The New York Sun this morning on the work of Mark Sullivan, a former captain in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve, in researching John Kerry’s discharge from military service:
The “honorable discharge” on the Kerry Web site appears to be a Carter administration substitute for an original action expunged from Mr. Kerry’s record, according to Mark Sullivan, who retired as a captain in the Navy’s Judge Advocate General Corps Reserve in 2003 after 33 years of service as a judge advocate. Mr. Sullivan served in the office of the Secretary of the Navy between 1975 and 1977…
With the only discharge document cited by Mr. Kerry issued in 1978, three years after the last date it should have been issued, the absence of a certificate from 1975 leaves only two possibilities. Either Mr. Kerry received an “other than honorable” certificate that has been removed in a review purging it from his records, or even worse, he received no certificate at all. In both cases there would have been a loss of all of Mr. Kerry’s medals and the suspension of all benefits of service.
Certainly something was wrong as early as 1973 when Mr. Kerry was applying to law school.
Mr. Kerry has said, “I applied to Harvard, Boston University, and Boston College. I was extremely late. Only BC would entertain a late application.”
It is hard to see why Mr. Kerry had to file an “extremely late” application since he lost the congressional race in Lowell, Mass., the first week of November 1972 and was basically doing nothing until he entered law school the following September of 1973.A member of the Harvard Law School admissions committee recalled that the real reason Mr. Kerry was not admitted was because the committee was concerned that because Mr. Kerry had received a less than honorable discharge they were not sure he could be admitted to any state bar.
The theory Sullivan presents in this story matches the analysis presented in the piece WorldNetDaily ran on Sunday, which argued that Kerry must have been hiding something based on the odd 1978 date of his honorable discharge.
Why might Kerry have received a less-than-honorable discharge? The most likely reason would be his meetings with representatives of the North Vietnamese government. Earlier this week, WorldNetDaily ran the following story providing documentary evidence showing that the antiwar activities which Kerry took part in were very much in line with the desires of the North Vietnamese:
Jerome Corsi [and co-author of Unfit for Command], a specialist on the Vietnam era, told WND the new discoveries are the “most remarkable documents I’ve seen in the entire history of the antiwar movement.”
“We’re not going to say he’s an agent for Vietnamese communists, but it’s the next thing to it,” he said. “Whether he was consciously carrying out their direction or naively doing what they wanted, it amounted to the same thing