Strengthening Constitutional Self-Government

No Left Turns

Fahrenheit 1971

Our own Mac Owens gets around, doesn’t he? He was one of the first to go after John Kerry’s post-Vietnam positions and testimony, and he continues with this fine and hard-hitting piece from The Weekly Standard; it is entitled, "Fahrenheit 1971." People are now beginning to realize how radical John Kerry’s views of Vietnam were. Mac doesn’t go after Kerry’s record in Vietnam; he never has. But he has gone after Kerry’s actions after the war, and this is what the Swifties have called attention to, and this is what is seriously hurting Kerry. Mac starts his piece from this quote from Kerry’s book, The New Soldier (1971); read the whole essay yourself, it being, effectively, a rumination on this quote:

"We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans’ Day waving small flags, calling to memory those thousands who died for the ’greater glory of the United States.’ We will not accept the rhetoric. We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars--in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all and when we do, we will demand relevancy such as other organizations have recently been unable to provide. We will not take solace from the creation of monuments or the naming of parks after a select few of the thousands of dead Americans and Vietnamese. We will not uphold the traditions which decorously memorialize that which was base and grim. . . . We are asking America to turn from false glory, hollow victory, fabricated foreign threats, fear which threatens us as a nation, shallow pride which feeds of fear." --John F. Kerry

As Mac says: "Kerry’s actions after Vietnam are reminiscent of Michael Moore and MoveOn.org today. It was not enough for him merely to criticize U.S. policy in Vietnam. He and his friends in the VVAW were obliged by their radicalism to go after the United States itself."    

Here is the famous cover of The New Soldier, and the Epilogue, written by Kerry.

Discussions - 1 Comment

I have a bigger photo of the book here. BTW, the photo on the book’s cover was taken later in the day, April 22, 1971, the day of Kerry’s Senate testimony.

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