Six days after a photo surfaced showing Sen. John Kerry with anti-American activist Jane Fonda, the Democratic presidential front-runner ordered his campaign to drop its attacks on President Bush's National Guard service.
"I have suggested to some people who are my advocates, who have gone [to] that line of attack – it's not one that I plan to do, so I've asked them not to," Kerry said at Sunday night's Democratic debate in Milwaukee, Wis.
Kerry had sounded eager just 12 days earlier to focus on charges that Bush went "AWOL" from an Alabama Guard unit in 1972, telling the Boston Globe, "I think it's up to the president and the military to answer those questions."
But Kerry began to back away from the issue on Feb. 10, a day after NewsMax.com and Rush Limbaugh's Web site published photographic evidence of his association with the woman known as "Hanoi Jane."
That night ABC "World News Tonight" reported, "Democrats, including the party's presidential front-runner, Senator John Kerry, have sought to fuel the [Bush AWOL] controversy – but today, Kerry suddenly backed away."
"I don't want to comment on it. It's not an issue I've chosen to create. It's not my record that is at issue," Kerry told the network, in marked contrast to his earlier suggestion that Bush needed to address the Guard story.
The top Democrat's decision to drop the AWOL story may be a bid to halt further media examination of his anti-war activities, which included denouncing America as "the real criminal" in Vietnam and testifying that the soldiers he served with routinely committed atrocities.
Before Kerry decided to drop the AWOL story, Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., an early Kerry backer, publicly offered Republicans a deal.
"I'm willing to put all of [Bush's Guard record] aside and not bring any of that up ... but you better do the same with John Kerry," proposed Ford, after he was asked about the Fonda photo last Wednesday during an interview on the Fox News Channel.
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