John Thomas Burch Jr. has been fighting the Vietnam War on many fronts.
An official at the Veterans Affairs Department, he has also overseen a lucrative but little-known veterans fundraising group and served as a Bush campaign surrogate willing to scorch war heroes on veterans issues.
In one notable incident during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina, Burch stood with George W. Bush at his side and accused Sen. John McCain of Arizona of opposing health care for Persian Gulf war veterans and blocking efforts to locate POW-MIAs, saying the former prisoner of war “came home from Vietnam and forgot us.”
That swipe at McCain “had to be one of the more outrageous things in American [political] history,” said former Sen. Max Cleland of Georgia, who supports Democratic presidential contender Sen. John Kerry. Bush embraced Burch at the event but a day later apologized for his surrogate’s caustic words.
Now, as the Bush campaign targets Kerry’s Vietnam-era record, Burch, a Vietnam vet too, appears poised to re-enter the campaign fray.
Last year, he registered the Internet domain names veteransforkerry.org and veteransforkerry.com (the domain names as published have been corrected in this text).
Neither Web site is up and running–it is not clear if Burch registered them to prevent Kerry from having the names or for some other reason. Burch did not respond to requests for comment.
Kerry campaign spokesman David Wade said he assumes this was an attempt to make mischief with the senator’s campaign.
“I suspect they plan to fill cyberspace with all kinds of vicious lies,” Wade said. “The same gang that slandered John McCain is going to try the same, under-the-radar-screen sneak attacks to mislead veterans and distort John Kerry’s record.”
One thing is certain: Burch has been a longtime foe of the Democratic contender.
In November 1992, as the U.S. took its first steps to normalize relations with Vietnam, Burch accused Kerry of coaching witnesses who appeared before his Senate committee on the topic. He said Kerry was trying to discredit those who maintained that Americans were still being held in Laos.
“The Vietnam veterans and family members feel we have been betrayed by Sen. John Kerry,” Burch said at the time.
Two years later, on CNN’s “Larry King Live,” Burch criticized Kerry for his effort to lift the Vietnam trade embargo. Kerry’s action suggested “there’s money involved or somebody’s got something on you,” Burch said.
Burch’s most public face has been as chairman of National Vietnam Veterans Coalition Foundation Inc., a tax-exempt charity designed to raise awareness on veterans issues. The foundation raised $7.7 million from 1999 through 2002, mostly through telephone solicitations, according to its public charity tax filings. But most of that money–$5.8 million–was spent on professional fundraising fees, the filings show.
The foundation has an affiliated lobbying organization called National Vietnam Veterans Coalition Inc.
Veteran Affairs Department spokesman Phil Budahn said he could not determine Friday evening when Burch was given his position in the VA’s Office of General Counsel.
Kerry has already been under attack from an ad hoc group that calls itself Vietnam Veterans Against Kerry, run by Ted Sampley, a longtime conservative activist. A self-styled advocate for Vietnam prisoners of war, Sampley has gone to extraordinary lengths to tar Kerry and McCain, saying they did not do enough to locate POWs in the 1990s. In one early-1990s incident, Sampley published a fake photo of Kerry shooting an American war prisoner in Vietnam with the caption: “Kerry eliminates another MIA from his discrepancy list.”
He alleged that McCain was brainwashed by communists while a prisoner in Hanoi, and told The Boston Globe this month: “We will do what is politically necessary to stop John Kerry and draw attention to the hypocrisy of his campaign.”
