Swift boat showdown in Crawford
By Wolf Blitzer
CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- "We're asking George Bush today to put up or shut up," former Democratic Senator and Vietnam War veteran Max Cleland said in Crawford, Texas, as he tried to deliver a letter to the president signed by several current U.S. senators -- all veterans -- asking the president to denounce the swift boat attack ads against John Kerry.
"We want George Bush to stand up, come to the plate and say this is wrong. An attack on the valorous service of a fellow American is wrong," Cleland said.
Jim Rassmann, the U.S. Army Green Beret who was saved by Kerry on a river in Vietnam in 1969, joined Cleland.
"I had bullets flying around me and now they're telling me that I'm a liar. I'm not a liar. I know it when a bullet comes near me," Rassmann said.
Despite repeated White House denials, Cleland charged that Kerry was the latest Vietnam War veteran smeared by the president -- saying the same happened to Republican Sen. John McCain during the 2000 presidential primary and to himself.
"I'm one of the three Vietnam veterans that George Bush went after. He came to my state five different times and they ran millions of dollars worth of ads with me and Saddam Hussein up there," Cleland said.
Bush did not personally receive Cleland or his letter at the ranch. Instead, Jerry Patterson, the Texas State Land commissioner, also a Vietnam War veteran, was outside the ranch with a pro-Bush letter for Cleland -- endorsed by several members of Congress.
"The letter was drafted by Bush-Cheney '04 and all of us are signatories... All veterans have a right to speak," Patterson said.
The exchange was the latest in the uproar following the release of two attack ads put out by the anti-Kerry group, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
By law, the groups that release those ads -- known as 527's -- are supposed to be completely independent of presidential campaigns or political parties. But Kerry and other Democrats charge that the swift boat ads are merely a front for the president.
That's a charge denied by the Bush-Cheney campaign, though last night it was revealed one of the president's top campaign lawyers, Benjamin Ginsberg, was also providing legal advice to the swift boat group.
Together with former Secretary of State James Baker, Ginsberg was one of the key Bush lawyers involved in the 2000 Florida election recount uproar.
He has now resigned from the campaign.
In a letter to the president, he said he simply wanted "to ensure that the giving of legal advice to decorated military veterans, which was entirely within the boundaries of the law, doesn't distract from the real issues upon which you and the country should be focusing."
He insisted he was merely offering the same kind of legal advice to the swift boat veterans group as Democratic Party lawyers have been providing to anti-Bush attack groups.
