http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2004/04/28/medals/print.htmlOut of all the stories that have hounded Kerry on the campaign trail, the issue of whether he threw away his ribbons or his medals is the most mendacious. Last week the media demanded to view Kerry's military records. The reason for the urgency was that Grant W. Hibbard, a lieutenant commander during Kerry's swift boat days in Vietnam, asserted that Kerry's first Purple Heart was undeserved. According to Hibbard, Kerry had a tiny scratch. The Boston Globe quoted him as saying, "I've had thorns from a rose that were worse." Over 35 years after the fact, Hibbard, a Republican, was trying to belittle, embarrass and malign Kerry.
<>But the release of Kerry's war record put an end to the flap. Stuck in the middle of released documents was an evaluation of Kerry by Hibbard, filled out two weeks after he supposedly told Kerry he didn't deserve a Purple Heart. Nowhere in Hibbard's evaluation did he mention any problem with Kerry over Kerry's winning a Purple Heart. In fact, Hibbard wrote that Kerry was one of the best sailors he knew in three categories -- initiative, cooperation and personal behavior. Why, if he thought Kerry was trying to finagle a Purple Heart, did he give him such high marks for personal behavior? As Katherine Q. Seelye reported in the New York Times once the document was released, Hibbard went underground, unwilling to grant interviews, hiding from the press in his retirement home in Florida. The story went away.
<>Here is what happened on April 23, 1971, the day of the medal ceremony: First, Kerry had been in Washington for over a week organizing the Vietnam Veterans Against the War march on Washington. Before that he had been fundraising in New York City. His medals had been left back in Waltham, Mass. What he had brought with him, and often wore, were his ribbons. This made perfect sense. His medals were too clunky to wear on his Navy blues. When Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, for example, he wore his ribbons, not his medals. Throughout the week of Dewey Canyon III, the White House was worried sick about the medal-returning ceremony. Its main fear was that VVAW was going to abandon the Capitol and hurl them over the White House gate instead. President Nixon and his advisors considered having a U.S. military representative accept the medals in front of the White House -- such a gesture would ensure there was no violence or wild TV images.
<>Recent critics of Kerry assert that his Dewey County III ceremony is a metaphor for a lifetime of political flip-flopping. For Kerry, giving up his ribbons -- the objects he had with him in Washington that week -- made perfect sense. To his way of thinking, he was symbolically returning his medals to the U.S. government by tossing his ribbons. Even Sen. Stuart Symington, D-Mo., when preparing to cross-examine Kerry at the Fulbright committee meeting, asked him what the "medals" on his chest represented. They weren't medals, they were ribbons; it was -- and is -- a common mistake. From Kerry's vantage point, there is nothing contradictory about his statement to "Viewpoints" that he had given back "six, seven, eight, nine medals." To have said that he had given back ribbons but that his medals were at home would have simply confused the TV audience.
<>Still, the persistent resurrection of this issue means Kerry should have been more exact in his language back in 1971. Clarity is usually a virtue in politics. But we should also remember that he earned those medals/ribbons. The shrapnel in his thigh should remind us of that sacrifice. It is a tangible souvenir from Vietnam that is still with him every day.
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