“That’s a hard-hitting ad,” Hannity remarked when it was over. He told his viewers that, in addition to airing the ad in its entirety the next night, he would talk live with the Swift Boat vets themselves before allowing the Kerry campaign to respond. “We’ll get both sides,” he promised.
Halpin first thought the effort was “preposterous.” Smearing Kerry’s military service smacked of desperation. Off-camera, Hannity assured Halpin he was wrong: “This is going to change the whole campaign.”
Hannity was right. The next day, a $500,000 ad campaign hit the airwaves in Ohio, Wisconsin, and West Virginia, key swing states. It was a modest buy. But Fox News gave the ad the oxygen it needed to explode. Throughout the week, hosts and pundits hotly debated the charges from all sides. On August 5, Brit Hume’s newscast ran two segments about the ad. That night, Bill O’Reilly, burnishing his no-spin bona fides, castigated Kerry’s accusers. “I think this is awful,” he complained to Dick Morris.
“I not only think it’s awful, I think it’s stupid and dangerous,” Morris replied.
Pro or con, it did not matter. Just talking about the controversy gave it juice. “Cable news,” Ailes said around this time, was “beginning to change the agenda of what is news.” The Swift Boat controversy, driven by Fox, showed a clear evolution from the Clinton era. The scandal around Clinton and Monica Lewinsky was at its core a real story. But Swift Boat began as a campaign commercial, spurring a cable-ready argument over what the underlying facts might be—the controversy was primary. And for Ailes, it was an apotheosis: take-no-prisoners campaign politics and engrossing television in one indivisible package.
The ad was the capstone of an extensive Fox campaign effort. Since Kerry locked up the nomination, Fox had painted a portrait of him as an out-of-touch Francophone with a superrich, foreign wife. “There were subtle commands from the second floor, like he’s French,” one senior producer recalled. Fox anchors helped transform Kerry into a cartoon. “He may be a Boston aristocrat with an Ivy League education and cousins in France, but that did not make it fair to laugh when John Kerry said last week that he pays close attention to rap music because it says something important,” Brit Hume quipped in one segment in April. It was a message reinforced in John Moody’s newsroom memos. “Kerry, starting to feel the heat for his flip-flop voting record, is in West Virginia,” the news chief wrote in March. The Swift Boat ad offered Fox’s audience a chance to relive the old grudge matches of the Vietnam generation. “Ribbons or medals? Which did John Kerry throw away after he returned from Vietnam?” Moody wrote in April. “This may become an issue for him today. His perceived disrespect for the military could be more damaging to the candidate than questions about his actions in uniform.”
Of all the Fox hosts, Hannity gave the story line momentum. The week after he debuted the ad with Halpin, Hannity aired the first television interview with John O’Neill, the Texas lawyer who founded the Swift Boat group, while he was promoting his anti-Kerry book, Unfit for Command. “I read the book,” Hannity told O’Neill. “It’s frankly devastating to Senator Kerry, what his fellow Vietnam guys are saying, what they experienced with him. They contradict just about every story he has told about his experience here.”
“It’s a pattern of total lying and exaggeration, much of it very demeaning to the other people that served with him,” O’Neill replied.
Unfit for Command hit the top of the Times bestseller list, and CNN and MSNBC were compelled to cover the story, too. “Heck, I know our group did in the range of a thousand different television and radio interviews. They were on virtually every network,” O’Neill later said. Looking back, he was thrilled with the results. “Giving the kidney to my wife was the best thing I ever did. The Swift Boat [ads] was the second best.”
Many Democrats saw the controversy as so obviously contrived as to pose no danger to their candidate. But Kerry’s supporters didn’t understand the new dynamics of cable television. They ignored the warnings of liberals close to Ailes who knew his playbook. It proved a grave miscalculation.
Fox News contributor Susan Estrich was one. When she watched the Swift Boat story snowball, she recalled her experience running Dukakis’s 1988 campaign. All the dynamics were repeating themselves. In ’88, the Willie Horton ad was produced by an outside group with shadowy connections to the George H. W. Bush campaign. The Swift Boat attack was also funded by powerful Republicans with financial and personal ties to the George W. Bush campaign. In 2004, however, the authors of Kerry’s demise had one crucial advantage: Fox News. The group behind the Willie Horton spot had to buy airtime and hope the broadcast media and newspapers would pick it up. With Fox News, conservatives had a twenty-four-hour network that allowed them to inject attack lines directly into the political bloodstream. The interplay between political advertising and journalism was an old campaign gambit. When he was a political consultant in the 1980s, Ailes said networks only cared about pictures, conflict, and mistakes. If an ad generated conflict, reporters were bound to cover it as “news.” Fox News was a perpetual conflict machine.
It had already happened once during the 2004 campaign. In May, Estrich received a call from a Hannity producer who wanted to book her for a segment about an Internet ad produced by the Republican National Committee. The spot mockingly compared Kerry to a cicada, who was trying to shed his liberal shell in time for the general election. “We want you to respond to the merits of the ad,” the producer told her. Estrich lit into him. “How many times has it been shown on television?” The producer stammered. Before hanging up, Estrich warned him she was calling Ailes to complain. When she reached Ailes that afternoon, he “burst out laughing,” she recalled. “He said, ‘I like to think I pioneered that technique.’ ”
Estrich was in a position to try to defend Kerry on Fox. As it happened, she was booked to fill in for Colmes on August 5, the night after Halpin. Hannity would be interviewing Van O’Dell, a Swift Boat veteran appearing in the ad. When Estrich called the Kerry-Edwards campaign headquarters to get talking points to use on camera, her concerns were confirmed: the campaign did not have any. Instead of cultivating Estrich and capitalizing on her ties to Fox News, Democrats shunned her—it was punishment for collaborating with Ailes. At the Democratic National Convention in Boston, she was ostracized. “Wherever I went, I was subjected to criticism,” she said. She was even left off the guest list for a party hosted by Dukakis. “Even if it was a clerical error, that was very hurtful,” she recalled.
Greta Van Susteren’s husband, the lawyer John Coale, was another Democrat with ties to Ailes who wanted to stave off disaster for Kerry. A few days before Hannity hyped O’Neill’s book on the air, Coale received a frantic phone call from his friend Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University historian, who had recently authored the lionizing Kerry biography Tour of Duty. Brinkley told Coale he had gotten his hands on O’Neill’s book and was aghast at the distortions and falsehoods. “Shit, you gotta call Kerry,” Brinkley told him. Coale quickly arranged a meeting with Kerry and implored him to sue O’Neill and the Swift Boat group for defamation. “He was all hopped up to do it,” Coale remembered. But like Estrich, Coale was ignored by Kerry’s advisers. Kerry’s campaign manager, Bob Shrum, and others warned the candidate that launching a counterattack would only dignify the allegations and give the scandal legs. Kerry did not personally respond to the Swift Boat vets for nearly three weeks.