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The senator's five years as a prisoner of war have been widely viewed as heroic. But as he prepares a White House bid, a small group of detractors is determined to expose him as a wartime traitor.
Craig Willbanks wants you to know that John McCain--former prisoner of war, current senator, White House aspirant--is a traitor, a liar and a wimp. Willbanks and McCain have never met. The senator probably has never heard of this hunched-over, soft-spoken fellow who served two tours of duty in Vietnam as an Army combat engineer and now lives in a run-down apartment in Mesa.
Craig Willbanks is obsessed with John McCain, and he is not alone.
He is part of a small, nationwide movement hell-bent on convincing the rest of us that in spite of glowing accounts of McCain's valor as a POW, Arizona's senior senator betrayed his country by collaborating with the North Vietnamese, and has been trying to cover up that fact ever since.
Willbanks' mission: "Don't get him elected. Cannot have . . . a traitor in the top position, giving away secrets of the United States."
To that end, Willbanks spends virtually all his free time retyping any Arizona Republic articles that portray the senator in an unflattering light. He intends to post them on the Web, where they'll join a pile of documents that, Willbanks insists, proves McCain collaborated with the Communists during his five years as a POW.
Willbanks has a paying job, as a bus driver for the City of Mesa. But he was recently reassigned to drive an adult day-care van. He's excited about it; the older people will want to talk about war history, and he can give them packets of information he keeps on McCain. He's already given out 15 or so.
"I give them a packet, and they come back and say, 'Well, that goddamn traitor,'" he says.
The "documents" include an article McCain wrote for U.S. News & World Report in 1973, upon his release from prison camp. In the article, McCain admits that he--like many POWs--confessed to war crimes under physical and emotional duress. There's also a transcript of an interview POW McCain did for French television, a story about McCain that appeared in a Vietnamese newspaper and an account of an interview of McCain by a Spanish psychiatrist.
Willbanks got these documents from retired Army Colonel Earl Hopper Sr. and his wife, Patty, who run a POW/MIA research organization from their home in Glendale. The Hoppers' goal is to force the U.S. government to produce a full accounting of the more than 2,000 men whose bodies have not been recovered from the Vietnam War. Among those men is Earl Hopper Jr., the colonel's eldest son.
Willbanks and the Hoppers believe that live American soldiers were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War, and that McCain is part of the conspiracy to cover it up. McCain has long contended that there is no proof that live Americans remain in Southeast Asia. The Hoppers have gathered a motley crew of local Vietnam veterans and POW/MIA family members to assist in their crusade against McCain, and have hooked up with like-minded vets and POW kin across the country.
One foot soldier for the cause is Roy Kerr, a veteran from Goodyear who researches McCain's business interests full-time. Around New Year's, Kerr hand-delivered anti-McCain packets to syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, U.S. Representative Henry Hyde and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who were in town for "The Weekend," a conservative confab at the Arizona Biltmore resort. Kerr packaged the documents in manila envelopes labeled "Veterans for McCain," figuring no one would open a package that said "Veterans Against McCain."
Kerr says he has driven to McCain's home at night to drop copies of anti-McCain literature and "Dump McCain" stickers over the senator's fence. And he's a frequent caller to radio talk shows when McCain is a guest. He proudly provides taped copies of these interviews, bragging that he made the senator stutter. (Barely, if at all.) He does all of this, he says, "to keep myself busy and appease my dislike for McCain."
And then there's Ted Sampley, who publishes a newspaper out of Kinston, North Carolina, called U.S. Veteran Dispatch. Sampley calls McCain the "Manchurian Candidate," maintaining that the Vietnamese brainwashed McCain, then sent him home to do their bidding--which, to Sampley's way of thinking, explains why McCain was instrumental in the nation's normalization of relations with Vietnam.
The POW/MIA zealots are a dwindling subculture. Mainstream society tends to dismiss the Willbankses, Hoppers and Kerrs as sad footnotes to an ugly chapter in American history.
Stanley Kutler, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, calls the behavior of these people "Sick. If it weren't so sick, it would be laughable. These are not nice people. They are the other side in an ongoing uncivil Civil War in America. They would refight Vietnam, criminalize abortion, make public school prayer mandatory, prove that Hillary bumped off Vince Foster, and indict Teddy Kennedy for Chappaquiddick. They are uncivil and intolerant of any views or information they do not share."
Kutler examined the Hoppers' packet, which, along with the "documents," includes political cartoons lampooning McCain, and accounts of testy exchanges between McCain and POW/MIA activists. Aubrey Immelman, associate professor of psychology at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota, looked at the anti-McCain propaganda, too, and observes:
"Once a person becomes as committed to a cause as some of these individuals, it becomes difficult to let go, and the lines between activism, crusade and obsession--and perhaps even paranoia--become increasingly blurred."
Is John McCain a hero or a traitor?
What a question.
In post-Monica politics, there aren't many taboos. Enter the presidential sweepstakes, and it's open season on every detail of your life. Everything except the hero status of a man who endured a broken leg, two broken arms and five and a half years in North Vietnamese prison camps.
Even McCain foes who carp about his youthful philandering, his grandstanding, his political flip-flopping, his membership in the Keating Five, his wife's drug addiction, don't question his war heroism.
So the Earl Hoppers of the world are dismissed as crazies, wackos, extremists--and perhaps it's a deserved label. Then again, to paraphrase another Arizona senator: Extremism in defense of a lost loved one is no vice. Who couldn't imagine themselves single-mindedly demanding the truth about a vanished son or husband?
McCain says he understands. "Those people who are family members, at least I have--I hope I feel--sympathy and some understanding for their zealotry on this issue," McCain tells New Times. "If I had a brother or a son who was in this situation, then clearly I think I would feel very strongly about it."
Not every POW/MIA activist despises John McCain, and among those who do, there are gradations of disgust.
Many activists don't like the way McCain has behaved since he was freed. They abhor his support for the normalization of relations with Vietnam, his apparent lack of respect for them and their cause. They say he has unfairly attacked those he says prey on the family members by selling them false hopes in the form of faked pictures of their loved ones, even though in some cases McCain has been proved right. And most of all, the activists feel McCain has used his POW status to spring up the political ranks, with his eye on the presidential prize.
But a few have let their ire take them even farther. A handful of POW/MIA activists are critical of McCain's behavior during the war. They believe that John McCain did not return from Vietnam a hero. They say his own clumsiness caused his limbs to be broken as he ejected from his plummeting warplane. They claim McCain was never tortured in prison. They accuse him of collaborating with not only the North Vietnamese but with Communists in the Soviet Union and Cuba. They quote unnamed sources who say McCain had a wife and children in Vietnam.
Some even claim he was broken and brainwashed by the Communists and then returned to the U.S. to amass political power and carry out the Reds' wishes. Why else, they ask, would McCain support normalization? Why else would he have embraced onetime North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin during hearings into POW/MIA issues? (They circulate a photo of that traitorous act as evidence.) Why else would the North Vietnamese have erected a monument at the lake in Hanoi where he was shot down in 1967?
All these claims disintegrate upon close inspection--they cannot be proved or disproved--with one tenuous exception: two former POWs who say they were senior officers at a camp where McCain claims to have been tortured tell New Times they knew of no such torture during that time at that camp. McCain has denied that he ever reported to these men.
(The rest of this article is available here)
Craig Willbanks wants you to know that John McCain--former prisoner of war, current senator, White House aspirant--is a traitor, a liar and a wimp. Willbanks and McCain have never met. The senator probably has never heard of this hunched-over, soft-spoken fellow who served two tours of duty in Vietnam as an Army combat engineer and now lives in a run-down apartment in Mesa.
Craig Willbanks is obsessed with John McCain, and he is not alone.
He is part of a small, nationwide movement hell-bent on convincing the rest of us that in spite of glowing accounts of McCain's valor as a POW, Arizona's senior senator betrayed his country by collaborating with the North Vietnamese, and has been trying to cover up that fact ever since.
Willbanks' mission: "Don't get him elected. Cannot have . . . a traitor in the top position, giving away secrets of the United States."
To that end, Willbanks spends virtually all his free time retyping any Arizona Republic articles that portray the senator in an unflattering light. He intends to post them on the Web, where they'll join a pile of documents that, Willbanks insists, proves McCain collaborated with the Communists during his five years as a POW.
Willbanks has a paying job, as a bus driver for the City of Mesa. But he was recently reassigned to drive an adult day-care van. He's excited about it; the older people will want to talk about war history, and he can give them packets of information he keeps on McCain. He's already given out 15 or so.
"I give them a packet, and they come back and say, 'Well, that goddamn traitor,'" he says.
The "documents" include an article McCain wrote for U.S. News & World Report in 1973, upon his release from prison camp. In the article, McCain admits that he--like many POWs--confessed to war crimes under physical and emotional duress. There's also a transcript of an interview POW McCain did for French television, a story about McCain that appeared in a Vietnamese newspaper and an account of an interview of McCain by a Spanish psychiatrist.
Willbanks got these documents from retired Army Colonel Earl Hopper Sr. and his wife, Patty, who run a POW/MIA research organization from their home in Glendale. The Hoppers' goal is to force the U.S. government to produce a full accounting of the more than 2,000 men whose bodies have not been recovered from the Vietnam War. Among those men is Earl Hopper Jr., the colonel's eldest son.
Willbanks and the Hoppers believe that live American soldiers were left behind at the end of the Vietnam War, and that McCain is part of the conspiracy to cover it up. McCain has long contended that there is no proof that live Americans remain in Southeast Asia. The Hoppers have gathered a motley crew of local Vietnam veterans and POW/MIA family members to assist in their crusade against McCain, and have hooked up with like-minded vets and POW kin across the country.
One foot soldier for the cause is Roy Kerr, a veteran from Goodyear who researches McCain's business interests full-time. Around New Year's, Kerr hand-delivered anti-McCain packets to syndicated columnist Arianna Huffington, U.S. Representative Henry Hyde and New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who were in town for "The Weekend," a conservative confab at the Arizona Biltmore resort. Kerr packaged the documents in manila envelopes labeled "Veterans for McCain," figuring no one would open a package that said "Veterans Against McCain."
Kerr says he has driven to McCain's home at night to drop copies of anti-McCain literature and "Dump McCain" stickers over the senator's fence. And he's a frequent caller to radio talk shows when McCain is a guest. He proudly provides taped copies of these interviews, bragging that he made the senator stutter. (Barely, if at all.) He does all of this, he says, "to keep myself busy and appease my dislike for McCain."
And then there's Ted Sampley, who publishes a newspaper out of Kinston, North Carolina, called U.S. Veteran Dispatch. Sampley calls McCain the "Manchurian Candidate," maintaining that the Vietnamese brainwashed McCain, then sent him home to do their bidding--which, to Sampley's way of thinking, explains why McCain was instrumental in the nation's normalization of relations with Vietnam.
The POW/MIA zealots are a dwindling subculture. Mainstream society tends to dismiss the Willbankses, Hoppers and Kerrs as sad footnotes to an ugly chapter in American history.
Stanley Kutler, professor of law at the University of Wisconsin and editor of The Encyclopedia of the Vietnam War, calls the behavior of these people "Sick. If it weren't so sick, it would be laughable. These are not nice people. They are the other side in an ongoing uncivil Civil War in America. They would refight Vietnam, criminalize abortion, make public school prayer mandatory, prove that Hillary bumped off Vince Foster, and indict Teddy Kennedy for Chappaquiddick. They are uncivil and intolerant of any views or information they do not share."
Kutler examined the Hoppers' packet, which, along with the "documents," includes political cartoons lampooning McCain, and accounts of testy exchanges between McCain and POW/MIA activists. Aubrey Immelman, associate professor of psychology at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict in Minnesota, looked at the anti-McCain propaganda, too, and observes:
"Once a person becomes as committed to a cause as some of these individuals, it becomes difficult to let go, and the lines between activism, crusade and obsession--and perhaps even paranoia--become increasingly blurred."
Is John McCain a hero or a traitor?
What a question.
In post-Monica politics, there aren't many taboos. Enter the presidential sweepstakes, and it's open season on every detail of your life. Everything except the hero status of a man who endured a broken leg, two broken arms and five and a half years in North Vietnamese prison camps.
Even McCain foes who carp about his youthful philandering, his grandstanding, his political flip-flopping, his membership in the Keating Five, his wife's drug addiction, don't question his war heroism.
So the Earl Hoppers of the world are dismissed as crazies, wackos, extremists--and perhaps it's a deserved label. Then again, to paraphrase another Arizona senator: Extremism in defense of a lost loved one is no vice. Who couldn't imagine themselves single-mindedly demanding the truth about a vanished son or husband?
McCain says he understands. "Those people who are family members, at least I have--I hope I feel--sympathy and some understanding for their zealotry on this issue," McCain tells New Times. "If I had a brother or a son who was in this situation, then clearly I think I would feel very strongly about it."
Not every POW/MIA activist despises John McCain, and among those who do, there are gradations of disgust.
Many activists don't like the way McCain has behaved since he was freed. They abhor his support for the normalization of relations with Vietnam, his apparent lack of respect for them and their cause. They say he has unfairly attacked those he says prey on the family members by selling them false hopes in the form of faked pictures of their loved ones, even though in some cases McCain has been proved right. And most of all, the activists feel McCain has used his POW status to spring up the political ranks, with his eye on the presidential prize.
But a few have let their ire take them even farther. A handful of POW/MIA activists are critical of McCain's behavior during the war. They believe that John McCain did not return from Vietnam a hero. They say his own clumsiness caused his limbs to be broken as he ejected from his plummeting warplane. They claim McCain was never tortured in prison. They accuse him of collaborating with not only the North Vietnamese but with Communists in the Soviet Union and Cuba. They quote unnamed sources who say McCain had a wife and children in Vietnam.
Some even claim he was broken and brainwashed by the Communists and then returned to the U.S. to amass political power and carry out the Reds' wishes. Why else, they ask, would McCain support normalization? Why else would he have embraced onetime North Vietnamese Colonel Bui Tin during hearings into POW/MIA issues? (They circulate a photo of that traitorous act as evidence.) Why else would the North Vietnamese have erected a monument at the lake in Hanoi where he was shot down in 1967?
All these claims disintegrate upon close inspection--they cannot be proved or disproved--with one tenuous exception: two former POWs who say they were senior officers at a camp where McCain claims to have been tortured tell New Times they knew of no such torture during that time at that camp. McCain has denied that he ever reported to these men.
(The rest of this article is available here)
