[Congressional Record Volume 141, Number 119 (Friday, July 21, 1995)]
[House]
[Pages H7454-H7460]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        LOOKING BACK TO VIETNAM

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mr. Crapo). Under the Speaker's announced 
policy of May 12, 1995, the gentleman from California [Mr. Dornan] is 
recognized for 60 minutes as the designee of the majority leader.
  Mr. DORNAN. Thank you, Mr. Speaker. Obviously, I am going to be the 
last speaker, and most of our colleagues are in automobiles and 
airplanes heading back to their districts across the country. I will be 
shortly myself back on the trail. I want to be respectful of our hard-
working reporters of official debate. They are understaffed by three 
people at the end of the week, and this has been a particularly arduous 
week for them. They can begin a well-deserved rest after they put in 
the several, more than several hours compiling all of the records today 
at the end of the day.
  So I do not intend to take the hour. I had thought I was going first. 
Next week is going to be more hectic than this week, and the week after 
that, before we take our August break, is going to be one rapidly-
moving treadmill. But I have something that I must get out to the 
American people through C-SPAN. There are not many folks in the gallery 
tonight, and I want this on the record. I will send the written Record 
to people. But it is important.
  As with most of my presentations, I will put a bit more energy into 
it to hold onto my audience than the two preceding presentations. You 
always like to have a good lead-in with a lot of energy and an exciting 
topic so you do not lose the C-SPAN audience to the evening news, which 
is filled with more terror and modern American controversy.
  I have promised people in all 50 States, as I have been out there on 
the campaign trail, that I will do something about McNamara, Robert 
Strange McNamara's insulting book, cruel book, ripping open the wounds 
of Vietnam, rending the hearts of now aging mothers and dads and 
beautiful young widows that are now in middle age with grown up 
children, and children who were toddlers that are not in their 
thirties, early forties, late twenties, with families of their own who 
are still trying to find answers for the agony of Vietnam. Both POW/
missing-in-action groups are in town, the League of Families and the 
Alliance of Families of our missing. I made promises to them.
  I believe that of all people to end up in the White House, William 
Jefferson Blythe Clinton was the last human being of all the 42 
Presidents, or anybody who has ever run for President, to normalize 
relations with war criminals in Hanoi who broke every single paragraph 
and line, who violated every letter of the spirit and the intent of the 
Paris peace accords worked out between Le Duc Tho, war criminal, and 
Henry Kissinger, never described as naive, but certainly naive in this 
case; they violated all of it. The Communist rulers in Hanoi today, and 
we see other Members of the other Chamber, the United States Senate, 
going over there on John F. Kennedy's funeral airplane, literally 
Kennedy's Air Force One that brought his broken body home from Dallas, 
the very plane that Lyndon Baines Johnson became President on, the 36th 
President of the United States, sworn in on that airplane.
  That airplane, on a nonbipartisan trip, all members of one party, all 
of them liberals, all of them with $12.50 of per diem in their pockets, 
on their way to Hanoi and Saigon to congratulate the war criminals for 
their victory over at least three of the dominoes, South Vietnam, 
Cambodia, and Laos.
  Mr. Speaker, I have been doing a lot of thinking about my last two 
special orders where I said I had
 made an historical statement on this floor, and that I was going to 
stand by it. My words were taken down, my speaking privileges were 
removed for the day. I could have appealed the ruling of the Chair. In 
retrospect, I thought it would have been an easy party line victory 
that was an historical statement that I used against Mr. Clinton.

  I have rethought it, and I said I would do it again on the floor, and 
I probably will not. There are many ways to discuss history without 
using words and trying to understand why decent men who are 
parliamentarians found three simple words worthy of being stricken from 
the Record.
  Let me approach this gingerly. Here is the U.S. Constitution. A 
handful of us carry it around with us almost every day, try to have it 
every day. Here is article 3, section 3. It gives the definition of 
treason against the United States.
  When the Constitution was written, the United States were always 
spoken of in plural. As any historian will tell you, this ended with 
the Civil War where we became truly one union, one entity. So I will 
explain this as I read section 3, article 3. It said, Treason against 
the United States shall consist only in levying war against them. 
``Them'' means the plural of the handful of States that existed then, 
the 13 agricultural Colonies of the original United States. It shall 
consist only in levying war, and war is capitalized, against them. Or, 
in adhering to their, all 13 States, Enemies, with a capital E, giving 
them Aid, with a capital A, a simple word, and Comfort, with a capital 
C.
  So there is where the term came from. Aid and Comfort, capital A, 
capital C, and adhering to their enemies, plural. New sentence: No 
person shall be convicted of treason unless, on the testimony, for some 
reason testimony is capitalized, of two witnesses, witnesses 
capitalized, to the same overt act, two witnesses to an overt act, of 

[[Page H7455]]
giving aid and comfort to enemies, or a confession in open court.
  Now, this says, the Congress shall have power to declare the 
punishment of treason, but no retainer of treason shall work, 
corruption of blood or forfeiture, except during the life of the person 
attained. A rather archaic 1787 language.
  Now, because of those words, to put those three words together, enemy 
in any juxtaposition with two very simple words we use all the time in 
medicine, giving aid or giving comfort, it constitutes an inference of 
treason. I never intended to give that inference on the day after the 
State of the Union, and I have never even applied it to Jane Fonda, 
because without a declaration of war, which we had in neither Korea or 
the Vietnam war, we were in the peculiar position of seeing Americans 
do whatever they felt like to demoralize our troops in the field who 
were shedding blood, or to assist a Communist cause anywhere in the 
world and describe it as a nationalist cause, and many people felt 
that.
  With the emergence of McNamara's book, an arrogant and self-serving a 
piece of writing, and not very good quality writing, at that, and 
Clinton, in answer to a CNN reporter, Wolf Blitzer by name, that this 
gave him vindication for what he did overseas during the Vietnam war, 
it is a stunning offense and hurt to everybody who lost a loved one in 
the decade of Vietnam's bloodshedding or anyone who is in a wheelchair 
today, or left a limb behind in Vietnam, or saw a young boyhood friend 
blown to pieces or die slowly in their arms.
  Mr. Speaker, I have several books here that I want to recommend for 
Americans to read if they think they are qualified to debate me on this 
subject of our Commander in Chief or Vietnam.
                              {time}  1900

  When I was in Des Moines, IA, last March, a Vietnam veteran gave me 
this book, ``Working-Class War,'' by Christian J.G. Appe, subtitle: 
American Combat Soldiers in Vietnam. It is a perfect historical piece 
to describe that Vietnam was fought by working-class kids, the sons, 
and in the case of the 80 females' names on the wall, Army nurses, 
almost every one of them, that it was a war where the middle class of 
America gave up their sons; very few, very few from the Ivy League 
schools.
  The best and the brightest, I believe, were the ROTC students, the 
graduates of West Point, Annapolis, and the Air Force Academy of 
Colorado Springs who, by the very volunteer nature of their going to 
the academies to get a commission, or the ROTC, or the OCS, that they 
were the best and brightest, standing up to communism in that period.
  What triggered my thought response to Mr. Clinton was his reference 
in the State of the Union, with the Medal of Honor winner sitting up 
here, who had won the Medal of Honor 6 days past his 17th birthday in 
the battle of Iwo Jima, he made reference to the cold war, that we have 
won the cold war. When somebody says ``we,'' they are including 
themselves in that process.
  I cannot think of a single, solitary effort in his entire life that 
Mr. Clinton gave or performed to have added to the success of what 
President John F. Kennedy called the long twilight struggle against 
communism. There are other Members in this Chamber and in the Senate 
who I do not believe lifted a tiny pinkie in their entire lives to 
contribute one scintilla of effort to winning that cold war. There are 
those who never wore the uniform, voted for a strong defense budget, or 
gave support to our men in uniform; verbally, town hall meetings, with 
just nothing much more than respect.
  There are women, of course, who have never been subject to a draft in 
this country, mothers who gave their sons, sisters who saw their 
brothers go off and supported them, wrote to them, kept their morale 
up, and there are people who are 4-F, God's call, who worked in the 
defense industry, gave money, or paid their taxes willingly. You can 
come down a long thermometer of effort to find some tiny contribution, 
but there are Members of this Chamber and the other body, and Mr. 
Clinton, who did nothing. If you did nothing, that is better than 
contributing to the other side.
  Mr. Speaker, here is McNamara's ugly, hurtful, self-serving book 
called ``In Retrospect.'' Let me put something in retrospect. When you 
read this book, you learn what has stunned me for years, that Mr. 
McNamara resigned after 7 years in the position of Secretary of 
Defense, the architect of this war, almost the sole architect, as 
President Johnson never, ever had a feel for military affairs.
  In spite of the fact that he wore a Silver Star to his grave, he did 
not earn that Silver Star. The B-26 Martin Marauder that he was on on a 
mission for Sam Rayburn as a Congressman on a leave of duty to be a 
lieutenant commander, starting at the top is nice, in the U.S. Navy, to 
bring back some firsthand information for Speaker Sam Rayburn, the 
aircraft that he was on by name the Harried Hare, H-A-R-E, turned back 
with a generator problem before it had seen any combat. It was never 
fired upon. The log shows 1 hour and 5 minutes, about 30 minutes out to 
the north coast, heading toward the north coast of New Guinea to bomb 
Lei, came back before it got over the Owen Stanley Mountain Range.
  For that he was awarded a Silver Star by PR types
   in General McArthur's campaign, I am sure MacArthur never knew this, 
and he accepted this, knowing in his heart he had done nothing but fly 
a short mission that never went into combat. Even if it had, what was 
he doing except being hunkered down in the back of an airplane? Men 
have given their lives to get a Bronze Star with V for valor and have 
paid for it with their life or their limbs of the health of their body 
for the rest of their lives.

  LBJ let McNamara run rampant for 7 years with this noble cause, as 
Ronald Reagan always referred to it and still does, and still do I, 
this noble cause, crippled politically in this Chamber, the other 
Chamber, and mainly at the White House under LBJ and under Nixon, who 
by his own admission, on a television show to David Frost, said ``The 
biggest mistake I made in my career, Mr. Frost, was I did in 1972 in 
Vietnam what I should have done in 1969. I should have done it all in 
1969 my first year in office, and maybe there would not have been 
killing fields in Cambodia, 1 to 2 million people dead, no 68,000 
people executed by death list of our Vietnamese allies, no 100,000 or 
200,000 killed in Laos, no 750,000 drowned or torn apart by sharks or 
human sharks called pirates on the South China seas or along the Thai 
or Vietnamese coast.'' All of that agony and grief was caused by Nixon 
waiting to win a second term, raw ego. But Nixon accounts for 18,000, 
19,000 names on the wall.
  The other 39,000 to 40,000 are LBJ's, so LBJ gave McNamara his head. 
McNamara resigned on leap year day, February 29, 1968. He was so 
clever, he thinks, although David Halberstam told me in a radio 
discussion with me that he does not think McNamara was very bright, and 
that was the key to the whole thing, in spite of his academic 
achievement, or his 2 months as president of Ford Motor Co., or less 
than 90 days, anyway.
  He writes in this incredible self-serving book that in his 
resignation ceremony at the river entrance of the Pentagon, he was 
supposed to have a fly-by. Who is going to give him a fly-by? Vietnam 
vets, veterans of aerial combat over Southeast Asia? Maybe a Korean ace 
thrown in there? What were they going to use, F-100's that I flew in 
peacetime, or F-4 Phantoms, which were used by Marines, Navy, and Air 
Force? What were they going to fly for him? F-105 Thunderchiefs, that 
he decimated the whole 1,000-plane fleet against the hills and thud 
ridge of the Red River Valley of North Vietnam, so much so that the 
aircraft picked up a name by the pilots of ``the Thud'' itself, that 
big, beautiful long Tunderchief? Is that what was going to fly a 
tribute to Robert Strange McNamara--that is his mother's maiden name, 
by the way--it really is strange. I feel like calling him Robert Evil 
McNamara, as does historian Col. Harry Summers. I will call him that. I 
have called him that.
  He resigns on the day that only pops up every 4 years, Presidential 
years, interestingly, February 29, 1968. Well, God rained on his 
parade. There was weather, no fly-by. Everybody was drenched. They went 
inside, and then he took his what appears to be lovely 

[[Page H7456]]
wife, Marge, and off they go to Aspen, Snow Mass at Aspen.
  I took my young kids there, my two young sons, and three daughters 
stayed home, a month after Saigon fell, to show them millionaire Robert 
Strange McNamara's home on the ski run at Snow Mass at Aspen, and it 
was an energy crisis period, and there were tiki lights, burning gas 
lights, all around this millionaire's hideaway at Aspen.
  That is where he went for all of March 1968, and Mr. Speaker, March 
is when our hospitals in
 Vietnam and Laos and in the Philippines and Trippler hospital in 
Hawaii were filled with more wounded than any point or month during the 
entire war. There were more amputees and double amputees and triple 
amputees and young men dying in those hospitals and dying on the air 
shuttle hospital planes back to Hawaii and other hospitals, more people 
being returned broken to their families, more names were put on that 
wall in the month of February and March, when he is skiing in Aspen, 
than any other 2-month period of the entire war.

  As a matter of fact, in the first 10 days of the Tet offensive of the 
month he resigned, I remember the figure, it is pretty easy, 1,111 
Americans killed in action. He did not want to touch it, because he was 
quitting that month. He had given his notice to President Johnson, who 
let him pick his departure date, Leap Year Day, months before.
  I remember Johnson telling Walter Kronkite, in a goodbye or finale 
audio interview, that McNamara made a speech in Canada that we could 
never win the war. That is what this book is basically about, only he 
made that decision in 1963 before we had had any Americans--two dozen 
were killed in action when he decides we cannot win it, and 58,000 end 
up paying with their lives, and 100,000 others with broken bodies.
  There is a page in here, interestingly, page 105, listen to this. I 
read this on the floor last week. I feel like doing it every month 
until I retire from here. He is in Washington, returning from Vietnam, 
and Kennedy is not in the grave 26 days. This is 1 day shy of Kennedy's 
assassination day, November 22. This is December 21, 1963. He comments 
on a secret program that is about to be launched bailing out courageous 
young South Vietnamese officers into North Vietnam. We did it all that 
next Spring, and every one of them was captured and tortured to death. 
Is that fascinating? McNamara sent all these people north to be 
tortured to death, young Vietnamese officers. In this whole book, he 
treats our Vietnamese allies in the South disgracefully, either by 
ignominiously dismissing them, or talking about how corrupt they are, 
as though the heroes are the Communists up in Hanoi.
  He says, McNamara, quoting from his book directly, page 105: ``Upon 
my return to Washington of December 21, I was less than candid when I 
reported to the press. Perhaps a senior government official could 
hardly have been more straightforward in the midst of war.'' He is 
calling it a war, and it is December, 4 days before Christmas of 1963, 
2 dozen men are killed in action. That was over a 2-year period. Jim 
Davis, the first man killed, on this exact date, December 21 of 1961, 
so it is 2 years since the first man was killed and we are still under 
30.
  He says: ``I couldn't have been more straightforward in the midst of 
a war. I could not fail to recognize the effect discouraging remarks 
might have on those we strove to support--the South Vietnamese--as well 
as those we sought to overcome--the Viet Cong and North Vietnamese. It 
is a profound, enduring, and universal ethical and moral dilemma: How, 
in times of war and crisis, can senior government officials be 
completely frank to their own people without giving aid and comfort to 
the enemy?''
  Mr. Speaker, there is the term that got me in trouble, ``aid and 
comfort to the enemy.'' He is applying that just about a Secretary of 
Defense at a press conference, being too candid with the press and then 
transmitting the truth to the American people.
 Let us flash forward. I will keep this little newspaper clipping at 
this point in McNamara's book for the rest of my life. Some great-
grandchildren will remove it some day and say, ``Interesting 
similarity.''

  Let us flash forward from December 21, 1963, to May 20, 1995. Here is 
Mr. Clinton, challenging the NRA to donate the proceeds of that 
controversial letter that was stupidly and offensively written about 
bucket helmets and jackboots, when it should have merely been written 
combat helmets and combat boots.
  Why were we using M-1 tanks, two of them, M-2 Bradley fighting 
vehicles, 4 of them, they wanted 14 to assault the compound of a 
religious cult that was accumulating weapons and seducing young 
children, children as young as 10, but the women were obviously hostage 
prisoners, and there were 24 little babies left in there when 51 days 
later they hit it again, but obviously it was in violation of posse 
comitatus to use tanks that were not available to Mogadishu 6 months 
later, let alone all these Bradley fighting vehicles that could have 
blown through simply-made roadblocks, that caused Rangers to bleed to 
death all night because we did not have one Bradley or one Abrahms tank 
6 months later, 5\1/2\ months later in Mogadishu.
  Here is the article in the liberal Washington Post, by Ann Devry, and 
the title again: ``Clinton Challenges NRA to Donate Letter Proceeds.'' 
Listen to this. He says, ``The money should be given over,'' which is 
an interesting point, because they, the NRA, made the money by 
attacking the police. They admitted they did the wrong thing, the NRA, 
and they ought to give the money up. Interesting, Clinton, who has 
fought the antigun control forces of the NRA through his Presidency, 
added ``I hope the NRA knows by now that anyone who pretends that 
police officers are the enemy is only giving aid and comfort to 
criminals, who are the real enemy.''
                              {time}  1915

  So Clinton likes that term now, aid and comfort to the enemy, the 
enemy being criminals, if you are criticizing police officers. So, I 
wonder does he think, it seems to be a Democratic theme at the hearings 
that two of our subcommittees have joined together to have and that 
they are having on the Senate side about this atrocity at Waco, and 
then we will get around to the atrocity, even worse, because of greater 
loss of life at Oklahoma City. But does Clinton think our hearings are 
giving aid and comfort to criminals in the street?
  Is everybody who belongs to the NRA a criminal for wanting to own, 
under the Second Amendment, for their own self-defense weapons? 
Because, as I said in that same speech where four or five of my words 
were removed, the Second Amendment has nothing to do with hunting. It 
is not about hunting; hunting mallard ducks or bears or stags or 
anything. It is about political freedom.
  As I said, it is about situations like Grozny in Chechnya, or Bosnia. 
I did not mention Bosnia, but I did mention 1776. Somebody has to 
dissect this McNamara book that so cavalierly uses this term from 
article III, section 3 of the Constitution about aid and comfort.
  Now, I took off our computer screen in our office's WordPerfect 
thesaurus, it is the computer thesaurus on all of our word processors, 
to look for synonyms for ``aid'' and ``comfort.'' And I got Roget's II 
Thesaurus, and I decided never again would I use that term, even about 
Jane Fonda or even about people who, like Tom Hayden, a State senator 
in California, in violation of our State Constitution, which is far 
more specific than our beautiful Federal Constitution, because it does 
not say that you need a declaration of war.
  It says anybody that assists or gives aid and comfort to any fighting 
force in conflict with our men must never be allowed to serve in office 
in California. And I went there the day years ago when we almost threw 
Hayden out as an assemblyman. The vote was 36 to 33; 11 people did not 
have the guts to show up for the vote.
  Now, he is in the State senate, serving against our Constitution. 
Again, somebody who gave aid and comfort to Hanoi. And, unfortunately, 
we only have 17 Republicans. If he were in the assembly today, he would 
be thrown out by our California Constitution.
  So if you take ``aid'' and look for a synonym, in Roget's II 
Thesaurus it says ``help.'' That is a verb. Or a noun: ``help'' or 
``helper.''

[[Page H7457]]

  For ``comfort,'' verb. ``Console, solace, soothe, relieve.'' Noun: 
``consolation, solace.'' Synonym for enemy: Simple, ``opponent, foe.'' 
It did not even have ``adversary''; that is too neutral.
  You come down to our computer thesauruses, Mr. Speaker, on your own 
office word offices, to get rid of that word, ``aid.'' You can use 
``aid, abet, assist, succor, sustain.'' There is a good word. If you 
need a noun, which is the way I used it, ``assistance, relief, support, 
comfort, assistant, attendant supporter.''
  If you are looking for another word for ``comfort,'' which the word 
computer uses perfectly as a synonym for ``aid,'' you could use 
``cheer, console, reassure, soothe.'' If a noun is needed, 
``consolation, solace, succor, contentment, abundance, luxury.'' It 
goes off the point here.
  ``Enemy,'' they use in the thesaurus, ``adversary, antagonist, 
betrayer, foe.'' A song I learned to sing at 8 years of age: ``Let's 
remember Pearl Harbor
 as we did the Alamo, let's remember Pearl Harbor as we go to meet the 
foe.'' In that case, Japan and Germany and Italy. ``Nemesis, opponent, 
rival.''

  So if I want to talk about Jane Fonda going to Moscow, which she did 
on the way to Hanoi and on other trips, of course, coming back from 
Hanoi, if I want to talk about Jane Fonda going to Moscow or Beijing, 
which she did later when she decided that Russia was not nice to her 
when she was making Doll House. The unions abused her when she was 
making the Ibsen movie, I do not think anybody ever saw it in Moscow 
studios. She decided China was the place of the future, Beijing. She 
didn't like that much either. She is used to a millionaire lifestyle.
  But suppose we said Jane Fonda went to Moscow to help the foe in 
Hanoi; to sustain the communist forces in Hanoi; to give them 
assistance and to support. Suppose we said Jane Fonda went to Moscow to 
sustain and support, to give cheer and to reassure the foe of our 
fighting forces in Vietnam.
  Now, of course she sat in a gun pit. she made radio broadcasts. And 
when our POWs were released in 1973, and the issue was still in doubt 
as to whether South Vietnam would prevail as a democracy with 44 
newspapers in Saigon, of course there is one now, a communist rag, she 
called our colleague, Pete Peterson, on that side of the aisle, and Sam 
Johnson on this side of the aisle, and Senator McCain, on the 
Republican majority side in the Senate, she called them liars, 
professional killers, and hypocrites.
  If you are scratching your head, Mr. Speaker, colleagues or Americans 
watching the proceedings, by hypocrite, she meant how could they fight 
in a war and then, if they were tortured, not expect to the tortured. 
She knows nothing about the Geneva Convention, so that is hypocritical.
  When Bill Clinton went to Moscow, and here is a book I recommend: 
Clinton Confidential, a Climb to Power, by George Carposi. He and I 
have chatted on the phone. He wants to show me his research on page 64 
to explain this paragraph, and it answers the question that Congressman 
Johnson, Congressman Hunter, Congressman Dornan and Congressman 
Cunningham, the three of us from California, Sam from Texas, could not 
get answered on this House floor in September and October. Nobody would 
phone in this information to our offices, and we were each taking over 
a thousand calls a day: Why did Clinton go to Moscow for only 2\1/2\ 
days at 27 degrees below zero, 10 inches of snow cover.
  And I am at the airport with four wives of missing-in-action heroes, 
one Marine three Air Force, and we are under arrest. And Ross Perot is 
cooling his heels in Denmark, at 40 years of age, a billionaire with a 
707 filled with food and medicine for the POWs delayed from Christmas. 
Came all the way around the world, across the Pacific, Vientiane, Laos, 
down through India, up through Europe and into Copenhagen waiting for 
clearance as the Russians promised in the Russian embassy, for him to 
fly it in, even without him on the airplane, even with a Russian crew, 
to go to Moscow where they would go fly it back to Hanoi.
  He never got into Moscow. I was kicked out of the airport. Four of us 
out of five, including me, coming down with pneumonia, because there 
was no heating in the old hotel where they locked us up.
  What was Clinton doing? Broke. No money. Freezing cold. And he 
arrived all by himself on New Year's eve with no money. Here is the 
answer, page 64: Clinton's activities in Moscow remain a mystery in 
full. He has never discussed with the media ever,
 ever, Mr. Speaker, to this day, either that trip or his travel to at 
least one other known defector country, Norway. The defector from NATO, 
as far as our effort in Vietnam is concerned. However, one phase of his 
short visit to Moscow has been ascertained.

  Clinton attended the January 2, so-called peace rally and banquet 
held in the National Hotel's ballroom. That is where he was put up, for 
free, I guess. That had as guest of honor, U.S. Senator Eugene 
McCarthy, the Minnesota Democrat that was defeated in 1968 by Vice 
President Humphrey.
  There are no other details of Clinton's trip to Moscow, which 
presumably ended when he boarded another Aeroflot jet, he came down by 
train from Leningrad, just the next day and the plane took him to 
Prague, where he stayed for 4 days.
  Now, Moscow was far more interesting in that period than Prague, but 
he stayed for 4 days with an Oxford classmate, Jan Kapold, and that 
family. Jan's grandmother and I discussed this with a Czechoslovakian 
gentleman at this hall today. I had forgotten her name and he knew it 
right off of the top of his head. The woman whose party threw Jan 
Masaryk, the Czech hero during World War II, out of the window and 
called it a suicide.
  Jan, one of his classmates at Oxford, her grandmother was Maria 
Smernova. Not even a Czech. She was a Rumanian, I found out from this 
gentleman. And this author, George Carposi of this book, Clinton 
Confidential, went up to the Czechoslovakian consulate in New York and 
found out that she was truly the founder of the Communist party in 
Czechoslovakia just after World War II. The murderers Jan Masaryk.
  And she was its first president, a position she still held when 
Clinton stayed with them in Prague in 1970. And the book gets more 
interesting than that on every level; Whitewater, personal life, 
everything.
  Mr. Speaker, that is the sixth book that has come out last year. And 
if people want to check with me about why I wear a Clinton countdown 
watch that shows 473 days until a glorious election, I hope, November 
5, 1996, when the Grand Old Party controls, hopefully, again this 
distinguished body of parliamentarians and the House of Lords, as I 
lovingly call the U.S. Senate.
  If we can control the White House and sync up those three bodies of 
power, maybe we can begin to roll back $5 trillion worth of debt that 
has been heaped on my nine grandchildren and my five grown children and 
my Sally and me and we have a 10th grandchild well on the way. Maybe we 
can do that.
  But to do it, we cannot do this with kid gloves, as my Navy-attack, 
torpedo-bomber-pilot, 58-combat-mission friend George Bush tried to do. 
We have to take the gloves off. Honorably, Marquess of Queensbury 
debate rules, looking for the proper synonyms of ``sustenance'' and 
``solace'' and ``comfort'' and ``sustaining'' and find other words for 
Hanoi than the word I, unfortunately, used. Use ``foe,'' ``adversary,'' 
``Communist killer,'' ``war criminal''; a lot of other ways to describe 
this.
  And you are going to have to read some other books if you want to be 
one step ahead of me. I have not found one Congressman or Senator yet 
who has read The Rise of Bill Clinton, that is the subtitle, On The 
Make, by Meridith Oakley.
  This book is by a young female reporter who is shown here with Bill 
Clinton as the attorney general back in 1978; a picture with young 
Meridith Oakley who followed his entire career. That came out less than
 2 years ago.

  And then it was followed by Bob Woodward's book, ``The Agenda.'' How 
many Congressmen and Senators have read this? Look at this fascinating 
confrontation on page 287. Senator Bob Kerry, medal of honor winner, 
arguing with Clinton over the greatest tax increase in the history of 
civilization. In all of recorded history, nothing has been as massive 
as the Democratic-engineered tax increase of the summer of 1993. Not a 
single Republican on this 

[[Page H7458]]

side of the aisle, or in the other body, voted for it.
  Kerry does not want to vote for it, the Medal of Honor winner who 
left a leg on an island in Vietnam. Clinton pleads with Kerry that he 
needs his vote. ``My presidency is going to go down now,'' he said 
sharply, by now shouting at the top of his voice. Kerry comes back, ``I 
do not like the argument that I am bringing the presidency down.''
  Hey, this is by a Pulitzer Prize winner. Maybe commander and hero of 
advocacy journalism, Bob Woodward. His name is as big as the title on 
the book. In the paperback it says ``Bob Woodward's The Agenda.'' He is 
a hot author.
  He has Kerry saying, ``I don't like the argument that I am bringing 
the presidency down,'' he shouted back getting fed up. Clinton shouted 
that the defeat would do precisely that. Kerry could not flee from his 
responsibility.
  By the way, Mr. Speaker, Kerry eventually voted for the big tax 
increase, but he extracted a good price; the commission that our 
colleague, Chris Cox was on that Judd Gregg of New Hampshire cochaired, 
where Kerry and Judd Gregg, two U.S. Senators said, in 20 years there 
will only be three lines in the U.S. budget: interest on the debt, 
Social Security, and Medicare. No Coast Guard lighthouses, no Marine 
Corps, no tower operators, crime running wild in the streets. Just 
three items. Kerry extracted that from him.
  Clinton shouts ``You are going to wreck my presidency.'' And Kerry 
says, bottom of page 287, The Agenda, ``I really resent the argument 
that somehow I am responsible for your presidency surviving,'' Kerry 
bellowed, is the word Bob Woodward chose.
  Clinton comes back. The ultimate four-letter word, there are pages in 
the Chamber, the ultimate four-letter word followed by the pronoun 
``you,'' Clinton yelled. Turn page. When I read this book I cold not 
hardly move fast enough to see if what Kerry's rejoinder was; whether 
he was going to echo the President. He did not.
  Kerry felt he always tried to be respectful of the Commander in 
Chief, but he also wanted to defend himself and he continued shouting 
back. Clinton pressed on two themes. He had to have Kerry's vote. ``I 
need it,'' he said at one point plaintively. ``I need it.'' He also 
said that if Kerry denied him the vote, Kerry would wreak national 
havoc.
  I've got the responsibility for me,'' Kerry replied. Now he is not 
shouting. ``I have got my vote. My vote matters. I vote based upon what 
I believe is right' always have. I don't particularly on big issues 
like this, like to shave it and so that's where it is.'' ``Fine,'' said 
Clinton brusquely. ``Okay. If that's what you want to do, go do it.'' 
Both crushed their phones down.
                              {time}  1930

  Interesting verb. Crushed their phones down. Clinton was irate, 
turned to his advisers after the conversation and said, ``It is going 
to be a no.'' No was a yes. Got to read the Agenda. This is the one 
that talks about purple rages, lava flowing from the top of his head, 
the Commander-in-Chief treating George Stephanopolous like an abused 
wife. Book two, Agenda.
  Then out came--let me get these two straight now. Yes, inside the 
White House, Ronald Kessler, seen him do several interviews, best-
selling author of the FBI and inside the CIA. Subtitle: The Hidden 
Lives of the Modern Presidents and the Secrets of the World's Most 
Powerful Institution.
  It was the revelations of the Kennedys that sold the book. And Inside 
the White House, the cooks talk, the butlers talk, the Secret Service 
talks, the hired help talk. And what the revelation says is what the 
British would call is all about unseemly speech in front of the hired 
help and explosions and domestic quarrels. Book three.
  Book four. Young picture of handsome Bill Clinton looking for all the 
world like Mickey Rooney with a lot of hair, honest, open, innocent 
face, looks like a Dornan in a way. Biography of Bill Clinton, first in 
his class. And it does not mean that he graduated first in grade 
school, high school, college. It means he was first of the baby boomers 
to achieve such raw naked power.
  Another winner of a Pulitizer Prize, David Moraniss, M-O-R-A-N-I-S-S. 
I ought to give the publishers on these.
  On the Make, Regnery; Bob Woodward, Simon and Shuster; Inside the 
White House, Pocketbooks; First in His Class, back to Simon and Shuster 
again.
  Seen a lot of interviews with this man. This was serialized for 4 
days, 3 or 4 days in the liberal Washington Post. Fascinating book. 
Read this and you will understand why there is chaos in our country and 
why every other week Clinton alternates in a race back to the center or 
back to his liberal core of beliefs.
  And in between all of this, Mr. Speaker, and my colleagues, if you 
read this book, POW, written in our bicentennial year or written for 
over a 3-year period, researched over 5 or 6, published in 1976 by John 
G. Hubell, H-U-B-E-L-L, association with Andrew Jones, and Kenneth 
Tomlinson, this book, POW, will tell you about why the Vietnamese are 
war criminals.
  You will read lines like this from one-term Senator Jerry Denton, a 
more honorable and decent man I have never served with at either 
Chamber. He was so tortured, the white heat coursing through his body, 
the white, red-hot pain, that he was sure his spine would snap. Jerry 
had never known pain to equal this.
  Sam Johnson, the same. Do not understand that you could suffer such 
pain and not lose consciousness. Stockdale, same thing. Robby Reisner, 
same thing.
  And these men, the ones that are most tortured, the ones that won the 
Medal of Honor, the Medal of Honor with valor written across it, the 
only word on the Medal of Honor, by sustaining unbelievable torture so 
as not to make a broadcast, they begged William Jefferson Blythe 
Clinton, do not normalize relations with the war criminals.
  I came across a quote from Senator Denton the other day. They are 
all--all the POWs are going to have a reunion in Annapolis this 
weekend. I was going
 to go up there, and then I talked to one, and they said, ``We are 
really just going to have a few beers and share some good memories and 
some awful memories.'' And they said, ``We would love to have you, but 
no politics.'' And I decided, no, that is their moment. This is just 
that incredible band of brothers that suffered so under the war 
criminals that are now laughing in our face in Hanoi.

  If you read this working-class war, read POW, you do not have to read 
such else about Vietnam.
  This week coming up, we will dedicate the Korean War Memorial, the 
war that I joined at 19 and was mercifully on my to pilot training when 
it ended so I never had to shoot at another mother's son or end up 
broken or a POW.
  My dad always told me about World War I. His prayer was, ``Take me to 
heaven, Lord, but don't burn me and don't cripple me.'' And his prayers 
were answered, although he had three wounds, two of them for poison 
gas.
  I was raised in a military family. I understand what sacrifice is all 
about. The brave die but once, cowards die a thousand times.
  And those that did not understand that this cold war was exactly what 
Kennedy called it, a twilight struggle against what Pope Pius the 11th 
called the intrinsic horrible evil of communism, those who did not want 
to join any noble cause or any part of that struggle against communism, 
they can laugh themselves all the way to Hanoi and back, all the way to 
Havana and back, all the way to Moscow and back, all the way to Beijing 
and back, but they still in the end have to live with themselves and 
their delusions that we were the imperialist interventionist, evil bad 
guys, we were the enemy of Vietnam.
  I remember that Pogo line being thrown in my face by college, smart-
ass punks saying, we have met the enemy, the enemy is us, we are the 
evil ones. Ho Chi Minh is George Washington. He is the arrow. I can 
hear Clinton repeating all of that at the teaching he did at London 
while he was giving a class at Oxford. On the way back, he told them, 
``Get lost. I can do anything I want.''
  Senator McCain told about the war, and I have got to rake John over 
the coals for that, that normalization was 

[[Page H7459]]
a 48 Hours story. No, Senator, it is not a 48 Hours story.
  The Committee on Rules gave us our day in court today. We will have a 
debate on this floor about no money going toward setting up a U.S. 
embassy in an enemy-foe-adversary-opponent capital where the war 
criminals, those who actually got the blood of our men on their hands, 
lieutenant colonels and the majors, they are now the ones that are the 
colonels and the generals in the political military/political leaders.
  The war criminals have taken over, the ones that are not dead that 
are older, like General Giap who sent 13- and 12-year-olds into battle 
to die, who had a thousand people, most of them civilians, executed 
along the Pearl River during McNamara's cowardly bug-out month, during 
February 1968, 5,000 people executed. That was under Giap's order.
  Giap is the one who sent hundreds of thousands of young peasant 
children to die against B-52s that McNamara was using improperly in 
this 7 years of his crime.
  I had a major, Army major, he is now a U.S. Congressman from Indiana, 
come up to me and say, Mr. Chairman, he is on my personnel committee, 
why can we not subpoena Kissinger and Eagleburger and current Secretary 
Winston Lord to tell us why everything went wrong with the Paris Peace 
Accords, why we never got a
 single live prisoner back from Laos, not one? A couple before the war 
really spooled up who escaped, and one after in 1974, but who--civilian 
was shot down after the war was won. It was over in Vietnam. Why did we 
not get back 399 men shot down in Laos?

  And I said, you know, it is a simple idea. I said, we should have 
Kissinger. We will not have to subpoena him. He is a good man. He will 
come. So will Larry Eagleburer. I know Larry. So will Winston Lord. He 
did not come this time, but he will next time. He knows I am ready to 
subpoena anybody who does not want to come and face up to this ugly 
book of McNamara's.
  Then Steve Buyer came to me, Congressman Buyer of Indiana, just a few 
days ago. He wrote me a letter. He says:

       ``Why can't we subpoena Robert Strange McNamara to come 
     before the full National Security Committee and answer for 
     this book? Why can't he help us write laws so that no Defense 
     Secretary or no President ever again will allow American 
     fighting men to be called `detained by a hostile power' 
     instead of `prisoners,' why he will allow our people to be 
     treated as criminals and air pirates instead of respectful 
     fighting men following the orders of their country?''

  You notice, Mr. Speaker, we never called Scott O'Grady a prisoner of 
war for the 6 days he was missing. We did not hardly have a title for 
him. They gagged on the words ``detained by hostile power.'' They did 
not know what to call it. Was it a hostage?
  What penalty have the Bosnian Serbs paid for destroying a $125 
million piece of American equipment and trying to kill one of our 
officers? Nothing.
  Instead, we are starting to put men in there with a man who avoided 
serving his country three times and the last time had an induction date 
of July 28, 1969, politically suppressed, reversed, obliterated, and 
mauled by a Governor, Senator Fulbright, by the draft board and by 
completely deviously telling the commander of the ROTC at Arkansas that 
he fully intended to join the ROTC unit, which obviously he did not, 
was already making plans to go back to Oxford and set up demonstrations 
on October 15, on October--and November 15.
  Remember that it was Hanoi who called Clinton's organized November 
15, 1969, demonstrations the fall offensive. That was a Communist title 
from the foe in Hanoi. The adversary, opponent, the killers of our 
Americans, the foe of the Hanoi called it the fall offensive and 
Clinton was part of the fall offensive. Sympathetic, coordinated 
demonstrations against the United States of America in Stockholm, Oslo, 
Helsinki, he visited all those capitals within days, in Moscow, London, 
Paris, New York, Washington, D.C., and I think in Atlanta, I know in 
L.A., San Francisco, and I know in Chicago, all coordinated worldwide.
  I have just had an intelligence officer write to me that the 
Communists in Hanoi were obsessed with their image synching because 
Jeremiah Denton, POW, some day to become a U.S. Senator from Alabama, 
had tapped out with his eyelashes the words torture.
  And then Bob Frischman came back. I met with him after he had been 
debriefed, had no elbow, saw his picture in prison holding up his arms, 
one arm with no elbow, let his wounds heal improperly. He was released 
early for some public relations reason. And Bob Frischman came back and 
told the horror stories of torture.
  I do not know why my friend, Melvin Laird, served here for almost 
three decades, maybe more than that, he was Secretary of Defense under 
Richard Nixon,
 replacing Clark Clifford's 1-year tenure who replaced McNamara after 
McNamara's 7. He went through the 7 days of January, 1969, all of 
February, all of March, all of April, and all of June.

  I was dying during this period because I knew what was going on in 
Hanoi. On July 10, 1969, Mel Laird had a massive press conference at 
the Pentagon, full world-court press, and said, ``Our men are being 
tortured in Hanoi, some to death.''
  The story built through August, September, October, November, 
December, January, February, and this intelligence officer is sending 
me intercepts that he had in Tan Son Nhut.
  Monday, I toured the NSA for 4 or 5 hours, National Security Agency. 
That is where we listen to everything around the whole world. NSA was 
as big then as it is now. They were listening to all the communist 
traffic that they were obsessed with, covering the torture stories. And 
did they find a hero in a Hill staffer who served in this House and has 
now gone to the Senate? They sure did. He went down with a Government 
camera, Government film that he later sold to Life Magazine and took 
pictures of the so-called tiger cages on Con Son Island, 125 miles 
southeast of Saigon and said, ``Well, we are brutalizing them.'' They 
had their story.
  Life Magazine published these purloined Government pictures, and that 
story began to go around the world feeding people like Jane Fonda. At 
that time, she was still going to orgies with Roger Vadim in Paris, but 
it ricocheted around the world that oh, my God, the Americans are 
torturing people just like the Vietnamese, so they are all hypocrites. 
One story cancels out the other.
  Phil Crane told me this week that as a freshman Congressman he was in 
Taiwan on a fact-finding trip by himself. He got a call from Saigon, 
headquarters at Tan Son Nhut. Come on down here, Congressman, and we 
will send you out to the Con Son tiger cages to show you that they have 
been cleverly photographed, and they are not the brutal places of 
imprisonment used to counter the stories of our men, truthful stories 
of being tortured and beaten to death.
  And Phil Crane told me he will get the pictures for me, that he 
brought them to the House floor here all blown up, late 1970s showed 
them. Said he will give them free to any of the press but not to Life 
Magazine.

                              {time}  1945

  Some people published them as a big story in ``Human Events'' they 
are sending me Monday, and Phil Crane did his best as a freshman 
Congressman to try to counter the damage done to our fighting men in 
prison in Hanoi by the efforts to say that we did to them what they 
were doing to our men, and it just was not true.
  I will never forget Jane Fonda when we returned the North Vietnamese 
and Viet Cong prisoners across the divide on the DMZ, the 17th 
parallel. Jane Fonda said, ``Well, you notice that all of these men are 
on crutches, and they're amputees, and none of our prisoners have a 
single amputation because they killed everybody or allowed them to die 
if they lost an arm or a leg.'' We patched up the North Vietnamese 
prisoners. That was obvious to a premed student, to a high school or 
grade school kid, that people survived our captivity with arms and legs 
gone, but not a single American came home with a limb missing or in bad 
mental state. If an American lost his sanity in prison, Irkle Beale, 
J.J. Connell, they were taken off and either murdered or allowed to 
die. Some of their remains have come home, and some of their
 remains have not come home.

  So, if anybody out there across America wants to discuss this with 
me, they have got a lot of reading to do. It 

[[Page H7460]]
is fascinating reading. It is current history. It is current events. It 
will give you an understanding and a feel for the men and women who 
wear the uniform, not just in our military services, but in the Coast 
Guard and in all of our law enforcement agencies, marshals, sheriffs, 
deputy sheriffs, cops up and down the line in all cities, American 
towns, and villages, and hamlets, people who will give their life not 
just for your life, but for your property.
  Read this material, and you will understand why Bob Dornan is 
sometimes aggressive, sometimes passionate, always dedicated, and 
always wanting to keep my eye focused on changing the leadership at the 
top to sync up with the worthy people up and down the chain of command 
like the 19 men who died in Mogadishu on October 3, 4, and 6, 1993, 
deaths that I predicted on this House floor in September and October of 
1992, that I said would happen if we put someone into the White House 
who did not understand this dangerous world we live in.
  I wanted to speak shorter than this, and I apologize to the official 
reporters, but obviously to this American this is very, very important, 
and I would point out, Mr. Speaker, and those that try to keep some 
modicum of civility here on this House floor, that I did not mention a 
book called ``Passion and Betrayal,'' which was the sixth book called 
``Passion and Betrayal,'' which was the sixth book to come out in the 
past 18 months because I believe that book should be called ``Lust and 
I Got Just What I Deserved'' because you cannot make a credible case 
with a bimbo against somebody who traffics in that kind of person.
  So I do not recommend reading what the Washington Post recommended 
people read because they said it was the first long-awaited 
Presidential pornography and it is about time was the reviewers smart-
aleck attitude in recommending that dumb book. Do not waste time. Do 
not look for articles in Playboy or Penthouse, although somebody told 
me there is even a factual article in Penthouse last month and the 
month before, that you really can get away with saying you read the 
articles. Do not do that. Read these five books. Read the McNamara 
book. Try to get it from a library. Do not give him any money. And read 
``Working Class War,'' and you will understand why some of us are 
passionate, and it is not a 48-hour story.


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