THE 2004 CAMPAIGN: ADVERTISING; Friendly Fire: The Birth of an Attack on Kerry
New York Times, Late Edition - Final, Sec. A, p 1 08-20-2004
By KATE ZERNIKE and JIM RUTENBERG
SNIP
Mr. O'Neill said he had also known Mr. Crow for 30 years, through mutual friends. Mr. Crow, the seventh-largest donor to Republicans in the state according to the Texans for Public Justice, has donated nowhere near as much money as Mr. Perry to the Swift boat group. His family owns one of the largest diversified commercial real estate companies in the nation, the Trammell Crow Company, and has given money to Mr. Bush and his father throughout their careers. He is listed as a trustee of the George Bush Presidential Library Foundation.
One of his law partners, Margaret Wilson, became Mr. Bush's general counsel when he was governor of Texas and followed him to the White House as deputy counsel for the Department of Commerce, according to her biography on the law firm's Web site.
Another partner, Tex Lezar, ran on the Republican ticket with Mr. Bush in 1994, as lieutenant governor. They were two years apart at Yale, and Mr. Lezar worked for the attorney general's office in the Reagan administration. Mr. Lezar, who died last year, was married to Merrie Spaeth, a powerful public relations executive who has helped coordinate the efforts of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.
In 2000, Ms. Spaeth was spokeswoman for a group that ran $2 million worth of ads attacking Senator John McCain's environmental record and lauding Mr. Bush's in crucial states during their fierce primary battle. The group, calling itself Republicans for Clean Air, was founded by a prominent Texas supporter of Mr. Bush, Sam Wyly.
Ms. Spaeth had been a communications official in the Reagan White House, where the president's aides had enough confidence in her to invite her to help prepare George Bush for his vice-presidential debate in 1984. She says she is also a close friend of Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, a client of Mr. Rove's. Ms. Spaeth said in an interview that the one time she had ever spoken to Mr. Rove was when Ms. Hutchison was running for the Texas treasurer's office in 1990.
When asked if she had ever visited the White House during Mr. Bush's tenure, Ms. Spaeth initially said that she had been there only once, in 2002, when Kenneth Starr gave her a personal tour. But this week Ms. Spaeth acknowledged that she had spent an hour in the Old Executive Office Building, part of the White House complex, in the spring of 2003, giving Mr. Bush's chief economic adviser, Stephen Friedman, public speaking advice. Asked if it was possible that she had worked with other administration officials, Ms. Spaeth said, "The answer is 'no,' unless you refresh my memory."
"Is the White House directing this?" Ms. Spaeth said of the organization. "Absolutely not."
McCain knows about this. Every Republican knows how the Swfit Boat smear was funded and carried out. McCain knows who funded it, that it was a slimey piece of work and he doesn't care. It was a good thing for John McCain and he absolutely doesn't care what it did to another vet. (Absolutely doesn't care.)
This is how Senator McCain repays friends. It's how he expresses, in real life, what he said in news articles like the one from 1996 in The New Yorker Magazine. We should all have good friends like John McCain.
Nevertheless, when I asked McCain if he would be campaigning for Weld, he shook his head, an emphatic no. "I simply would not do such a thing. I couldn't do that. . . . I'm surprised you would ask. . . . Going to campaign against John Kerry is just something I wouldn't consider." McCain's devotion to Kerry is an anomaly in American politics, and it is a measure of Kerry's reticence that few of his home-state constituents know of it, or of the story that lies behind it.
SNIP
Sometimes McCain was attacked by his fellow-senators and sometimes by witnesses. He was the lightning rod. I was told by a member of the committee staff that when Kerry and McCain were sitting near each other on the senators' dais, Kerry would, at such moments, unobtrusively move his hand over to McCain and place it on his arm and leave it there, a quiet gesture of what was becoming absolute mutual support. I asked McCain if he had been aware of Kerry's touch. "Yes," he replied. "He did that several times, and I'm glad he did. I'm grateful to him."
In 1992, as the Kerry committee's deliberations were nearing their conclusion, McCain was up for reëlection. That fall, he made one of his numerous trips to Vietnam, going over and back in a weekend. His Democratic opponent seized on the trip, criticizing McCain with more than an implication that he was grandstanding. Kerry had been the object of such attacks himself, so he immediately organized a letter from the members of the committee, Democrats and Republicans alike, defending McCain. Senator Bob Kerrey, of Nebraska, a committee member and a Medal of Honor winner, had gone to Arizona to campaign for the Democrat, but he, too, supported McCain on the issue. McCain won the election. Kerry and McCain had come a long way from the North End of Boston.
"During deliberations of the committee," McCain told me, referring to the end of the process, "John Kerry felt it was very important to have everybody—all the Republicans, all the Democrats—sign on to that report, because, if one or two people didn't, then the radicals would leap onto that person. A couple of times, I had very spirited exchanges, to say the least, with a couple of senators—in-your-face kind of exchanges. John Kerry—to his everlasting credit, and to my everlasting discredit, O.K.?—constantly said, 'Let's discuss it. Let's talk about it.' He was very mature in handling this—more mature than I was."
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/articles/020204fr_archive03
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