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Their best known confrontation was on the Dick Cavett show back in 1971. If you get a chance to see re-runs of that debate, it is well worth watching. At the heart of the issues between the two men were Kerry's widely publicized charges that Americans fighting in Vietnam committed atrocities not only wholesale and on a daily basis, but that those atrocities were both condoned and directed by those at the highest levels of command.

O'Neill repeatedly attempted to get Kerry to cite any evidence for these sweeping and damning charges -- and Kerry repeatedly sidestepped those questions and went off to discuss what he chose to define as the "real" issues. Kerry had that suave, smug, and condescending air that too often passes for intelligence and knowledge.

Much the same air was apparent in Dick Cavett's question to both men as to whether they believed the "cliche" that there would be a "blood bath" if and when the Communists took over in Vietnam. Kerry downplayed that possibility.

However chic it was among the intelligentsia to dismiss the prospect of a Communist bloodbath as a mere "cliche" in 1971, more than a million Vietnamese fled for their lives when the Communists took over. In their desperation, these refugees put themselves and their children on boats that were never meant for the high seas and about one-fourth of them died, either from drowning or from pirates who terrorized, robbed, raped, and slaughtered them.

Meanwhile, back in Vietnam, the Communists created precisely the kind of bloodbath that anyone outside of the intelligentsia could have predicted. In Cambodia, the Communists killed at least one-fifth of the entire population. Against the background of that carnage, the smug condescension of Cavett and Kerry now look obscene.

the relevance to presidential politics of Kerry's passionate 1971 [Senate] performance is, precisely, that he appears to have had good reason to know it was false and slanderous. If that is the case, it was not a demonstration of "forthright fire" and Kerry cannot have had real "beliefs" and "conviction" about it.

Pace [David] Brooks, the testimony then becomes the very antithesis of "authentic," because Kerry was either knowingly lying about American military activity in Southeast Asia or recklessly insouciant about the validity of his breathtaking war-crimes charges. In either event, his passion, having nothing to do with truth, would be explainable only by zealotry in the antiwar cause or by crass self-promotion.