This is the transcript of a speech I gave at the Libertarian Party of Ohio convention in 2020. Delivering this address was (almost) indescribably important to me. Being a veteran and descendant of veterans, writing this examination and doing the research for it was impactful. I hope you find it as insightful as the work behind it was for me.
As a veteran myself – having served six years in the United States Navy, twice deployed to the Middle East, the son of a World War II veteran who narrowly escaped death on the front lines in France, and the great-grandson of a Union Army soldier during the Civil War…
…I wish to take a few minutes to address a topic that is of significant personal importance and interest: U.S. military policy, military service, and how they interplay with presidential election year politics.
To achieve some measure of brevity, these remarks will focus on several presidential elections since I reached voting age in 1988.
As we will see, the ’88 election serves as a good starting point. That year, George H.W. Bush selected as his running-mate then-Senator from Indiana Dan Quayle.
Some in here and watching on CSPAN will remember how, within days of joining that presidential ticket, Senator Quayle was grilled over his choice to join the National Guard during the Vietnam conflict.
Going forward, his patriotism, his character, his dedication to his country, and of course his suitability for elected office were actively and aggressively assailed by the opposing major party. The starting point for all that being the nature of his military service.
Four years later, during the 1992 presidential race, the same political camp which eagerly took Quayle to task over joining the National Guard tripped all over themselves and one another in defending the nomination of then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton – who had taken multiple college deferments during U.S. involvement in Vietnam.
From there, fast-forward twelve years to 2004: the party of former Vice President Quayle demonstrated they would not be outdone in the arena of political hypocrisy.
With President George W. Bush locked in a tight reelection race, a political action committee calling themselves Swift Boat Veterans for Truth ran a series of attack ads against Bush’s main challenger, then-Massachusetts Senator John Kerry.
The Swift Boat Veterans PAC was heavily funded by a handful of party insiders from Texas, all deeply loyal to President Bush. Their commercials aggressively challenged and disparaged the nature of the senator’s service in Vietnam, where he was attached to a Naval swift boat unit.
The assertions in those ads eventually would be either proven false or revealed to come from unreliable sources who could not have known any such particulars surrounding Kerry’s wartime deployment.
Remember, all of this was coming from the political party claiming to hold veterans in high esteem.
On a quick side note: the controversy generated by these advertisements led to the term “swiftboating” being coined: meaning the use of dubious revelations and other misleading comments for political gain.
As a sad epilogue to all this, such hypocrisy from that party doesn’t even end there.
In 2008 and 2012, U.S. Representative from Texas, Ron Paul sought his party’s nomination for President, bringing with him an impressive resume punctuated by his service as a flight surgeon in the United States Air Force and then the Air National Guard.
Paul’s time of military service would include deployment to Vietnam.
During his 2012 presidential bid, in fact, Ron Paul would be his party’s only wartime veteran in the field.
The establishment may not have gone to the same extremes with the congressman’s time of service as they did with John Kerry’s…
…but they would do the next-best thing: ignore it… and do so to preserve their agenda.
No mention of Paul being a Vietnam veteran was made by any of the popular conservative pundits or election campaign reporters in the mainstream news media.
Taking the nature of Ron Paul’s military service into consideration on the campaign trail would have given his non-interventionist stance on U.S. foreign policy far greater credibility than many of his antiwar contemporaries.
It’s the same reason I emphasized my own personal and family history of military service as I did at the beginning.
At this point, I wish to revisit one individual mentioned previously because there is more that warrants examination.
When it comes to our nation’s foreign policy, few people in American Politics represent everything that is wrong in that arena than former senator from Massachusetts and
Secretary of State John Kerry.
Upon completion of his Naval active duty obligation, he began his antiwar activism. Kerry joined the organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War and later gained some notoriety for participating in the Winter Soldier Investigation. He first made national news in April 1971 by giving controversial testimony during the Fulbright hearings of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations.
He would use that antiwar activism to springboard his political aspirations, running for Congress the next year.
As a career politician, Kerry maintained his antiwar position, including most of his time in the Senate – that is, until he ran for President and decided being antiwar was too unfashionable in post-9-11 America.
In 2004, the man who had once been an antiwar stalwart in America’s political landscape would campaign for the White House while keeping one foot in each camp: sometimes antiwar, sometimes a pragmatic warhawk as needed.
Then, in February 2013 – in what would prove to be the pinnacle of his political career – his appointment as U.S. Secretary of State was confirmed by his fellow Senators.
John Kerry then spent the next four years beating the drum for war at every turn at the behest of the Obama Administration.
What everyone who is antiwar – or even simply has begun to rethink the present nature of U.S. military interventionism – should stop and ask is this: what changed?
What. Changed.
My fellow Americans, if you are as weary as I am of this never-ending cycle of political hypocrisy, there is one path to steer this country away from it: on Election Day, November 3, vote Libertarian.
And, I don’t just mean for the presidential ticket decided at national convention. Vote Libertarian in every U.S. Senate and House race. Vote Libertarian in your statewide and state legislature elections.
Most importantly, vote for the Libertarians running in your local races at the county, municipal, and township levels. Today’s Libertarians elected at the local level gain the ever-valuable public office experience that will enable them to run for and win state-level offices and beyond.
And, they will bring with them on that path, not only an antiwar or non-interventionist philosophy, but that same fire inside of them to dismantle that cycle of hypocrisy driving public policy and which has become entrenched in our nation’s governmental establishments.
Thank you for your time and may Peace, Faith, and Liberty be yours.
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