1. First of all, the $75 haircut thing was discredited. That was the price of Hillary Clinton's haircut at the same place. Kerry's was considerably cheaper.
2. Kerry was not responsible for the cover and had it immediately removed when he was shown it, and attempted to recover any copies that had gone out as such.
3. "Mr. Kerry lied when he threw what he claimed were his war medals over the White House fence; he later admitted they weren't his."
Here is a Salon piece that clarifies that Kerry never claimed that the medals were his:
From Kerry's perspective, of course, it was all pretty complicated and he never really understood what the brouhaha was all about. The medals were, after all, a highly personal matter. He'd ultimately decided to throw his also-important ribbons, and the medals he tossed were on behalf of some disabled vets. He never claimed to have thrown his own medals, and certainly the more important matter was that he had enlisted and fought bravely in the war, and had then come back to protest the atrocities he had participated in. And, it should be noted, in the "60 Minutes" interview with Kerry, which ran a mere four weeks after the 1971 demonstration on the Mall, Kerry refers to the "the emotion in the faces of those men who threw their medals back ... if you watch their faces, there was agony in them as they threw those things back," and so on, continuously referring to the medal-throwers in the third person, never including himself.
A couple pages after the photo of Sachs and others throwing their medals back are two different close-ups of the piles the vets left in their wake. "Look at that," Kerry says. "You see? A big deal was made about whether I threw back my medals or ribbons or whatever, but look. People threw everything. Ribbons. Discharge papers. Photographs. Certificates ..."
Indeed, that's what the photos show. In one photo, a veteran is throwing his cane. Kerry swallows. Slightly shakes his head.
http://archive.salon.com/politics/feature/2001/08/10/kerry/index2.html4. Here is the Boston Globe on the opposition to Kerry by other veterans:
The White House found a better way to go after Kerry. (Nixon's White House Counsel Charles) Colson had seen a press conference featuring a young Navy veteran named John O'Neill, who served in the same swift boat division as Kerry shortly after Kerry left Vietnam. O'Neill, like many swift boat veterans, was outraged at Kerry's claim of US atrocities.
In short order, O'Neill became the centerpiece of the Nixon White House strategy to undermine Kerry. O'Neill, now a Texas lawyer, stresses that he did not receive any payment from the White House and was acting on his own because he thought Kerry's statements were unconscionable lies.
For weeks, Colson had been accusing Kerry of ducking a debate with O'Neill. On June 15, Colson wrote to another White House aide: "I think we have Kerry on the run, he is beginning to take a tremendous beating in the press, but let's not let him up, let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader. Let's try to move through as many sources as we can the fact that he has refused to meet in debate, even though he agreed to do so and announced to the press he would."
The next day, O'Neill arrived at the White House to meet with Nixon. The two men bonded; a brief "grip and grin" session turned into an hourlong meeting, with Nixon bucking up O'Neill for the fight against Kerry.
Two weeks later, on June 30, the much anticipated debate took place. Kerry, who had been studying debate since he was about 14 years old, appeared with O'Neill on "The Dick Cavett Show." At 6 feet 4 inches, Kerry towered over Cavett and O'Neill. With his thick dark hair, dark blue suit, and lean features, he cut a striking figure.
O'Neill came out swinging. Visibly angry from the start, wearing a light suit, short hair, and white socks, O'Neill used words seemingly intended to taunt his opponent.
"Mr. Kerry is the type of person who lives and survives only on war-weariness and fears of the American people," O'Neill said. "This is the same little man who on nationwide television in April spoke of, quote, `crimes committed on a day-to-day basis, with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command.' Who was quoted in a prominent news magazine in May as saying, `War crimes in Vietnam are the rule, not the exception."'
Where O'Neill was red-hot, Kerry sought to look calm and intellectual, toting a hefty briefing book. He said the veterans weren't trying to tear down the country, but instead say to the country: "Here is where we went wrong, and we've got to change. What we say is, the killing can stop tomorrow."
"On the question of war crimes, it is really only with the utmost consideration that we pose this question," Kerry said. "I don't think that any man comes back to say that he raped, or to say that he burned a village, or to say that he wantonly destroyed crops or something for pleasure. I think he does it at the risk of certain kinds of punishment, at the risks of injuring his own character, which he has to live with, at the risk of the loss of family and friends as a result of it. But he does it because he believes intensely that people have got to be educated about the devastation of this war. We thought we were a moral country, yes, but we are now engaged in the most rampant bombing in the history of mankind."
Again and again, the question was asked: Did Kerry commit atrocities or see them committed by others? Kerry stuck to his script.
"I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that," Kerry said. "However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions in which the houses of noncombatants were burned to the ground. And all of these acts, I find out later on, are contrary to the Hague and Geneva conventions and to the laws of warfare. So in that sense, anybody who took part in those, if you carry out the application of the Nuremberg Principles, is in fact guilty. But we are not trying to find war criminals. That is not our purpose. It never has been."
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml5. As far as human rights violations in Vietnam, Kerry has long maintained that actions should be taken, but that disengagement is not necessarily the best option available - as was the case with Iraqi sanctions. This has certainly been borne out in Vietnam, where the human rights record and living standards have risen dramatically since normalization of relations.
6. Kerry protested free-fire zones while still serving honorably in Vietnam:
Kerry said he was appalled that the Navy's ''free fire zone'' policy put civilians at such high risk. So, on Jan. 22, 1969, Kerry and several dozen fellow skippers and officers traveled to Saigon to complain about the policy in an extraordinary meeting with Zumwalt and the overall commander of the war, General Creighton W. Abrams Jr. ''We were fighting the free fire policy very, very hard, to the point that many of the members were refusing to carry out orders on some of their missions, to the point where crews were starting to mutiny, to say, `I would not go back in the rivers again,''' Kerry recalled during a 1971 television appearance on the Dick Cavett Show.
But Kerry went back in the rivers. Indeed, it was after this meeting that he began his most deadly round of combat.
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml
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