Modern political campaigns are often remembered by the odd names of advertisements. The Johnson-Goldwater campaign of 1964 calls to mind the "daisy spot," a TV commercial that showed the petals being pulled off a flower counting down to an atomic explosion. The Bush-Dukakis campaign of 1988 calls to mind the Willie Horton commercial, about a murderer allowed weekend parole. Now it seems the 2004 presidential campaign will be identified with the Swift boat spot.
Though this column strives mightily to preserve its nonpartisan approach, it cannot flinch from etymological controversy. In 1959, the Field & Stream columnist Ed Zern tongue-in-cheekily reviewed D.H. Lawrence's classically racy and much-banned novel, Lady Chatterley's Lover, mentioning its anti-poaching, pheasant-raising and gamekeeping references and sternly concluding, "This book cannot take the place of J.R. Miller's Practical Gamekeeping."
In that tradition of mock-seriousness, we will now deal with the escalating dispute over the origin of the term "Swift boat." This is the 50-foot aluminum-hulled boat -- officially designated "patrol craft, fast," with the initials PCF -- that Lieutenant John Kerry commanded in Vietnam's coastal waters in late 1968 and early 1969.
Douglas Brinkley asserts unequivocally in his campaign-related biography, Tour of Duty, that the origin of the name is acronymic: "a Swift boat, the acronym for the even clumsier Pentagon moniker, `Shallow Water Inshore Fast Tactical Craft."' He informs my researcher that his source is Thomas Cutler's 1988 Brown Water, Black Berets, but Cutler says it isn't so.
"That isn't true," says Rear Admiral Roy Hoffmann, retired, chairman of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, the organization challenging much of the account of Kerry's service. "I had command of all the Swift boats and Coast Guard cutters in Vietnam. Sewart Seacraft named their different boats after seabirds, in this case, a swift. They had this name before the navy ever purchased them. They were called `Swift boats' from the time the navy put them into service." Another of Kerry's veteran challengers, John O'Neill, agrees: "It was actually a name selected by the guy that sold them to the navy. The people on them we called swifties."
Larry Wasikowski, of Omaha, Nebraska, who styles himself "the unofficial historian of the Swift Boat Sailors Association," recalls, "We believe it came from Sewart Seacraft, the manufacturer," but he claims no certainty about the origin. Another association member, Jim Schneider, of Rapid City, South Dakota, says that the owner of Sewart Seacraft, F.W. Sewart, who died in 1995, told him that an admiral watching a demonstration of the boats in Louisiana called them "swift," and that the adjective just stuck as the name. (The unidentified admiral couldn't call it a "speedboat," coined in 1905 about a small racing craft; he could have called it a fastboat, but that might be confused with Shakespeare's "vasty deep."
F.W. Sewart's son, who was in charge of production when that company, no longer in business, was turning out Swift boats, is F. Wayne Sewart of Morgan City, Louisiana. He informs me: "I can't remember any boats we gave a brand name to. People would come to us and say, `I want a 50-footer, an 85-footer, whatever.' We called them PCFs or `those navy boats,'" Blind alley there; no "seabird" connection, and besides, the swift is closer to a hummingbird.
The earliest usage in a newspaper that I can find is from a Feb. 16, 1966, Wall Street Journal: "At sea, a 50-foot US Navy patrol vessel, known as a SWIFT boat, was destroyed by an underwater mine in the Gulf of Siam." The use of capital letters suggests an acronym, supporting Brinkley's report.
However, the New York Times correspondent Neil Sheehan wrote in July of that year about the attempts by "54 high-speed motor launches called Swifts" to prevent the infiltration of communist arms and troops into South Vietnam. The name was not in all capitals and so did not suggest an acronym.
We may never know, as they say about memories of 35 years ago. Fog of war and all that -- "origin obscure," as the lexies say -- unless some reader comes up with the definitive answer. Until then, let us hearken to Agamemnon's words in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida "Go we to council. Let Achilles sleep: Light boats sail swift, though greater hulks draw deep."
W stands for wrong
Kerry entered the homestretch of the 2004 campaign with a Labor Day speech calling the conflict in Iraq "the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time." It was his rhetorical riposte to Senator Zell Miller's GOP convention praise of US President George W. Bush as "the right man in the right place at the right time."
But that stirring counterpoint used by Kerry rang a bell with me. In 1951, General Douglas MacArthur wanted to strike back at the 200,000 Chinese forces that had swarmed across the Yalu river to retake North Korea. President Harry Truman decided against widening the Korean conflict, which ultimately led to MacArthur's dismissal. General Omar Bradley, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported Truman's position in testimony to Congress on May 15, 1951, calling the MacArthur strategy "the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."
Kerry dropped the final "wrong" in his uncredited citation of Bradley's turn of phrase, saving the fourth use of the word in a play on the middle initial of the president's name: "The W stands for `wrong.'"
That rang a slight clank. In print, "The W stands for wrong" looks fine, but when spoken, the W in "wrong" is silent, wrapped into the sound of the R. It took a little edge off the denunciation, but maybe I'm in error. (Mistaken is weak; wrong, with its connotation of moral condemnation, is oratorically strong.)
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