Science, Politics, and Swift Boats • P. T. Jackson • Page 1
Science, Politics, and Swift Boats
by
Patrick Thaddeus Jackson, American University
1
The lead story on the front page of the Washington Post for Sunday, 22 August
2004, was an article entitled “Swift Boat Accounts Incomplete.” In the article, Michael
Dobbs, a staff writer who had been covering education stories until two weeks
previously,
2
presented the results of an investigation into events of an episode that took
place “in the jungles of Vietnam” 35 years previously (Dobbs 2004b: 1). On 13 March
1969, five US Navy PCF (also known as “Swift”) boats participated in a mission
involving travel on the Bay Hap River; on the way back from the mission, the boats ran
into an ambush and took damage. A crewmember on one of the boats—PCF-94—fell
overboard and was fished out of the river by his commanding officer, but no US
military personnel were killed.
It is doubtful that the events of that day would merit a front-page Sunday
newspaper story were it not for the fact that the commanding officer was John F. Kerry.
At the time of the article’s publication, Kerry was the junior Senator from
Massachusetts, and also the nominee of the Democratic Party for President of the
United States. He had received a Bronze Star (a US military award for valor) and his
1
Paper prepared for presentation at the 2004 American Political Science Association annual meeting; work in progress,
cite at your own risk. Apologies for the fragmentary nature of this paper as it proceeds. Portions of this paper are
sampled and remixed from a paper entitled “Bringing the Social back Into Social Science (preliminary, Weberian
thoughts)” that I presented at the 2004 Midwest Political Science Association annual meeting. For helpful comments on
that paper I would like to thank Dvora Yanow and Micheal Giles. Constructive comments and feedback welcome:
## email not listed ##
.
2
Dobbs stated this during an online discussion the day after the article appeared (Dobbs 2004a).
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