WASHINGTON – The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth (search) are launching a new wave of attacks against Democratic presidential hopeful John Kerry (search), FOX News has learned.
The group, which has been largely responsible for questioning the Massachusetts senator's Vietnam-era heroism, has made its largest media buy yet of the presidential campaign. It has put $1.2 million behind a new ad that attacks the candidate's 1970 meeting in Paris with members of two North Vietnamese delegations. The ads, which will be launched Wednesday, will run on broadcast affiliates in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Nevada and New Mexico.
The ads come as controversy continues to swirl around questionable documents aired by CBS purporting to show that President Bush (search) shirked his Vietnam-era Texas Air National Guard (search) service and received special treatment to get into the unit. FOX News analysts have said the memos are forgeries.
The Kerry campaign has acknowledged that Kerry traveled to Paris in 1970 with his then new wife, Julia Thorne. Kerry's campaign said the meetings were not part of any negotiation with the enemy but were part of Kerry's fact-finding efforts relating to the war and ways to win the release of U.S. prisoners of war.
Historian Gerald Nicosia has told FOX News that Kerry made a second trip to Paris in 1971 for many of the same reasons Kerry's campaign has cited for the 1970 trip. Kerry's camp denies a Kerry meeting with the North Vietnamese in the summer of 1971.
According to a Denver Post article dated Aug. 26, 1971, Kerry, in a speech to the National Student Association Congress at Colorado State University, said he had just returned from a trip to Paris to talk with delegates at the peace talks and said North Vietnamese delegates seem to have "a certain resignation" toward President Nixon's proposed trip to China.
Some Kerry critics have alleged he violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice (search) by meeting with the North Vietnamese while still a reserve officer with the U.S. Navy. Kerry had been placed on inactive status with the Navy in January 1970. Kerry's campaign said the Code of Military Justice did not apply to him because he was on inactive duty status.
The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth group has said it will run ads attacking Kerry's Vietnam record through Election Day.
Following is text from the ad, titled "Friends."
Opens With: Footage of Jane Fonda
Cuts To: Stills of Kerry, protesters, then Kerry testifying
Cuts to: Fonda at a press conference
Announcer: "Even before Jane Fonda (search) went to Hanoi to meet with the enemy and mock America, John Kerry secretly met with enemy leaders in Paris. Though we were still at war and Americans were being held in North Vietnamese prison camps. Then, he returned and accused American troops of committing war crimes on a daily basis. Eventually Jane Fonda apologized for her activities, but John Kerry refuses to. In a time of war, can America trust a man who betrayed his country?"
FOX News' Major Garrett contributed to this report.
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