Science, Politics, and Swift Boats • P. T. Jackson • Page 2
third Purple Heart (a US military award for injuries sustained in combat) for his actions
that day in 1969. The crewmember whom he had fished out of the river—Jim
Rassmann—had been featured in a number of “TV advertisements and campaign
appearances” in support of Kerry’s candidacy (Dobbs 2004b: 14). Kerry had made his
wartime record a central theme of the campaign, featuring his service record
prominently in his official campaign biography:
John Kerry served two tours of duty. On his second tour, he
volunteered to serve on a Swift Boat in the river deltas, one of the
most dangerous assignments of the war. His leadership, courage,
and sacrifice earned him a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat
V, and three Purple Hearts (Kerry-Edwards 2004 2004)
But Kerry’s claims had not been uniformly accepted. A group called Swift Boat
Veterans for Truth (SBVT), whose membership included several of the commanding
officers and crewmembers of the other boats engaged in the mission on 13 March 1969,
had been running television ads since May questioning Kerry’s version of the events of
that day (Zernike and Rutenberg 2004). One of SBVT’s prominent members, John E.
O’Neill, had recently co-authored a book entitled Unfit for Command that presented a
very different view of Kerry’s wartime service; the book shot to the top of many best-
seller lists, including that of online bookseller amazon.com (Dobbs 2004b: 15). Kerry
himself had publicly spoken out against the group’s charges in early August, and the
campaign was preparing an ad linking SBVT to the campaign of Kerry’s opponent,
President George W. Bush (Nagourney and Rutenberg 2004).
Into this controversy waded Michael Dobbs. In his own words, he “was
attempting to reconstruct as best I could the events surrounding the day Kerry was
Convention