# Swift Boat Veterans for Truth Ads In August 2004 a newly formed group of Vietnam veterans began running television ads that said [[John Kerry]], the Democratic nominee for president, had lied about the combat record at the center of his campaign. The first ad cost about half a million dollars and ran in three states. Cable news did the rest. The charges were contradicted by Navy records and by the men who served on Kerry's boat, but they consumed the month of August, and they gave American politics a verb: [[Swiftboating]]. The group behind them has its own page: [[Swift Boat Veterans for Truth]]. ## The ads **"Any Questions?"** began airing on **August 5, 2004** in Ohio, Wisconsin and West Virginia. Thirteen veterans who had served on Navy swift boats in Vietnam speak one after another. The refrain is "I served with John Kerry." None of them had served on Kerry's own boat. They say he lied to get his medals, that he could not be counted on, and that he "is no war hero." **"Sellout"** followed on **August 20**. It shifted the target from Kerry's service to what he did when he came home, using his 1971 Senate testimony about atrocities in Vietnam alongside veterans and former prisoners of war who said his words had dishonored them. More spots followed through the fall, on Kerry's medals and on a story he had told about being in Cambodia. The structure of the campaign was the two-step in those first two ads: first say the hero is a fraud, then say he betrayed the real heroes. ## Who made it and who paid The ads were made for the group by Republican consultant [[Chris LaCivita]], its media adviser, and the firm Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, whose founder Greg Stevens had produced the [[Dukakis Tank Ad]] for the Bush campaign in 1988. The group's lawyer was [[Ben Ginsberg]], who was also the top outside election lawyer for the Bush campaign. When that became public he resigned from the campaign, on August 25, 2004, and kept the veterans as a client. The money came mostly from Texas. Houston homebuilder Bob Perry, a longtime Republican donor, put up the seed money and eventually about $4.45 million. Harold Simmons gave $3 million and T. Boone Pickens $2 million. Those three accounted for more than half of what the group reported. By the end of the cycle it had raised more than $25 million, according to the [[Federal Election Commission]]. The ads arrived alongside a book. *Unfit for Command*, by the group's leading figure, John O'Neill, and [[Jerome Corsi]], was published by [[Regnery Publishing]] the same month and became a bestseller. ## Was it true? No finding supported the central charge. [[FactCheck.org]] reported the day after the first ad aired that the accusers were contradicted by Kerry's former crewmen and by the Navy's own records. Some of the veterans in the ads had praised Kerry's conduct in writing years earlier. Later press reviews reached the same place: the accusers had not shown that Kerry lied to win his decorations. ## Reaction Senator [[John McCain]], a Republican and a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, called the first ad "dishonest and dishonorable" and asked the Bush campaign to condemn it. President [[George W. Bush]] declined to denounce the ads specifically. Kerry's campaign held its fire for about two weeks before answering in force on August 19, a delay that became a cautionary tale of its own for later campaigns. The Museum of the Moving Image, which archives presidential campaign commercials, records "Any Questions?" as the first ad from an outside group to draw response ads directly from the campaign it attacked. ## What happened next Kerry lost the [[2004 Presidential Election]] in November. How much the ads moved the result is not established; polling on his honesty and his Vietnam record slipped during August, but researchers who looked for a direct link found limited evidence for one. The legal reckoning came two years after the vote. On **December 13, 2006** the [[Federal Election Commission]] announced that the group would pay a **$299,500** civil penalty for failing to register and report as a federal political committee and for taking contributions over the legal limits. The commission took no further action on the separate allegation that the group had coordinated with the Bush campaign. Campaign-finance lawyers pointed out at the time that the fine was a little over one percent of what the group had raised. ## Why it's on the map - **It is the outside-group model at full strength.** In 1988 the [[Willie Horton]] ad came from a political action committee while the campaign kept its distance. In 2004 the vehicle was a [[527 Organization]], which could take checks of any size. The [[Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act]] had just banned unlimited "soft money" gifts to the parties; the money moved to groups like this one within a single election cycle. - **It attacked a strength, not a weakness.** Kerry's war record was his campaign's opening argument. The ads did not need to win the argument about what happened in the Mekong Delta in 1969. They needed to turn a settled asset into a disputed one. - **The cost of doing business.** The fine arrived two years late and was small next to the spending. That gap between what the rules forbid and what they cost is a recurring pattern in the wiki's campaign-finance pages, and it widened after [[Citizens United v. FEC]] and the arrival of [[Super PACs]]. - **The people kept working.** LaCivita went on to co-manage [[Donald Trump]]'s 2024 campaign. Corsi went on to [[Birtherism]]. ## Connections - [[Swift Boat Veterans for Truth]] — the group - [[Swiftboating]] — the term - [[John Kerry]] · [[Chris LaCivita]] · [[Ben Ginsberg]] · [[Jerome Corsi]] - [[2004 Presidential Election]] - [[527 Organization]] · [[Independent Expenditure]] - [[Political Ads Hub]] · [[Willie Horton]] · [[Daisy Ad]] · [[Ramaswamy Ad Featuring Amy Acton's Mother]]