Months after the controversy erupted, the Houston Chronicle finally interviews local attorney John O'Neill, author of Unfit for Command and co-founder of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, who says his fight with John Kerry is personal, not political.
Earlier this year, as he lay in the hospital recuperating from major surgery in which he donated a kidney to his ailing wife, John O'Neill had no aspirations to literary success or political prominence.Posted by Alan at September 20, 2004 05:42 AMAnd if John Kerry had not a few weeks later surged to the front of the pack and in March sewn up the Democratic nomination for president, O'Neill may well have returned to his downtown Houston law practice and a comfortable life of relative obscurity.
But the possibility that Kerry, a decorated Vietnam War veteran against whom O'Neill has held a personal grudge for more than 30 years, could possibly become commander-in-chief of U.S. forces was too much to stomach.
Six months later, O'Neill's legal career is on hold. He has co-written a book attacking Kerry's war record that tops the national best-seller lists, and he leads a group of angry veterans who have mounted an effective and well-funded campaign to discredit Kerry's Vietnam heroics and derail his bid for the presidency.
O'Neill and his organization, Swift Boat Veterans For Truth, are accused by Kerry and his Democratic supporters of acting as clandestine operatives for the Republican Party. They are funded in part by prominent Republicans. And they received legal advice from a lawyer in President Bush's campaign who has since resigned.
But O'Neill adamantly maintains his beef against Kerry has nothing to do with partisan politics and everything to do with the Massachusetts senator's fitness to lead the nation in war.
"If the president of the United States was not the commander-in-chief I wouldn't have as much of a problem with it (Kerry's candidacy)," O'Neill, 58, said in an interview last week. "The problem I have is the president of the United States does serve as the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and I can't conceive of this guy commanding them."
After November, whatever the outcome of the election, O'Neill, a top-of-his-class graduate from the University of Texas Law School and a former clerk for U.S. Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist, plans to slip back into the obscurity of his law practice.
"Thirty-three years ago, the debate I had with Kerry was a major event in my life and I had no desire after that to be in politics," O'Neill said. "I just went home and became politically anonymous, and that is exactly what I plan to do this time."