Newsweek Spiked the Kerrey Atrocity Story Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit source - www.washingtonpost.com Newsweek Declined to Publish Kerrey Story By Howard Kurtz Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, April 26, 2001; 10:00 AM The political stunner -- nothing short of breathtaking -- is Bob Kerrey acknowledging that his Navy unit killed innocent women and children in Vietnam 32 years ago. The media stunner, revealed today, is that Newsweek declined to publish the story. The magazine made the decision after Kerrey decided against running for president in 2000. Newsweek, you may recall, held off on publishing the Monica Lewinsky story three years ago, thus allowing Mike Isikoff to be scooped on the tawdry tale that led to Bill Clinton's impeachment. This could turn out to be a misjudgment on almost as grand a scale. (Newsweek is owned by The Washington Post Co. which also owns The Washington Post, washingtonpost.com and other media businesses.) The Newsweek scribe this time was Gregory Vistica, a well-regarded defense correspondent. The New York Times reports this morning that Vistica brought the story to the Times Magazine and did another year of reporting before writing the story to be published Sunday. To read our account of the former Nebraska senator's efforts to preempt the Vistica story, and the conflicting accounts of the 1969 tragedy involving Kerrey's Navy SEAL unit, click here. Newsweek's decision almost seems to suggest that being involved in the wartime killing of civilians -- Kerrey says it was inadvertent and that he's been "haunted" by the episode for more than three decades -- is newsworthy if a man is running for president but not if he's a United States senator. Newsweek Editor Mark Whitaker said this morning that he decided not to run the story in 1999 because Kerrey would not cooperate -- but that Kerrey's decision not to seek the presidency was a major factor in holding off. "At that point, in my mind, the relevance of this story changed a little bit," Whitaker said. "We all agree there's a higher level of scrutiny that goes on for presidential candidates." It's hard to overstate the potential impact on Kerrey, now president of New York's New School University, who has been weighing a 2004 presidential bid. His image has always been that of a genuine war hero, a man who lost part of a leg to a Vietnam grenade, a Medal of Honor winner, not to mention a high-minded politician with a strong moralistic streak. Now Kerrey himself says he may not be a hero at all. And a former commando in his unit says the unarmed civilians were rounded up and shot at point-blank range, which Kerrey strongly denies. In a classic effort at damage control, Kerrey initiated interviews Tuesday with the Wall Street Journal and his home-state paper, the Omaha World-Herald . The preemptive strike continued yesterday as he gave his version to NBC's Tom Brokaw and CNN's Wolf Blitzer. CBS already had him on tape for a "60 Minutes II" piece to air next Tuesday. The Times, watching its scoop evaporate, took the unusual step of posting Vistica's piece from this Sunday's magazine online. In today's print edition, the Times says: "Bob Kerrey, a former United States senator who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his military service in Vietnam, has acknowledged that a combat mission he led there three decades ago caused the deaths of 13 to 20 unarmed civilians, most of them women and children. "Days before an investigation of his role in the incident was to be published in The New York Times Magazine, Mr. Kerrey began describing his version of the events in interviews with other newspapers and television networks today." USA Today : "Former senator Bob Kerrey says he is haunted by a raid he led into enemy territory in Vietnam 32 years ago, in which only civilians - women, children and older men -- were killed. Kerrey, who has not ruled out a run for president in 2004, received a Bronze Star for the raid on Feb. 25, 1969, in the Mekong Delta. The award citation says 21 Viet Cong were killed and enemy weapons were captured or destroyed." The New York Post : "Medal of Honor hero Bob Kerrey admitted yesterday he led a raid in Vietnam that killed unarmed women and children, but insisted it was a 'tragic mistake,' and 'it's not My Lai, for God's sake.'" The Los Angeles Times : "Kerrey's account, however, has been dramatically contradicted by a member of the SEAL squad he headed and by a Vietnamese woman who claimed to be a survivor of the raid and who alleged the villagers were brought together and massacred." ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytas-05.01.01-00:56:02-5603