A new dirty tricks campaign to embarrass Senator John Kerry backfired ignominiously on Tuesday when it emerged that a widely-circulated photograph of a protest against the Vietnam war was a crude forgery.
The photograph, falsely credited to the Associated Press, combined two separate images to make it appear as if Kerry shared a stage at an anti-war rally in the early 1970s with the actress, Jane Fonda.
Fonda is reviled by many Vietnam vets for her wartime visit to Hanoi, and the image was widely aired over the Internet by a fringe group of Vietnam veterans who have pursued a vendetta against Kerry for years.
In less than a week, the forgery traveled from a message board on a right wing Web site to a Vietnam veterans' mailing list to mainstream organizations. Two British national newspapers -- the Daily Mail and the Mail on Sunday -- used the photograph in editions on Friday last week and at the weekend.
The revelation that the picture was a fake follows the rumor that Kerry had had an affair with a young trainee reporter.
That claim, which started on the right wing Drudge report Web site, was largely ignored by American papers when it first surfaced, but was leapt on by some British newspapers.
On Monday the woman at the center of the furor, Alexandra Polier, issued a statement in which she denied ever having had a relationship with Kerry.
Inside the Kerry campaign, Democratic operatives said yesterday they were certain that the forged photograph would not be the last attempt to try to discredit their candidate's Vietnam war record.
"There are going to be a lot of dirty tricks in the campaign. It's like the story of the intern, which flew high as a kite before being shot down," said John Hurley, Kerry's campaign adviser on veterans' issues.
Although it is possible to trace the Fonda-Kerry forgery through the Internet, it was not clear yesterday who created the forged photograph.
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