PUTTING A SPIN ON KERREY's STORY

By: Nat Hentoff Our Columnist Ponders PR Firm's Involvement


Bob Kerrey -- Vietnam War hero, former U.S. senator, and now president of New York's New School University -- had a grave public-relations problem. In The New York Times Magazine April 29 and on CBS' "60 Minutes II" May 1, a raid he had conducted on the Vietnamese village of Thanh Phong in 1969 had been vividly and accusatorily recounted.

One of the seven Navy SEALs on that raid, Gerhard Klann, had said in both stories that, at Kerrey's command, more than a dozen women and children were herded together and shot to death, at close range; that a surviving baby, still crying, also was finished off; and that Kerrey himself earlier put his knee on an old man's chest as Klann slashed his throat.

Kerrey, in both stories, denied Klann's version, saying that on that moonless night, in a free-fire zone, his squad had been shot at and returned fire, from a distance. They later found the corpses in the village. On "60 Minutes II," Kerrey said that the event was not a war crime. Calling the killings an "atrocity ... is pretty close to being right, because that's how it felt," he explained.

But Klann said unequivocally: "We just basically slaughtered those people."

In the torrent of coverage that followed, there were calls for an official investigation of what actually did happen in Thanh Phong in the utter darkness, as Kerrey described it. A few researchers pointed out, for example, that according to the U.S. Naval Observatory the moon was 60% visible that night until an hour after the last survivor, the crying baby, was killed.

However, the majority of the commentary in newspapers and on radio and TV echoed three U.S. senators -- John Kerry, Chuck Hagel, and Max Cleland -- who served in Vietnam and wrote in The Washington Post: "Many people have been forced to do things in war they are deeply ashamed of later. Yet for our country to blame the warrior instead of the war is among the worst and, regrettably, the most frequent mistakes we as a country can make." And others claimed that the fundamental complicity was of the members of Congress and presidents who sent these and so many other young men to fight that questionable war that cost so many American lives.

Soon, however, Kerrey's raid was off the front pages, as well as the inside ones, and his name since has been seldom heard on talk radio or TV. There has been no indication there will be an official investigation.

What helped quiet the story was a statement by five other Navy SEALs on the raid that Kerrey, not Klann, has provided a true account of what happened.

Only briefly and fitfully noted in the press, however, was the role a PR firm played in selling Kerrey's version of events. On April 30, the New York Post reported that a "PR firm doing damage control for Kerrey" had transported the five other Navy SEALs to New York, had put them up at an East Side hotel, and had them meet, at Kerrey's home, until 2 a.m. to thrash out a consensus of what they would say happened in Thanh Phong in 1969.

"At that meeting," Time reported May 7, the six SEALs "talked the raid over for the very first time." By late afternoon of the same day the meeting ended, Kerrey was emboldened enough to claim that sections of the media were involved in a conspiracy against him.

The Post story said the PR firm was based in Washington. But many New York newspeople know that the most take-no-prisoners star of the PR firmament was New York's John Scanlon. He died suddenly of a heart attack soon after the Kerrey story broke, but a friend had asked him -- as news came of the impending New York Times and "60 Minutes II" stories -- whether Kerrey had become his client.

"I'm giving him advice," Scanlon said. And what Kerrey did fit the Scanlon strategic pattern -- counter an adverse story immediately by giving your side in as many interviews as you can get.

I can't prove that Scanlon himself gathered together the five corroborating SEALs so that they and Kerrey could tell a common story. But the meeting did take place, and it reminded me of New York's 48-hour rule, under which city police officers accused in the press of especially outrageous conduct are given 48 hours during which they do not have to speak to anyone -- including internal-affairs investigators with the police department. During those reflective 48 hours, the cops can orchestrate a common explanation of what they will say happened.

Nationally, most Americans don't know about Kerrey's closed-door meeting without the seventh SEAL, Gerhard Klann, who works in a steel mill in Butler, Pa., and can't afford a PR firm.

Largely forgotten is a point made in an April 30 letter in The New York Times by reader Patricia Sette: "Everyone, including Mr. Kerrey, seems to think that this story is about him. ... Real human beings ... suffered a terrifying and undeserved death. No matter what degree of understanding Kerrey deserves, it is the victims who are at the center of the story."



Nat Hentoff is a writer for The Village Voice. His "Getting It Right" column appears monthly in E&P.



Related stories:
REPORTER APPROACHED KERREY STORY CAUTIOUSLY (04/30/01)
NEW YORK TIMES WIELDS WEB FOR SCOOP (04/26/01)



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