The historical record informs us
When Barack Obama nominated John Kerry to be America’s next Secretary of State Friday afternoon, he called Kerry the “perfect choice” to replace Hillary Clinton. Stating that “few individuals … grasp our foreign policies as firmly as John Kerry,” Obama said the Senator will not “need a lot of on-the-job training.” He then praised Mr. Kerry’s combat service in the Vietnam War and his subsequent tenure of service in the Senate, where Kerry has been intimately involved in “every major foreign policy debate for the past 30 years.”
Notably, President Obama made no mention of what occurred after Kerry’s military service and before his political career. Perhaps this is because what Kerry did during that time would be difficult even for an adroit wordsmith like Obama to summarize with just a pithy phrase or two of adulation.
The historical record informs us that not only has John Kerry been on the wrong side of every major foreign policy issue for most of his adult life, including Iraq, Nicaragua and most recently in Syria, but he has routinely engaged in deception to conceal his folly. What’s worse, Kerry has a clear record of giving aid and comfort to America’s enemies, all the while never missing an opportunity to viciously trash our brave forces fighting against them.
With Obama’s nomination of Kerry to head the State Department, therefore, a look back at Kerry’s “service” to this country becomes more pertinent than ever:
After being discharged from the Navy in early 1970, Kerry joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) and became a major figure in the so-called “peace” movement, whose hallmarks were a deep wellspring of hatred for the United States coupled with sympathy for America’s Communist enemy. In May 1970, Kerry, without government authorization, met personally with North Vietnamese and Viet Cong delegations in Paris to discuss a list of “peace” proposals enumerated by Nguyen Thi Madame Binh, the top Viet Cong delegate to the Paris Peace talks. In the aftermath of that illegal meeting, Kerry stronglyadvised the U.S. Senate to accept Binh’s proposals.
At that time, Kerry himself acknowledged that his visit to Paris was “on the borderline” of legality. Actually, it extended far beyond that “borderline.” Afederal law known as the Uniform Code of Military Justice prescribed severe punishment (including, in some cases, the death penalty) for any person who “without proper authority, knowingly harbors or protects or gives intelligence to or communicates or corresponds with or holds any intercourse with the enemy, either directly or indirectly.”
During the ensuing months, Kerry, with increasing stridency, continued to exhortthe U.S. to accept the Viet Cong peace proposals. His radical VVAW comrades went so far as to sign a “People’s Peace Treaty,” whose nine points were all extracted from a list of Viet Cong conditions for ending the war. Kerry fullysupported this treaty.
On April 22, 1971, Kerry famously testified to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations that many U.S. servicemen in Vietnam had “personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war …” “We learned the meaning of free fire zones,” added Kerry. “Shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed a cheapness on the lives of Orientals.” Moreover, Kerry emphasized that America’s “war crimes” in Southeast Asia were “not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.”
Army reports that were unearthed decades later resoundingly discredited the claims of Kerry and his fellow VVAW members, proving those claims to be essentially a pack of lies.
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