JOHN LEO'S BLOG

During the 2004 campaign, a report said a coordinate used by the military fixed Kerry's boat at a site 40 to 50 miles south of the Cambodian border. Last Sunday, a New York Times news story explained that Kerry had been about 35 miles from the border on Christmas Eve. So there's still no evidence that he was in Cambodia at Christmastime, but he's getting closer all the time.

Kerry said many times, in interviews, articles, and speeches, that he was 5 miles inside Cambodia on Christmas and that the experience was "seared" into him. Why seared? Because the United States was not at war with Cambodia, making all military incursions illegal, and because Kerry claimed that his boat had been shot at by drunken South Vietnamese allies. He wrote in the Boston Herald: "The absurdity of being almost killed by our own allies in a country in which President Nixon claimed there were no American troops was very real."

Elsewhere, Kerry said he had been shot at in Cambodia by Khmer Rouge and Cambodian troops.

The Times story glides smoothly past the information that should have been the point of the report–that Kerry has finally called for his military records to be released, after refusing to do so during the 2004 campaign. Presumably Kerry is now talking about his complete records. During the campaign, the Washington Post made an effort to open up Kerry's records and received only six of 100 pages.

The mainstream media suffered heavy damage by ignoring the swift boat charges for 10 or 11 days in August 2004, while the issue spread rapidly on radio and on the Internet. Later, a few newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times, ran long and incurious reports, generally hostile to the anti-Kerry accusations. (Classic line from the L.A. Times article: "What actually happened about 35 years ago along the remote southern coast of Vietnam remains murky.") The general tone was "move along, folks; nothing to see here."

In its endless report on the swift boat charges during the campaign, the New York Times pushed the Christmas issue way to the end of the article. The paper had no room to mention that Kerry had told the story many times for years and had described it as a life-changing incident, complete with reports of being fired on by allies and Cambodians. In last Sunday's piece, reporter Kate Zernike wrote that a researcher for Kerry, using Vietnam-era military maps and spot reports from the naval archives, "traced his path from Ha Tien toward Cambodia on a mission that records say was to insert Navy SEALs." In a box accompanying the article, the excruciatingly vague "toward Cambodia" became "around the area of Cao Lanh, 35 miles from the border, on Christmas Eve." More candor, please.