Hardball interviews John Oneill

[dude1394]

I was interested in this interview as I think I've seen Matthews try to shift away from shrill partisan after his run-in with zell. This is heartening as matthews actually is pretty interesting to me. I actually think if he would take more of O'Reilly's non-toleration of spin, he could have a pretty good audience. THere is also some background and discussion on vietnam that I normally don't see and some pretty honest discussion of what happened. All in all pretty good chris. Also O'Neill again shows himself as a studious solid source with pretty apolitical convictions.
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hardball

MATTHEWS: This half-hour on HARDBALL, John O‘Neill, the co-author of the anti-Kerry best-seller “Unfit For Command,” plus, Frank Rich of “The New York Times” and “TIME” magazine‘s Michael Weisskopf on the presidential race one week before the first debate.
MATTHEWS: Welcome back to HARDBALL.
As David Shuster reported, the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth released a new ad that says John Kerry secretly met with enemy leaders in Paris while we were still at war in Vietnam.
John O‘Neill is a member of the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth and co-author of the book “Unfit For Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry.” Mr. O‘Neill succeeded John Kerry‘s command of PCF-94, the swift boat in Vietnam.
Mr. O‘Neill, thank you very much for coming back.

JOHN O‘NEILL, SWIFT BOAT VETERANS FOR TRUTH: Thank you very much, sir.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you about those. What do you think are the—is the importance of that meeting between John Kerry and the North Vietnamese leaders in Paris?

O‘NEILL: He met once and possibly twice, Chris, with the North Vietnamese, for the first time in May of 1970 and we believe on a second occasion in July of 1971.
I think the significance is, he was a Naval officer. He was prohibited by the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In the United States, we don‘t negotiate separately. We negotiate through our commander in chief.

MATTHEWS: All right, that‘s a Logan Act violation, you‘re saying. Is that right?

O‘NEILL: Not only that. It is simply a betrayal. We were in the field, Chris. We lost a lot of people by coincidence in May of 1970. I don‘t think one of the guys that served with us should have been meeting with the North Vietnamese.
Your mentor was a fabulous man, Tip O‘Neill. He never met with the North Vietnamese. He never called the guys like us war criminals.

MATTHEWS: John, what do you think—you fought in the service. You faced the enemy bullets. You have as much guts as anybody. Let me ask you this. What would be the appropriate role, looking back, on someone like yourself, an officer, an enlisted guy or woman, who decided during the course of the war they thought it was bad for the United States to be doing that, for whatever reason? What was their American, appropriate manner in which they should have expressed that?

O‘NEILL: I think a great example was Lieutenant Colonel Corson, who was my professor at the Naval Academy, “Wild Bill” Corson.
He gave up his entire career in the Marine Corps. He wrote a book. He protested the war openly because he thought it was the wrong thing to do. None of us had anything but courage—excuse me—but respect for Colonel Corson, because those were his feelings, even if we disagreed with him. But he didn‘t meet with the enemy and he didn‘t take the position we were all criminals. And he didn‘t lie—he didn‘t claim that Ho Chi Minh was George Washington, all of which John Kerry did.

MATTHEWS: Right.
Among your—the troupe you‘ve kept very loyal to, you‘ve been very much a community, I can say, a fraternity of men, a band of brothers all these years. You‘ve stuck together since way back in the late ‘60s. And you‘ve met a lot and you‘ve probably spent a lot of time in bull sessions together. What is the general sense among you guys who fought the war, didn‘t protest it at the time, about what it was about? Was it a good war for the United States?

Forget the morality for a second here. Was it effective for U.S. foreign policy to have fought that war through the 1970s?

O‘NEILL: You find mixed feelings, to tell you the truth, Chris.
Some people believe it was a mistake to have gotten involved in the Vietnam War. Other people feel, if we had supported the Vietnamese after 1972, that it would have turned into a nation like South Korea.

MATTHEWS: That we could have held the line. We could have helped them hold the line.

O‘NEILL: People—all of us, though, believe, even if we lost in South Vietnam, we did win the Cold War. It is a lot like we lost at Pearl Harbor, but we won World War II. And so we take pride in that accomplishment.

MATTHEWS: And people believe that even though the war turned bad and we ended up leaving and the Vietnamese ended up losing their government in the south, that it did play an efficacious role in the Cold War?

O‘NEILL: We stood. We fought. We fought in a battle that was lost in a war that was won, Chris. The Vietnam War was a terrible tragedy. There were four million people killed after we left. There‘s nothing, no way to paint it except as a terrible tragedy. That‘s what it really was.

MATTHEWS: You have an amazing pulpit now, sir, having had a book on the best-seller list at No. 1 for all these weeks. And you‘ve written a book that has had an impact on this campaign and will have an impact on Election Day. We had you on to talk about the particulars of the book.
Can you summarize, based upon your firsthand experience, and those of your fellows, with John Kerry, what the voters should know from that experience? Distill it down to what you know that‘s relevant to them when they vote.

O‘NEILL: Based on my investigation, and, much less importance, John Kerry exaggerated his role in Vietnam. Much more important, and firsthand experience, when John Kerry came back, it wasn‘t clear who he was for anymore.

He was telling people that Ho Chi Minh was like George Washington. He was meeting directly with our enemies. Most important to me, he was characterizing all of our guys as the army of Genghis Khan. We weren‘t that. I don‘t believe he would be fit to be commander in chief. I would not entrust my son or my nephew to John Kerry to be the guy in charge of them.

MATTHEWS: Do you think he believed that the North Vietnamese and the V.C. were the good guys and we were the bad guys? Did he go that far?

O‘NEILL: He really did. That‘s the sad thing, Chris.
When you read his speech where he says Ho Chi Minh is like George Washington and he wants to impose a constitution that will be like our Constitution, that‘s a speech he gave that‘s in the book. That‘s what he actually said. I don‘t know how he could believe that. We saw them, Chris. They were killing people.

MATTHEWS: General Eisenhower—President Eisenhower—he was General Eisenhower—when he was president said he was fearful of having an election in South Vietnam during the last part of the 1950s for fear that Ho Chi Minh would win the election. So he was a very popular figure.

O‘NEILL: And he might have. I can‘t speak to that.
But I can tell that you by the time we were there, we were watching the communists shoot people in the back of the head. We would recover their bodies two and three a week in the area that we were in. These were not—these were not—this is not George Washington or anything like any of us saw.

MATTHEWS: Let me ask you this about the impact of your book. It‘s sold, what, a half-million, a million copies by now?

O‘NEILL: I think it has sold 830,000 copies. It is really the book of 60 of us, to be fair. I‘m proud of having my name on it, but there are more than 60 people from our unit that contributed to it.

MATTHEWS: Five years, 10 years from now, what impact will it have had?

O‘NEILL: This book?

MATTHEWS: Yes.

O‘NEILL: I can‘t say.

MATTHEWS: Because I don‘t think you did it for the money. So what impact will it have?

O‘NEILL: Oh, I hope the first thing it does is that the election that occurs will be an informed election. People will make up their own mind, that we won‘t be in a situation where an election occurs without all the facts, no matter what the result is.
The second thing is, I hope people realize that the average Vietnam veteran is not a war criminal. He is not a—he is just a kid, just like the kids from Holy Cross that I taught, Chris, my last year.

MATTHEWS: I know you did.

O‘NEILL: They were good kids.

MATTHEWS: Well, both my brothers were
MATTHEWS: ... as you know. Both went over.

O‘NEILL: And you know they‘re great people. You know that they were doing their best.

MATTHEWS: OK. Well, it‘s great having you on.

MATTHEWS: Congratulations, John O‘Neill. We may disagree, but all in good civility.

O‘NEILL: Thank you.