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Senator William Fulbright invited John Kerry to testify at a hearing of his
Foreign Relations Committee of which he was the chairman. Kerry was the sole
witness. John O'neil, one of the leaders of the Swift Boat Vets for Truth,
requested to be heard at the same hearing but was denied.
The Legislative Proposals Relating to the War in Southeast Asia,
more commonly known as the Fulbright Hearing, was a hearing of Foreign Relations Committee of the United States Senate held on April 22, 1971 regarding continued U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Democratic Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, was the chairman of the committee and
presided over the hearing, which consisted of testimony from the sole witness,
John Kerry. Kerry gave a prepared open statement and
later was asked questions by the Senators.
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It was at this hearing, during his testimony that John Kerry asked the question "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" More recently, during the 2004 United States presidential campaign, come critics of Senator Kerry, have focused current media attention on this long past Senate hearing and have alleged that parts of his testimony that day portrayed American war veterans of that era in an unduly harsh light. Committee membersThe hearingOpening statementThe first action of the hearing is Fulbright's call to order and the opening statement. Fulbright was a Democrat and his opening statement was very sympathetic to Kerry's views: ...I believe they deserve to be heard and listened to by the Congress and by the officials in the executive branch and by the public generally. You have a perspective that those in the Government who make our Nation's policy do no always have and I am sure that your testimony today will be helpful to the committee in its consideration of the proposals before us...Fulbright also mentions the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision, where the court ruled that Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group for which Kerry was a leader and spokesman, did not have a constitutional right to use the National Mall: ...I regret that. It seems to me to be but another instance of an insensitivity of our Government to the tragic effects of this war upon our people. I want also to congratulate Mr. Kerry, you, and your associates upon the restraint that you have shown, certainly in the hearing the other day when there were a great many of your people here. I think you conducted yourselves in a most commendable manner throughout this week. Whenever people gather there is always a tendency for some of the more emotional ones to do things which are even against their own interests. I think you deserve much of the credit because I understand you are one of the leaders of this group... Kerry's testimonyAfter a brief supportive statement from Javits, Kerry begins reading his prepared opening statement. After thanking each member of the committee by name, Kerry states: I would like to say for the record, and also for the men behind me who are also wearing the uniforms and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic. I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony."The men behind me" refers to members of VVAW and others who came to the committee to hear Kerry testify, which by all accounts was very crowded with supporters and media. Kerry also mentions the short time he had to prepare: I would simply like to speak in very general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me and I am afraid because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare. Kerry then delivers a most important part of his testimony — explaining the Winter Soldier Investigation, which took place earlier that year in Detroit, Michigan. This part of the testimony is the most controversial: ...I would like to talk, representing all those veterans, and say that several months ago in Detroit, we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged and many very highly decorated veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia, not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit, the emotions in the room, the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam, but they did. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, tape wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the country side of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country. We call this investigation the "Winter Soldier Investigation." The term "Winter Soldier" is a play on words of Thomas Paine in 1776 when he spoke of the Sunshine Patriot and summertime soldiers who deserted at Valley Forge because the going was rough...'' Kerry continues to stress the emotional anguish of Vietnam War veterans, then moves on to political issues: ...In 1970 at West Point, Vice President [Spiro] Agnew said "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse" and this was used as a rallying point for our effort in Vietnam. But for us, as boys in Asia, whom the country was supposed to support, his statement is a terrible distortion from which we can only draw a very deep sense of revulsion. Hence the anger of some of the men who are here in Washington today. It is a distortion because we in no way consider ourselves the best men of this country, because those he calls misfits were standing up for us in a way that nobody else in this country dated to, because so many who have died would have returned to this country to join the misfits in their efforts to ask for an immediate withdrawal from South Vietnam, because so many of those best men have returned as quadriplegics and amputees, and they lie forgotten in Veterans' Administration hospitals in this country which fly the flag which so many have chosen as their own personal symbol. And we can not consider ourselves America's best men when we are ashamed of and hated what we were called on to do in Southeast Asia. In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America. And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to use the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart... Kerry expressed his belief that the Vietnam War did not make the U.S. more safe or secure, and that the conflict was really a civil war instead of part of a global struggle against Communism: ...We found most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart. They wanted everything to do with the war, particularly with this foreign presence of the United States of America, to leave them alone in peace, and they practiced the art of survival by siding with whichever military force was present at a particular time, be it Vietcong, North Vietnamese, or American." ...We found also that all too often American men were dying in those rice paddies for want of support from their allies. We saw firsthand how money from American taxes was used for a corrupt dictatorial regime. We saw that many people in this country had a one-sided idea of who was kept free by our flag, as blacks provided the highest percentage of casualties. We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs as well as by search and destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong." 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