When George W. Bush's handlers had him dress up as the 1986 Tom Cruise of "Top Gun" to dance a victory jig on an aircraft carrier, they didn't stop to think that he might soon face an opponent who could be type-cast more persuasively in his own Tom Cruise role. John F. Kerry was in real life a comrade of Ron Kovic, whom Mr. Cruise played to great acclaim in the 1989 "Born on the Fourth of July." Mr. Kerry, like the movie's hero, was a decorated Vietnam soldier who became a star activist for Vietnam Veterans Against the War upon returning home.
In a pivotal scene in the film, delegates at the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach eject Kovic and his fellow protesting vets from the hall, call him a traitor and spit on him. If that incident has a certain angry passion, it may be because the director was Oliver Stone. Like both Mr. Bush and Mr. Kerry, Mr. Stone was a son of privilege who attended Yale in the mid-1960's. Like Mr. Kerry but unlike Mr. Bush, he went on to combat in Vietnam, won a bronze star and then turned against America's most disastrous foreign war.
But just where was Mr. Bush during that convention fracas dramatized in "Born on the Fourth of July"? We still don't know. The summer of '72 is midway through the missing months in the president's résumé — a time when, in the still undocumented White House account, the young Mr. Bush was supposedly completing his National Guard service while campaigning for a senatorial hopeful in Alabama. Whatever the future president was up to, it is not inconceivable that he accompanied his candidate to Miami Beach, where he watched from afar as Mr. Kovic and his fellow veterans were dispersed in a paroxysm of tear gas and rage.
(snip)
Mr. Kerry and his fellow members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War are now being attacked by Republicans as vociferously as Mr. Kovic's band of brothers were at the party's '72 convention. The head of a group called Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry, which helped disseminate the Fonda picture, portrays him as a radical, a traitor and, worst of all, "hippielike." The Weekly Standard characterizes the antiwar Vietnam veterans of that time as "hairy men, many with `Easy Rider' mustaches."
There's a method to this archaic culture-war language. It's meant to complement the ubiquitous Vietnam-era photo of a decidedly clean-shaven, unhippielike Mr. Bush at the moment he is joining the Texas Air National Guard. The tableau shows Mr. Bush's beaming father, then a congressman, as he prepares to pin second lieutenant's bars to his son's uniform. But there's something wrong with this picture. It all too potently raises the unanswered question of just how the young Mr. Bush got into the guard, in those days a safe haven from combat duty, ahead of 100,000 others then on the national waiting list. At the time, 250 Americans a week were dying in Vietnam.
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http://nytimes.com/2004/02/22/arts/22RICH.html
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