It is difficult, 20 years on, to say which is more unlikely: that flip-flopping, wind-surfing, “Jinjis” Khan-pronouncing John Kerry came within an Ohio whisper of the White House or that Kerry’s rebuke proceeded in large part from a bevy of cheesed-off veterans. Politics change in two decades, of course, and my guess is that the presidential nomination process has produced its last patrician Bay Stater for some time. Yet the real development since 2004 is the sheer improbability now of what Kerry’s onetime comrades in arms pulled off.
With a series of devastatingly well-made television ads, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth won the battle over the Massachusetts senator’s war record, moral fiber, and fitness for office. But they have lost the ideological war.
Five presidential election cycles later, we have moved to Kerry’s side of the vessel.
Readers of this magazine will remember the action. For nearly the whole of April 2004, then-President George W. Bush held leads in the mid-single digits, according to most polls. The last days of that month, however, saw the release, by CBS News, of prisoner-abuse photos from the Army-run hellhole Abu Ghraib. Here, in miniature, was the entire Bush-Republican war operation: stupid, cruel, toxically masculine, and weirdly homoerotic. By the next week, the Pew Research Center had Kerry up by 3 points. Four days after that, separate Zogby and CNN polls showed “Kerry +5.”
Yet, unbeknownst to the Kerry campaign, the seeds of their man’s destruction were already being sown by a recently registered 527 organization. Founded by Rear Adm. Roy Hoffmann, now retired, and two-time Bronze Star recipient John O’Neill, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth commandeered a National Press Club podium on May 4 and announced to the public that the presumptive Democratic nominee was “totally unfit to be commander in chief.” Though the event attracted little interest, the group was just getting started. As National Review’s John J. Miller would go on to write in the days following the election, the “May 4 press conference was perhaps the most overlooked major news event of the campaign.” Because the media declined to investigate or even acknowledge the claims against Kerry, SBVT had sole command of the political seas. When the barrage launched, the Democrat was almost totally defenseless.
SBVT’s first television ad began airing on Aug. 5. By that date, Kerry had led in 27 of the last 32 national polls. Titled “Any Questions?” the spot featured more than a dozen men who had fought alongside the candidate in Vietnam. Among their accusations were that Kerry had lied about the circumstances leading to his first Purple Heart, that he had “betrayed the men and women he served with,” and that he had “dishonored his country.” Though the media roused themselves at last, declaring the charges “inconsistent” (New York Times, Aug. 7) and “smears” (Washington Post, Aug. 11), the wound was already open. By the time a second ad debuted, featuring a youthful Kerry denouncing his fellow troops as rapists and decapitators, Bush had pulled into a tie nationally. The incumbent president would go on to lead in almost all of the remaining polls.
One would search in vain for the exact percentage by which SBVT decreased Kerry’s chances. Yet it is hard to avoid the sense that the Democrat lost the race because his enemies took away his one true advantage. Few will have forgotten that Kerry was for the $87 billion (in war funding) before he was against it, but at least the waffling swamp creature had seen actual combat. Bush had spent the autumn of 1968 on an air base in Texas. Kerry had spent it in Khanh Hoa. That mattered to an electorate that still included nearly 26 million veterans. (The number today is perhaps 16 million.) Moreover, the Iraq War was already a disgrace. Wasn’t Kerry the necessary man: stiff but valorous and possessed of the moral authority to bring the fighting to an honorable conclusion? Perhaps he had said unpleasant things to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, but who could recall the specifics?
To say that the swift-boaters changed all that is woefully to understate the point. SBVT’s second ad, which included cuts from the Senate committee hearings in question, dropped like a bomb on the voting public. Here was Kerry at his absolute worst: hectoring, self-satisfied, Brahmin-accented, and heaping contempt upon the American war effort. Our fighters in Vietnam had “randomly shot at civilians,” Kerry intoned, clearly relishing the sound of his own voice. They had “personally … cut off limbs” and committed “crimes … on a day-to-day basis.” I was of voting age and politically sentient in 2004, and I am here to tell you that Kerry never recovered from that ad. Soft Republicans and swing voters were ready for a change in leadership, but they would never trust the man who had said such things in front of the world.
If I am lingering on the specifics of that bygone campaign, it is because they, as much as we, are unlikely ever to be the same again. For one thing, no legacy media organization worth its salt would delay for an instant if its man came under coordinated political assault in 2024. For another, a skeleton the size of Kerry’s 1971 testimony would today be yanked from the closet, deconstructed, and sewn back together by a million social media posts. SBVT’s element of perfectly timed surprise is now and forever a thing of the past.
Yet the most substantial change is that it is no longer unthinkable to elect as president a man who openly scorns the armed forces. If Kerry cracked that door, then former Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump tore it from its hinges and cast it onto the burn pile. The statistics tell the story fairly well and are worth consulting. In 2004, 24% of Gallup respondents had only “some” or “very little” confidence in the military. By 2023, that figure had risen to 40%. Inverting the data leads to similarly grim outcomes, especially if one takes partisan affiliation into account. A mere 62% of Democrats had “a great deal” or “quite a lot” of confidence in the military in 2023, down from 66% in 2004. Ninety-three percent of Republicans expressed high confidence in the military during the Bush-Kerry election year. The 2023 percentage was a startlingly low 68%.
Is any of this surprising given the war-losing, the wokeness, the naked politicking, and the general incompetence that have attended America’s officer class for the last two decades? Data aside, I encourage the reader to perform a thought experiment in the privacy of his own home. If, as several Republican presidential hopefuls recently urged, the United States were to use military force against Mexico’s drug cartels, is it at all likely that we would win that war? Or consider the China conflict into which we are sleepwalking. Can the American military, in anything like its current form, really be expected to defeat a disciplined, ruthless superpower in its own backyard, 8,000 miles from our shores?
Whatever your answer to these questions, grant that voicing them would have been political suicide a generation ago. Today, by contrast, even mainstream Republicans have eyes to see, for example, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mark Milley brazenly thwarting the will of an elected president. The “dissident” Right is full of grifters who will say whatever it takes to get their next click. When 90-year-old Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) starts talking about military “smoke and mirrors,” it’s time to listen.
Of course, young people don’t need another Senate floor speech to make up their minds about our armed forces. They are voting with their feet, to the tune of an unprecedented military recruiting crisis. Perhaps our men of fighting age are simply following their leaders. Obama did not throw open the gates to transgender service members because he loves and respects our military institutions. Nor did Trump’s savaging of the late Sen. John McCain proceed from a deep wellspring of reverence. If Kerry follows the news — no sure thing given his commitment to breaking lifetime private jet travel records — he must be cursing his electoral timing. Released today, his Senate testimony would barely raise eyebrows. Of course our soldiers behaved abominably in Vietnam, the thinking would go. They’re representatives of a broken brand.
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In short, John Kerry-ism — the notion that our military is one more problem to be ashamed of — is now ascendant. The vision of American might once expressed by the swift-boaters, meanwhile, is drowning in a murky river, slowly vanishing in the gathering fog. As a conservative, I hold the foundational belief that there are no solutions to many of our crises. But here are a few for the armed forces: Shut up about diversity. Stop playing politics. Win a war. You’ll be shocked by how quickly the public comes back to your side.
On May 31, 2008, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disbanded and ceased operations. Little could its members have guessed the outcome of their final war. They lost.
Graham Hillard is editor at the James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal and a Washington Examiner magazine contributing writer.
