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McCain Camp Ignores Questions About Candidate’s Military Record
By Jeff Stein, Congressional Quarterly Staff

Evidently taking a page from John Kerry ’s quest for the presidency in
2004, John McCain ’s campaign has decided — for now, anyway — not to
respond to provocative attacks aimed squarely at his strong point: his
reputation as a military hero.

The much talked about main broadside came in the form of a 12,000-word
attack in Rolling Stone, which portrayed the hard-partying young McCain
as a reckless pilot who totaled three jets, and whose career as a pilot
was saved only by the pull of his father, commander of the U.S. Navy’s
Pacific Fleet during the Vietnam War.

The piece, which Rolling Stone says has garnered 2.5 million hits on the
magazine’s Web site since Oct. 6, has been the talk of the liberal
blogosphere, but gotten zero attention from the mainstream media.

The Internet has also been afire with other, more vicious brickbats
suggesting that a “cowboy pilot” prank by McCain might have started the
July 1967 fire that destroyed the USS Forrestal aircraft carrier.

Unlike the Rolling Stone piece, however, whose negative coverage of
McCain’s military years leans heavily on the recollections of John
Dramesi, an Air Force pilot who was a prisoner of war with McCain, the
blogs on the Forrestal incident rely almost entirely on anonymous sources.

In 2004, Kerry’s team initially decided to ignore attacks on his
military record, figuring that few people would believe questions about
his much-decorated performance as a Navy swift boat commander in Vietnam.

Like McCain, Kerry’s vaunted Vietnam service was a key element of his
run for the presidency.

According to the conventional wisdom, the swift boaters sulphurous TV
ads, which portrayed the Massachusetts senator as a resume-inflating
imposter who did not deserve his medals, inflicted a fatal blow on
Kerry’s campaign before he belatedly decided he had to respond.

The Rolling Stone piece, “Make Believe Maverick,” by Tim Dickinson,
likewise calls into question McCain’s military legend.

It portrays him running from his burning jet on the Forrestal’s deck and
virtually hiding in the carrier’s ward room while others died fighting
the ferocious fire and exploding ordnance. In all, 133 sailors died in
the tragedy.

Publicly, McCain’s campaign has ignored the story. It also declined to
respond to my requests by phone and e-mail for a comment on the story’s
accuracy.

Likewise, it has not responded to slashing blogs circulating intensely
on the Web that offer an even darker view of the Forrestal incident.

According to these accounts, McCain, whose A4-E Skyhawk was queued up in
a line of jets waiting to take off, “wet started” his engine, a prank
designed to startle a trailing pilot with a flame of exploding kerosene.
McCain Camp Ignores Questions About Candidate’s Military Record

Normally, it’s a harmless, common stunt by “cowboy pilots.” But on this
occasion the exploding kerosene caused a six-foot long Zuni rocket under
the trailing pilot’s wing to launch across the flight deck.

“[It] ripped through the fuel tank of McCain’s aircraft,” Dickinson
writes. “Hundreds of gallons of fuel splashed onto the deck and came
ablaze. Then: Clank. Clank. Two 1,000-pound bombs dropped from under the
belly of McCain’s stubby A-4 . . . into the fire.”

McCain rolled out of his cockpit onto the deck and ran for his life,
Dickinson writes.

“Just then, one of his bombs ‘cooked off,’ blowing a crater in the deck
and incinerating the sailors who had rushed past McCain with hoses and
fire extinguishers.”

But according to historian Mary Hershberger, writing on the liberal
Truthdig.com site, McCain panicked.

“Some of those who were on the Forrestal and other persons familiar with
the ordnance told me that because the rocket did not hit McCain’s craft,
only actions by the pilot could have caused any bomb to fall from
McCain’s Skyhawk,” wrote Hershberger, who in 2005 published a biography,
”Jane Fonda’s War,” advertised as “an antidote to the ‘Hanoi Jane’ myth.”

“These sources . . . who spoke under the condition that they not be
publicly identified,” Hershberger wrote, “agree with each other that, if
any bomb fell from the McCain airplane, it was because of actions that
he took either in error or panic upon seeing the fire on the deck or in
his hasty exit from the plane. Two switches in the cockpit of a Skyhawk
need to be thrown to drop such a bomb, according to the sources.”

Truthdig lists Hershberger’s piece, posted on May 7, as its “most read”
and “most e-mailed” article.

But while Truthdig and Rolling Stone have liberals clucking, it’s yet to
be seen whether they will have any where near the impact of the swift
boat ads — which, by the way, the mainstream media also initially
ignored because of questions about their accuracy.

“I doubt it will have much of an impact.,” says New York Times media
columnist David Carr.

“There is a vertical axis of information in conservative circles that
the swift boat moved on that is not replicated by liberals,” Carr said
“The conservative talk radio shows have an ability to metastasize and
amplify negative stories, and they won’t be punching in on this one.”

Washington Post blogger Dan Froomkin, a frequent Bush critic, agreed.

“One enormous difference compared to Kerry, in my mind, is that the
[mainstream media], with the exception of the LA Times, has refused to
pick up any elements of this story, whereas it served (wittingly and
unwittingly) as a massive echo chamber for the Swift boating,” according
to Froomkin.
McCain Camp Ignores Questions About Candidate’s Military Record

But Josh Marshall, founding editor of the influential liberal blog
Talking Points Memo, said the attack on Kerry’s military record and
McCain’s are “fundamentally different in two respects. The more
important of the two is that there’s been very little questioning, as
far as I’ve seen, of McCain’s actual military and POW record.”

“Second,” he added, “there’s been no organized effort, again as far as
I’ve seen, to denigrate his record.”

Mark Hertsgaard, author of “On Bended Knee,” a best-selling critique of
the 1980s-era White House press corps, said attacks on McCain’s war
record, lacking a right-wing media accelerant, will wilt without a boost
from the major newspapers and networks.

“The obvious place to start is with the former POW, Mr. Dramesi,”
featured in the Rolling Stone piece, he added. “Why aren’t we seeing him
on TV shows already?”

Mark Crispin Miller, author of “Loser Take All: Election Fraud and the
Subversion of Democracy, 2000-2008,” among other books on the media,
called the Rolling Stone piece “devastating” and scolded the Democrats
for being “too timid” to make more of it.

“It’s sadly typical that the Republicans could mount a big campaign of
lies [against Kerry] and get away with it, while the Democrats do
nothing with the very damning truth about McCain’s war record,” added
Miller, who maintained he is “not a Democrat or Obama supporter.”

The lone establishment voice calling for the media to dig deeper into
McCain’s war record belongs to Barry Sussman, one of the famed
Washington Post editors in charge of the paper’s Watergate investigations.

“McCain has made his military experience a key reason to vote for him.,”
Sussman wrote on the Nieman Watchdog Web site, which he now edits
following his Post retirement.

“Reporters should examine his military records, including reports on air
mishaps he was involved in before he was shot down over Hanoi. And
McCain should see to it that all reports are made public,” Sussman said.

So far, though, outside of the Los Angles Times, Rolling Stone and the
web, no one appears to be heeding Sussman’s call, posted in early September.

Rolling Stone managing editor Will Dana said he found that curious.

“Tim Dickinson gets asked to be on MSNBC and CNN all the time,” Dana
said, “but the phones haven’t been ringing this week.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at .