Some amazing discoveries you must see immediately. About how a Vietnam era radical whose voice was broadcast into Vietmam POW cells who became a friend of John McCain. Here's where it all started...
Not only that, but that same radical who broadcast over Radio Hanoi once owned The New Republic.
Not only that, but there is a sequence to how that friendship created the media stroking love that John McCain once had with the liberal media.
Not only that, but he was a general counsel to the campaign of Bill Clinton. Even helped round up a few interesting connections. Did I say Neo-Cons yet?
Now...let's look at what he once said he wasn't...to what he evidently is.
From TNR...
"The cover of Life magazine of April 23, 1971, shows David Ifshin, aged 22, at a war rally, wearing a collegiate goatee. He's standing directly behind Jane Fonda, who has her fist raised. After his war protests he worked on a kibbutz; but when he returned to America he also returned to national politics. He went on to work on the Mondale campaign and, to a storm of protest, was even tapped to head the Dukakis transition team. He spent ten years as general counsel to AIPAC. He had met Clinton briefly in 1972; twenty years later, when Clinton ran for president, Ifshin became general counsel for his campaign."
From The New York Times...
"McCain had struck up with a Vietnam War protester named David Ifshin -- the owner of The New Republic, who is not prone to being moved by the behavior of Republican politicians, called to say the article had brought tears to his eyes. He asked if McCain might be available for lunch. He had no plans to support McCain for anything, you understand. But he was interested. . . ."
So McCain's 1960's Radio Hanoi broadcasting radical is now connected to Bill Clinton.
Strange bedfellows? It creates a plethora of questions for John McCain.
How did this Radio Hanoi Radical become John McCain's friend. And why did it take William Ayers to uncover all these connections?
From Newsweek...
The animating principle of McCain's life is honor. It kept him in a Vietnamese prison for five and a half years instead of going home early, as his captors offered. It's at the root of his passionate efforts to clean up politics and redeem what he sees as his own connection to a corrupt system. It's why he bonded a few years ago with a onetime antiwar protester, David Ifshin, who was dying of cancer, and why he repeatedly visited former Arizona representative Morris Udall (a Democrat suffering for years from Parkinson's disease) in the hospital when everyone else seemed to have forgotten about him. Their honor mattered to him, too.
Honor is almost a quaint notion now, associated with a different time. McCain gives it a charming twinkle, and the hope of living on as something more than a platitude. He keeps faith with it, even while sometimes falling short of the standard himself. Like many other POWs, McCain broke under torture and signed a "confession." On returning to the United States, he cheated on his first wife, Carol, who had been seriously injured in a car accident when he was in Vietnam. Later, he was too wrapped up in work to notice that his second wife, Cindy, was addicted to prescription drugs (box). He let himself get too close to savings and loan executive Charles Keating, who turned out to be a crook. He can be sarcastic and belittling, when he knows better.
But even his failures just seem to deepen the character lines. The life story works politically because McCain wears it lightly. It's part of his campaign advertising but not his basic stump speech. "I'm always a little embarrassed and nostalgic when I see some of those [Vietnam] pictures," he says. When asked about his years in captivity, he insists he wasn't a hero.
Their honor mattered to him at one point. It seems so far away.
So about this radical and The New Republic. How did it lead to McCain being coddled by the press. Including The New York Times?
First, remember the years involved...1996-1999. More than a few of those same people are still in the business, and more than a few of them remember the friendships and associations they once had.
From The New York Times...
John McCain is unlike any pol Michael Lewis has ever met. Over the next few months, McCain makes frequent cameo appearances in Lewis' column--always the hero, the maverick.
Lewis gushes. He fawns. No doubt, his own starstruck musings coming from anybody else would make him throw up. But in this new interest, he finds the topic for a cover story in the May 13 edition of the New Republic. He strays from the campaign trail to write "Surrogates," a feature devoted to Bob Dole's campaign surrogate, Senator John McCain. It is the tale of McCain's relationship with David Ifshin, a former Vietnam War protester who should have been ex-prisoner of war McCain's enemy, but instead had become the senator's friend.
McCain had been an incorrigible media flirt for years, but this was the first time he'd succeeded in going all the way. "Surrogates" seems to have tripped an epiphany in the consciousness of the Beltway media.
By August, writers in the New York Times and Washington Post were raving about McCain. In October, it was The New Yorker--in December, the Baltimore Sun.
From "Surrogates"
In December 1970 David Ifshin had led a group of American students to Hanoi, where he delivered an anti-war radio address to American soldiers engaged in attacks on North Vietnam. Like other anti-American propaganda, his program was piped into McCain's prison cell from six in the morning until nine at night. But McCain, who can generate anger in a heartbeat, shows not the faintest trace of resentment. "Ifshin stood in my office," he explains, "and he said, I came here to tell you that I made a mistake. I was wrong, and I'm sorry.' And I said to him, Look, I accept your apology. We'll be friends. But more importantly I want you to forget it. Go on with your life. You cannot look back.'"
Here he pauses, and I figure he's finished. But he's groping behind his aviator sunglasses for the point of his anecdote--that forgiveness is ultimately less self-destructive than the bitter desire for vengeance. Or perhaps that there is no such thing as vengeance. Five months ago David Ifshin was diagnosed with cancer. The cancer has proved untreatable and has spread rapidly. David Ifshin is now dying. He is 47 years old and has a wife and three young children. "When I heard about it," says McCain, "it did pass through my mind: Suppose I had told David Ifshin to get the hell out of my office. How would I feel about myself now?"
John McCain and the media grew familiar with each other. It appears to have much to do with Mr. Ifshin.
Somewhere along the way, all the players involved made peace with each other, grew up and moved on.
Which begs the question of just who in the McCain campaign thought revisiting all this made sense. David Ifshin is a link between McCain and Clinton. He was an anti-war radical whose words were used to demoralize POWs. He died before September 11, 2001, and who knows what he would have said. I doubt it would have matched Ayers' comments...Ifshin was a lawyer, not a professor.
McCain spoke at David Ifshin's funeral.
In 1997, columnist Robert J. Samuelson wrote a column about the cultivation of conflict. He decried a political "climate in which people increasingly view their opponents as their enemies." To show that it need not be so, he turned to the Vietnam War. He described how John McCain gave one of the eulogies at the 1996 funeral of David Ifshin, a Democratic lawyer. While in his 20s, Ifshin had visited Hanoi as an anti-war protestor. McCain, of course, was a prisoner of war in North Vietnam at the time. Some of Ifshin’s speeches were piped in to prison camps that held U.S. servicemen as POWs. Years later, McCain criticized Ifshin but decided it was a cheap shot and apologized. Ifshin, for his part, came to believe that whatever his views of the war, going to Hanoi dishonored American servicemen. The two became friends.
The difference between Ayers and Ifshin quoted above is in bold print. Perhaps that is how McCain dealt with it...Ifshin basically apologized. Still, quite a double standard.
McCain forgiving Ifshin begs another question. Why did McCain deny the benefits of information to other POW families. What guided his thinking? Was he mad at Ifshin and other protesters. Affected in some other way? Ifshin apologized around 1980. The deal with McCain and the Pentagon came about 1990-1993. Yet, McCain took on his own protest against his own fellow POWs.
Highly disturbing. His tormentor apologized for verbally abusing McCain.
McCain turns around and severs a lifeline between fellow POWs and their loved ones. How cruel is this man?
Earlier this year, TNR could have gone into this relationship, but instead chose to bring up Jim Hensley and G. Gordon Liddy. Not David Ifshin.
From Chicago Tribune..
Last November, McCain went on his radio show. Liddy greeted him as "an old friend," and McCain sounded like one. "I'm proud of you, I'm proud of your family," he gushed. "It's always a pleasure for me to come on your program, Gordon, and congratulations on your continued success and adherence to the principles and philosophies that keep our nation great."
Which principles would those be? The ones that told Liddy it was fine to break into the office of the Democratic National Committee to plant bugs and photograph documents? The ones that made him propose to kidnap anti-war activists so they couldn't disrupt the 1972 Republican National Convention? The ones that inspired him to plan the murder (never carried out) of an unfriendly newspaper columnist?
And of course, who can forget Jim Hensley?
Incredibly, what does TNR have to say just now?
This.
"Quibbling With Obama's Ayers Rebuttal" is the title of the piece.
In other words, The New Republic has the history of David Ifshin under their own nose, and yet, where is it today? Are they hiding it? Denying it? Did they forget?