- "My truth is that I am a gay American,'' announced
Gov. James McGreevey to the people of New Jersey last Thursday.
-
- That's such an exquisitely contemporary formulation:
''my'' truth. Once upon a time, there was only ''the'' truth. Now everyone
gets his own -- or, as the governor put it, ''One has to look deeply into
the mirror of one's soul and decide one's unique truth in the world.''
For Jim McGreevey, his truth is that he's a gay American; for others in
the Garden State, the truth about McGreevey is that he's a corrupt sexual
harasser who put his lover on the state payroll in a critical homeland
security post, and whose I-am-what-I-am confessional is a tactical feint
that distracts the media sob sisters from the fact that, as his final service
to the Democratic Party, he's resigned in such a way as to deny the people
an early vote on his successor.
-
- We'll see whose truth prevails in the fullness of time.
-
- In politics, it's helpful if whatever ''unique truth''
the consultants have run past the focus groups bears at least a passing
relationship to the real, actual truth -- not the whole truth, but at least
a grain of it. That was what was so ingenious about Bill Clinton's ''60
Minutes'' appearance in 1992. He didn't come clean -- he was, as usual,
full of it -- but he set in motion his designated ''unique truth'' -- flawed
but human. It was designed to get him past Gennifer, but it wound up also
getting him past Paula, Monica, Kathleen, Juanita. . . . Whatever goods
you got on him, it fit ''his truth'' as he sold it to us on CBS that day.
As his attorney Cheryl Mills put it during the impeachment trial, Bill
Clinton, along with Jefferson, Kennedy and Martin Luther King, ''made human
errors, but they struggled to do humanity good . . .''
-
- Which brings us to John Kerry. What is his unique truth?
In 1986, on the floor of the United States Senate, he said:
-
- ''I remember Christmas of 1968, sitting on a gunboat
in Cambodia. I remember what it was like to be shot at by the Vietnamese
and the Khmer Rouge and Cambodians, and the president of the United States
telling the American people that I was not there, the troops were not in
Cambodia. I have that memory, which is seared -- seared -- in me.''
-
- Though the seared senator peddled this searing memory
for a quarter-century, it had evidently been seared into him pretty haphazardly.
It turns out at Christmas 1968 he wasn't in Cambodia but was instead 55
miles away at Sa Dec, South Vietnam. So the Kerry campaign's begun riffling
hurriedly through its Sears Rowback catalog for more or less watertight
back-pedaling of the story: They now say that ''many times he was on or
near the Cambodian border,'' which is true in the sense that 80 percent
of Canadians live on or near the American border. But most folks in Vancouver
don't claim to be living in the Greater Seattle area.
-
- Earlier, senior Kerry spokesman Michael Meehan told ABC
News: ''The Mekong Delta consists of the border between Cambodia and Vietnam,
so on Christmas Eve in 1968, he was in fact on patrol ... in the Mekong
Delta between Cambodia and Vietnam.'' For a crowd of ostentatious multilateralists,
they can't seem to hold the map the right way up: The Mekong River isn't
the border between Cambodia and Vietnam; it cuts through the heart of Cambodia
and then runs through Vietnam to the sea.
-
- But this question isn't about geographical degrees of
latitude so much as psychological ones. Here's the real reason Lt. Kerry
wasn't spending Dec. 24, 1968, on a secret mission in Cambodia: On the
previous day, Dec. 23, the U.S. government finally secured the release,
after a five-month diplomatic stand-off, of 11 Americans whose U.S. Army
utility landing craft had made a navigational error and strayed into Cambodian
waters. Prince Sihanouk had rejected U.S. apologies and threatened to try
the men under Cambodian law. It's unlikely, 24 hours after their release,
anyone in Washington was thinking, ''Hey, we need to send that hotshot
Kerry in there.''
-
- So what are we to make of Sen. Kerry's self-seared 30-year-old
false memory of Christmas in Cambodia with its vast accumulation of precise
details? Of being shot at by the Khmer Rouge (unlikely in 1968) and of
South Vietnamese troops drunkenly celebrating Christmas (as only devout
Buddhists know how)?
-
- It's not about dates and places. For Kerry, his Yuletide
mission was an epiphany: the moment when he realized his government was
lying to the people about what was going on. This is the turning point,
the moment that set the young Kerry on the path from brave young war volunteer
to fierce anti-war activist.
-
- And it turns out it's total bunk.
-
- Thirty-five years on, having no appealing campaign themes,
the senator decides to run for president on his biography. But for the
last 20 years he's been a legislative non-entity. Before that, he was accusing
his brave band of brothers of mutilation, rape and torture. He spent his
early life at Swiss finishing school and his later life living off his
wife's inheritance from her first husband. So, biography-wise, that leaves
four months in Vietnam, which he talks about non-stop. That 1986 Senate
speech is typical: It was supposed to be about Reagan policy in Central
America, but like so many Kerry speeches and interviews somehow it winds
up with yet another self-aggrandizing trip down memory lane.
-
- A handful of Kerry's ''band of brothers'' are traveling
around with his campaign. Most of the rest, including a majority of his
fellow swift boat commanders and 254 swiftees from Kerry's Coastal Squadron
One, are opposed to his candidacy. That is an amazing ratio and, if snot-nosed
American media grandees don't think there's a story there, maybe they ought
to consider another line of work. To put it in terms they can understand,
imagine if Dick Cheney campaigned for the presidency on the basis of his
time at Halliburton, and a majority of the Halliburton board and 80 percent
of the stockholders declared he was unfit for office. More to the point,
on the swift vets' first major allegation -- Christmas in Cambodia -- the
Kerry campaign has caved.
-
- Who is John Kerry? What is his ''unique truth?'' Consider
this vignette from New Hampshire primary season as retailed in a recent
8,000-word yawneroo puff piece in the New Yorker:
-
- '' 'He'll often thrash around in the night,' the filmmaker
George Butler, who is one of Kerry's oldest friends, told me. 'He smashed
up a lamp in my house in New Hampshire, in the bedroom where he was staying.
Most Vietnam veterans go through this.'''
-
- ''Most?'' Whether or not John Kerry ever entered Cambodia,
he seems unable, psychologically, to exit it.
|