Document Release
Kerry has made his Vietnam journals and diaries available to his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley, but has not made them otherwise publicly available. In declining to make the materials available to the Washington Post in 2004, the Kerry campaign cited an exclusivity agreement with Brinkley. However, Brinkley subsequently told the paper that he interpreted the agreement as requiring only that quotations from the materials cite his book.
During the 2004 campaign, Kerry released hundreds of documents related to his military service, including his reserve and discharge documents.
The conservative organization Judicial Watch filed a request for Kerry's records with the Navy under the Freedom of Information Act. The Navy provided Judicial Watch with many of Kerry's service records, including those concerning the medals he received, while withholding his personnel records that were exempt from disclosure under the law (but noting that Kerry's website included documents subject to the exemption).
Kerry was criticized by SBVT and some media entities for not authorizing independent public access to his privacy protected service records. After the election, on May 20, 2005, he did sign a Standard Form 180 allowing full release of all his military service records, including his reserve and discharge records, as well as his medical records, to the Associated Press, the Boston Globe, and the Los Angeles Times. Kerry refused a request from the New York Sun to permit the Sun's reporters to inspect the records. The Boston Globe reported that the material largely duplicated what Kerry had released during the campaign, and included no "substantive new material".
Asked why he had declined to sign the release earlier, Kerry responded:
| “ | The call for me to sign a 180 form came from the same partisan operatives who were lying about my record on a daily basis on the Web and in the right-wing media. Even though the media was discrediting them, they continued to lie. I felt strongly that we shouldn't kowtow to them and their attempts to drag their lies out. | ” |
Read more about this topic: John Kerry Military Service Controversy
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