Wealthy Texans revive attack ads

WASHINGTON – A political action group of Vietnam War veterans that has attacked Democratic candidate Sen. John F. Kerry over his combat record has begun a new television and direct-mail blitz, enriched by $3 million in contributions from two longtime financial supporters of President Bush and the Republican Party.

In filings with the Federal Election Commission last week, officials of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth disclosed two $1 million donations from Harold Simmons, a billionaire chemical-and-waste industry magnate, and another $1 million from oilman T. Boone Pickens. Both industrialists base their corporate empires in the Dallas area.

The mammoth donations are just the latest evidence of the way both Republicans and Democrats are capitalizing on unlimited contributions flowing to “527” political action groups. The Swift Boat veterans operation has been the most conspicuous example of the growing use of tax-exempt independent groups by both parties as stalking-horses to advance their controversial ad campaigns.

Simmons and Pickens have provided hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations to GOP candidates and committees in past years.

Pickens alone had already given the Swift Boat group $500,000. And Simmons contributed more than $90,000 to Bush’s two Texas governor races. With its treasury swelled by the two Texans, the Swift Boat group launched a new cycle of television campaign ads claiming that Kerry “betrayed his fellow veterans” by meeting with “enemy” Vietnamese negotiators in Paris during the Vietnam War.

In the ad, two wives of former prisoners of war rebuke Kerry for the April 1971 antiwar speech to a U.S. Senate committee that first brought him national fame.

During his 1971 speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry talked about private meetings he had attended the previous May in Paris with peace negotiators from both the U.S.-backed South and communist North Vietnamese governments. Kerry advocated an immediate pullout during his Senate appearance, but he has since denied any intent to intervene in the peace process, shepherded by the Nixon administration. Kerry sought the private meetings while on a honeymoon in France but has never fully explained how he made contact with the negotiators.

The anti-Kerry ads are running on national cable TV and in the battleground states of Pennsylvania, Nevada and New Mexico. Sean McCabe, a spokesman for the Swift Boat group, described the $1.4-million effort as “the most expensive media buy the group has made to date.”

McCabe said the group also had begun a nationwide direct-mail campaign aimed at 1.2 million voters.

The Swift Boat group’s latest burst of activity and funding was quickly dismissed Monday by Kerry aides who have long complained of collusion between the Bush campaign and the anti-Kerry veterans. Democrats have bridled all summer over the Swift Boat group’s questioning of Kerry’s medals and battle accounts. Their charges were heavily covered but remain largely unsubstantiated by military records and eyewitnesses.

“Given the national laughingstock this discredited group is, you would have thought that the Bush-Rove moneymen would have invested in something more reliable and useful, like snake oil,” Kerry campaign spokesman Michael Meehan said.

Calls to a Bush campaign spokesman were not returned. Neither of the Texas business executives could be reached for comment. A Simmons spokeswoman said the two men “are business friends.”