerrey's political record and potential and judged him overall to be a far better man than the brass and advisers who set the killing wheels in motion, misdirecting the patriotic idealism of brave young men. Whatever their ultimate judgment, voters should have been able to assess Kerrey knowing his whole war record.

And, in fact, by the time Kerrey ran for statewide office in 1982, enough was known to raise questions about any former Vietnam SEAL. Details of the SEALs' secret war in Vietnam had come to light. These included the use of SEAL teams in the American-run Phoenix program, which worked to eradicate Vietcong cadres and village elders aligned with the communist cause. News profiles of Kerrey during his 1992 presidential race did occasionally include references to the mission of the SEALs in Vietnam, such as the following from The Washington Post: "SEALs are . . . specialists in ambush, kidnapping, sapping, sabotage, assassination and a variety of other black arts."

The SEALs' role in Vietnam suggested some obvious questions for reporters to pursue regarding Kerrey. What sort of "black arts" had this aspiring national leader practiced personally? Did Kerrey's raiders deliberately target civilians? Or inadvertently kill them?

Instead, there were glowing profiles of Kerrey that focused on another fateful raid against a suspected Vietcong outpost. This was the March 1969 operation in which Kerrey had part of a leg blown off but insisted on staying in command until the skirmish was won. He was later awarded the Medal of Honor for that operation. The articles cast Kerrey as the ultimate hero: he had emerged with honor from a dubious and divisive conflict. In story after story, Bob Kerrey was the man who overcame the agonizing handicap of a war wound and the taunts of antiwar activists to work for national reconciliation. He was "a transformed survivor (and) charismatic war hero" (Washington Post, January 31, 1992). "The story of what happened to Kerrey in Vietnam in some ways is reminiscent of the John F. Kennedy PT-109 legend" (The New Republic, December 18, 1989). Kerrey came back from Vietnam a "certified hero . . . . But as he wobbled onto the Philadelphia streets, the welcome he got was from strangers who called him a baby killer" (Los Angeles Times, February 10, 1992). The irony of that last passage would not come into clear focus until nearly a decade after it had been written.

One can only speculate as to why reporters did not dig out the full details of Kerrey's war record when he was a candidate.

The answer, I suspect, lies partly in the fact that Kerrey emerged in national politics in the 1980s. This was a time when the country was rapidly revising its view of the Vietnam war as indefensible and embarrassing. This was the period in which the service and sacrifice of Vietnam veterans were finally acknowledged with a memorial in Washington and in countless newspaper articles. The press corps embraced Democrat Kerrey as a symbol of post-war healing -- a bridge between veterans and erstwhile war supporters, on the one hand, and former antiwar activists on the other. "He seems a perfect candidate for the Vietnam generation," as a Washington Post political reporter, Guy Gugliotta, put it. This was not a climate that encouraged skeptical exposés about Vietnam military service.

There was also the mystique of the Medal of Honor itself. It is the country's highest decoration for bravery and has often been awarded posthumously. It is generally given for near-suicidal daring and for those acts of self-sacrifice that we often identify as virtue. In Kerrey's case, the self-sacrifice included a grievous injury. Reporters were presumably disinclined to investigate a man who had lost a leg and suffered years of intense physical pain in service to his country.

The medal gave Kerrey an aura of magic untouchability. His "Medal of Honor makes him about the only Democrat the GOP can't smear," according to David Nyhan of The Boston Globe (September 10, 1991). "Kerrey is brave -- his Medal of Honor proves that. He is bold," according to a Los Angeles Times piece echoing the views of his supporters. "And friend and foe alike agree that [he] is endowed with charisma -- that magical and mysterious political potion" (September 27, 1991).

Relatively few articles noted that Kerrey was originally put in for a lesser medal and that, as he himself said in several campaign interviews in 1992, the White House upgraded the award beyond what he deserved because it wanted a p.r. "hero."

Another reason for the lack of journalistic skepticism was Kerrey's personal appeal. Weary of political showmanship, reporters are always on the lookout for the rare politician who is "the real thing," "the genuine article." Kerrey seemed to be one of the few -- blunt, appealing, unrehearsed, his identity forged by war and suffering rather than polls and spin-doctors. He seemed to fit the pattern of the classic hero transformed by his odyssey from humble youth (he had been an aspiring pharmacist) to mature and dynamic leader. Kerrey was thus an "authentic" hero, according to The Washington Post. His life experience gave him "inner direction" and many saw in him "a depth and honesty that make him unique," said the Los Angeles Times.

The idea that a person with such appealing qualities could also be hiding dark secrets evidently just did not compute in the press corps. As Jacob Weisberg -- who once wrote a glowing article on Kerrey in The New Republic entitled "Senator Perfect" -- put it in a recent Slate on-line commentary: "It has always been easy to dismiss the perpetrators of war crimes, the Calleys and Karadics, as moral monsters, people nothing like us. Here we have someone I knew as a candid, kind, and charming person who turns out to be, quite possibly, a war criminal . . . . Bob Kerrey is a good person who evidently did something awful, and possibly something profoundly evil, on a single day of his life . . . . It shakes our view of morality itself. If Bob Kerrey could do that, good and evil aren't fixed within a person for a lifetime."

In 1998, Vistica, then a Newsweek reporter, finally unearthed missing details in Kerrey's war record. Acting on a tip, Vistica tracked down Klann, confronted Kerrey, acquired Pentagon after-action reports on the Thanh Phong raid, and presented the story to his editors. But the newsmagazine spiked the piece because -- as the D.C. bureau's Evan Thomas later told reporters -- Kerrey had opted not to run for president in 2000. This was a very weak justification, especially considering that at the time Kerrey was still a United States senator.

Vistica later left Newsweek, taking the story with him. There was a splash of controversy when it finally ran, but within a couple of weeks scarcely a ripple could be seen. Kerrey by now had left the Senate to become president of the New School University in New York. The story had broken far too late to matter much to the public. Journalists covering Kerrey believed what they preferred to believe rather than probing for a truth they didn't want to find -- that in war even the best of us can end up doing terrible things.

Christopher Hanson, a CJR contributing editor, accompanied a U.S. tank unit in the 1991 invasion of Iraq, covered the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, and reported often on the Pentagon during twenty years as a newspaper correspondent. He teaches journalism at the University of Maryland.