THE VETS ATTACK

But Kerry's old ambivalence and caution were surfacing once again. At home he had always been reticent about telling his daughters about the war. They were intensely curious, and they knew their father had suffered. But he would not tell them exactly how. They never knew he had killed someone until they read about it in the newspapers. Alex had become a professional filmmaker. Her first short film was the "fictional" tale of a daughter struggling to connect with her father, a shellshocked veteran of a war reminiscent of Vietnam.

Vanessa assumed that her father was not hitting back because he did not like the dirty side of politics. The Kerry girls saw their father as a pillar of New England rectitude. He had never punished them for being late or for petty rule breaking, only for failing to tell the truth. He would invoke their Brahmin ancestors, looking at them sternly and intoning, "Vanessa Bradford Kerry," "Alexandra Forbes Kerry."

The girls were frustrated. At campaign events, voters would come up to Vanessa and say, "Did your dad really deserve his medals?" Why couldn't her father set them straight? He wouldn't be lying; he'd be telling the truth.

Kerry wanted the truth to come out, but he wanted to get it out in his own careful, deliberate way. The former prosecutor wanted to marshal the evidence, to build a case that would hold up. But that took time, and in the world of bloggers and 24/7 talking heads on cable, every day spent fact checking was a day lost. One quick pre-emptive strike might have been to reassemble Kerry's old Swift Boat crew, his band of brothers, and send them out on the talk-show circuit. But it was August; they were mostly a bunch of grandfathers, scattered on family vacations. Kerry remembered that one of the Swift Boat commanders, Donald Droz, killed in Vietnam, had regularly written his wife. Maybe one of those letters detailed the battle in which Kerry had won a Bronze Star and his last Purple Heart (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were claiming that no shots had been fired). The campaign scrambled to find the wife, but she explained that she had no letters about the incident; she had seen her husband in Hawaii soon after on R&R, so there had been no need for letters. Kerry couldn't believe it. "Let me call her," he said. The whole process took four or five days, and the letters never turned up.

The Kerry campaign did work closely with the major dailies, feeding documents to The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe to debunk the Swift Boat vets. The articles were mostly (though not entirely) supportive of Kerry, but it was too late. The old media may have been more responsible than the new media, but they were also largely irrelevant.

In early August, when the Swift Boat story started to pick up steam on the talk shows, Susan Estrich, a California law professor, well-known liberal talking head and onetime campaign manager for Michael Dukakis, had called the Kerry campaign for marching orders. She had been booked on Fox's "Hannity & Colmes" to talk about the Swift Boat ads. What are the talking points? Estrich asked the Kerry campaign. There are none, she was told. Estrich was startled. She had seen this bad movie before. In August 1988, Dukakis had blown a 17-point lead over Vice President George H.W. Bush by failing to hit back against a series of seemingly petty or low-blow attacks (including allegations of mental instability). Sitting in a bar at New York's Essex House hotel, in town as a liberal TV commentator at the Republican convention, Estrich gloomily replayed the tape in her head. "Dukakis is not crazy; details at 11," she bitterly mimicked a TV announcer caught up in the swirl of the Bush I smear campaign of '88. Kerry's August was just like Dukakis's August, she despaired. Even some of the people were the same, on both sides. Estrich e-mailed her friend Marylouise Oates, better known as Oatsie. Married to Bob Shrum, Oatsie was on Nantucket at the time with Kerry and the inner circle. "Do something," pleaded Estrich. She wouldn't reveal what Oatsie e-mailed back, but she said, "They know. They're shellshocked."