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FootnoteTV® : Going Upriver and Stolen Honor
Two recent documentaries have given very different portrayals of Sen. John Kerry's military service in Vietnam and his subsequent antiwar activities. While Going Upriver depicts Kerry's military service and his involvement in the Vietnam Veterans Against The War organization favorably, Stolen Honor largely portrays his involvement in VVAW very unfavorably.
Both documentaries are incomplete and oversimplified.
Going Upriver (on-line here) does not fully address the questions some have raised about Kerry's medals and Purple Hearts, it does not mention Kerry's controversial trip to Paris in May 1970, it does not acknowledge questions that have been raised about the credibility of the Winter Soldier hearings, and it does not address how Kerry's antiwar comments upset other soldiers including many of the people who served under his command. It also suggests that Kerry decided to go to Vietnam in part because of the death of his friend Dick Pershing; Kerry actually put in his request to serve in Vietnam more than two weeks before learning of Pershing's death and has said that he wanted to serve on a Swift boat particularly because it was thought at the time to be a relatively safe command.
At the same time, Stolen Honor (on-line here), the documentary that the Sinclair Network had planned to show in its entirety, suggests that Kerry's antiwar activities prolonged the war without explaining how or the context of the ongoing peace negotiations, it suggests that Kerry's comments about war crimes were unsubstantiated without acknowledging supporting evidence, and it suggests that Kerry's comments demonized Vietnam veterans without acknowledging that some returning veterans were greeted coldly long before Kerry's emergence in the antiwar movement.
For more on the issues raised in these documentaries:
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By Stephen Lee
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