Jackson Free Press

Thank you, Swift Boat Veterans, for chucking the blocks out of memory. It all comes back to me now: Vietnam, anti-war protests, Civil Rights struggles. But not at all in the way John O'Neill is re-telling it.

During the Nixon administration, when oily placating pronouncements came from the White House in direct contradiction to what we were seeing and coming to understand about the Vietnam War, we had to learn that even if a president says a thing, it doesn't make it so. The scruffier the long-haired youth of American became, the more outlandish the claims of close-cropped Nixon Republicans. "I'm clean, and so is my underwear," they seemed to be saying. "And you have to trust me no matter how many nasty things I do." Tricky Dick earned that moniker. We can win the war, he said. But the war got bigger and nastier and more unwinnable under the cloak of secret troop movements and untrackable sums of money.

In 1972 I was arrested at the Republican National Convention in Miami for protesting the war and Nixon's re-election. There were tens of thousands of us, but by then the movement was aged, and we were poorly organized, splintered in fact, into a bevy of special interests: Yippies, Gay Rights, Women's Libbers, Anarchists, Communists, Black Panthers, Vietnam Veterans Against the War and others.

It was the worst of the 1960s and '70s anti-war movement—unfocused anarchism with no clear agenda. But we were young, with the strong certainty that we were right. So even when no one was leading, we were marching.

History ultimately proved us right. In spite of the fact that we were so young. In spite of the fact that many of us got our facts garbled and let passion overwhelm politic actions. And in spite of the fact that Nixon's two administrations fought desperately to discredit us—from the foot soldiers like me (a 20-year-old woman from Mississippi) to John Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran who chose to speak the truth as he knew it.

To those of us who had marched, been arrested and done all that was in our feeble power to end the war, Kerry was a hero. He had the credentials and the guts to add his voice to the imperative of halting the war and returning the country to sanity. But it was hard. "America—love it or leave it" was the conservative imperative. For those of us who loved our country, but wanted to fix it rather than leave it, the times were poisonous.

Now when I watch the Nixon attack-pawn O'Neill re-wound and sent out to bluster for Bush, talking about the Swift Boat Veterans, scrutinizing and distorting John Kerry's war record through the lens of 21st-century history redux with obfuscated parsing of unprovable details, I see the faces of leering bigots with dogs and riot police who shot to kill college students. And I remember what was so galvanizing about the 1960s: We spoke out individually, then coalesced into a powerful life-changing movement, led by people's heroes—unlikely men like Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King and women like Rosa Parks and Fannie Lou Hamer. All of whom could have lived quiet lives out of harm's way, as so many did, but who chose instead to speak out in order to right horrible wrongs. We were idealists, not ideologues, and we have lived long enough to see our ideas made real.

Societal upheaval creates its own leaders—people thrust into the spotlight, not because they sought it but because they are caught like rabbits in the headlights of history. Our leaders in the '60s were not solicited as O'Neill's group is. Our leaders paid a horrible price in personal pain, emotional turmoil, persecution and even death; they paid a price in social ostracism, loss of closely held friendships, economic hardship and disruption of their lives.

Our country is better today than it was then because people like Kerry spoke their conscience. But now the Swift Boat Veterans are denying the truth of those former times, rewriting history to suit the re-election needs of a struggling candidate and doing it on a Republican bankroll. How many millions did it take before O'Neill et al found their convictions?

When Nixon died and his reputation was being resurrected in hindsight by smug-faced conservatives who said the Vietnam War could have been won if not for the anti-war movement giving aid and comfort to the enemy, I laughed out loud. Didn't we win the Cold War despite abandoning the one in Vietnam, by taking a different approach? Didn't we overcome the humbling lack of a military victory in Vietnam because the people of the United States forced retreat and made it possible for us to regain the moral high ground in the world community? The Communist dominoes toppled, but not onto us as Kennedy and Johnson and Nixon had predicted.

So why are Republican ideologues being allowed to rewrite history and make John Kerry a traitor? Can't they ever take responsibility for making a mess of things? Or even for dodging military service at a time when so many (but not John Kerry) did? Must they always sell the truth to obtain the perception of right? They seem compelled to rush into a cesspool of Shakespearean-sized fiction like freshly barbered lemmings.

Ruth Campbell Williams is the co-author, with Jeff Durstewitz, of "Younger Than That Now, A Shared Passage from the 60s" (Bantam/Doubleday/Dell, 2000). She is a regular contributor to the Jackson Free Press and a freelance writer. She lives in Flora, Miss.