Brinkley had in-hand the Belodeau Eulogy, but ignored it in telling the Rassmann rescue story

My regard for Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley as an historian has dropped to a new low.  I've discovered that Brinkley must have had in his hands — and ignored — an unimpeachable source in which John Kerry told a version of the Jim Rassmann rescue that is completely, mutually inconsistent with the version which Kerry has related, and Brinkley himself has repeated, everywhere else.

In reading his book Tour of Duty:  John Kerry and the Vietnam War, I've mostly marvelled at Brinkley's tin ear — his seeming obliviousness to Kerry's own tendencies toward self-aggrandizement, exaggeration, and hyperdeveloped ego.  I'd wondered if Brinkley had noticed these things and was just being droll, passing them along with a straight face to let his readers draw their own conclusions.   I'd thought that Brinkley himself — despite being a professor of history and the Director of the Eisenhower Center for American Studies at the University of New Orleans — perhaps just didn't know much about, for example, the Battle of Antietam during the American Civil War.

But then I came upon this passage tonight at page 264 of Tour of Duty, in which Brinkley is writing about the crewmen young Lt. Kerry took over when he assumed command of PCF 94 when that Swift Boat's skipper, Tedd Peck, was wounded in an ambush on January 29, 1969 (boldface mine):

Rounding out Peck's five-man crew on PCF-94 was Radarman Thomas M. Belodeau, whose shy, demure demeanor masked a fighting instinct that had already made him a decorated seaman.  On July 5, 1968, Belodeau had been serving on PCF-27 when he spied a Viet Cong suspect running from a riverbank and went after him.  As enemy fire exploded all around, Belodeau had gone in and pulled the suspected VC from the water for interrogation, earning a Bronze Star with the Combat V device for his bravery.  "I cannot adequately convey or describe to you the measure of this man at war — screaming up a river in the dead of night, no moon, fifty yards from Cambodia, literally bouncing off the riverbank, waiting for a mine to go off or a rocket to explode," Kerry would later marvel at Belodeau.  "And always, always dependable — always there for the rest of the crew."

Since the point of this paragraph was to tell Belodeau's history, I have no particular quibble with Brinkley's failure to point out explicitly that Belodeau's medal-winning performance on July 5, 1968, long predated his association with Kerry.  (In July 1968, Kerry was finishing up his service on the Gridley and hadn't even started his Swift Boats training in San Diego.) 

But my jaw dropped upon reading the next lines — because the "Kerry later marveled at Belodeau" quote in ToD is drawn directly, word-for-word, from the eulogy that Kerry gave at Belodeau's funeral on November 10, 1997, and then had inserted into the Congressional Record for January 28, 1998!  As shown by this screencap of three consecutive paragraphs from the .pdf version (at 150 percent magnification) of page S186 from the Congressional Record on that date:

It is simply inconceivable that, in extracting the Kerry quote from the Belodeau Eulogy that he republished in Tour of Duty, Brinkley could have missed what appeared a mere two paragraphs up from it.  Anyone even vaguely familiar with Kerry's war-hero record could not possibly fail to recognize this as Kerry re-telling the Bay Hap River action — including the loss overboard of Green Beret Lt. Jim Rassmann, whose rescue got Kerry his Bronze Star.  And anyone even vaguely familiar with those events cannot fail to spot, immediately, the inconsistencies between the version of this story that Kerry told in the Belodeau Eulogy and the version that Kerry has told everywhere else — including the version later recounted by his authorized biographer Brinkley in Tour of Duty!

I've already blogged at length (here and here) about the inconsistencies between the Belodeau Eulogy version of the Rassmann rescue and that which Kerry has told elsewhere.  In the Belodeau Eulogy version, for example, Rassmann goes overboard during a "high speed turn to starboard," and the only mine has gone off some time prior to that, under Kerry's own PCF 94, lifting it two feet out of the water.  In the other versions that Kerry and his supporters have told, Rassmann goes overboard not during a sharp turn, but due to a second mine (or perhaps a rocket explosion, per Kerry supporter Sandusky), and it's Lt. Pees' PCF 3 that had previously been lifted out of the water (and indeed totally disabled) by the first mine.

I've been frustrated that these inconsistencies — which seem to me as simple and stark and obvious as those which led to the exposure of the "Christmas in Cambodia" fairy tale — haven't gotten any substantial attention in the blogosphere, much less in the mainstream media.  I was pleased to hear (although I don't yet have a verifying link) that Fox News' Brit Hume has mentioned the Belodeau Eulogy within the last couple of days.  And I am very pleased to read the just-published article on the Belodeau Eulogy by Art Moore in WorldNetDaily.com, in which Mr. Moore was kind enough to link and credit my blog for first finding it (although the credit should actually go to two of my readers who emailed me about it).

Brinkley's own tellings of the Rassmann rescue — both in Chapter Thirteen (at pp. 314-18) of ToD and in a slightly reworked version of that chapter later published as "John Kerry's Final Mission in Vietnam" on History.net — contain their own odd internal inconsistencies.  (For example, at page 314, the print version of ToD has Rassmann going overboard not from Kerry's own PCF 94, but from "PCF-35" — a boat that wasn't there at all that day.  And the History.net version has Rassmann aboard Pees' PCF 3, which is clearly wrong by everyone's account.)  In trying to sort through those inconsistencies — much less reconcile them to the versions told by Kerry's skeptics among the SwiftVets — I've been inclined to give Brinkley the benefit of the doubt, and to blame at least some of the errors on gremlins or sloppy editors.  I was inclined to attribute to an editor trying to shorten the online version, for example, the omission of this rather important sentence that, at page 313 in the print version of ToD, made clear that Kerry's butt-wound (which may have been at least part of the basis for his third Purple Heart) occurred through his own negligence rather than due to enemy fire:

"I got a piece of small grenade in my ass from one of the rice-bin explosions and then we started to move back to the boats, firing to our rear as we went," Kerry related.

But to find that Brinkley had the starkly different version of the Rassmann resuce that Kerry told in the Belodeau Eulogy actually in his hands — and that Brinkley ignored it! — simply stuns me.  This is simply not something one can blame on an incompetent editor or typesetting gremlins.

There's more mystery here, however:   In Brinkley's unnumbered "Notes" for Chapter Twelve at the conclusion of the book (at pp. 483-84), he gives no reference whatsoever for his "Kerry would later marvel at Belodeau" quote on page 264.  It's therefore unclear whether Brinkley was quoting from a written version of Kerry's Belodeau Eulogy as delivered at the funeral and maintained in Kerry's private records — records to which Brinkley was given exclusive access, and that the Kerry campaign disingenuously continues to insist, despite Brinkley's vocal disagreement, that Kerry's contract with Brinkley prevents Kerry from releasing — or instead from the presumably identical version of the Belodeau Eulogy that Kerry had inserted into the Congressional Record.  The troubling omission of any documentation, however, for the one Belodeau Eulogy quote that Brinkley did use in his book raises an inevitable ugly question: 

Was Brinkley just spectacularly incompetent?  Or did he deliberately deep-six the Belodeau Eulogy attribution that should have appeared in his notes section for Chapter Twelve, and then deliberately ignore its contradictory version for his telling of the Rassmann rescue in Chapter Thirteen?