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Kerry: No comment
During September, one such person -- the "Red Queen of Peace" -- was roaming the U.N. corridors as she has done for the past 36 years. It was Mrs. Cora Weiss, daughter of the late Faberge Fragrances millionaire and friend to the Soviets, Samuel Rubin. Paraphrasing Shakespeare, age has not withered her, nor custom soured her variety. She presents a facade untouched by serious thought, hence her support for John Forbes Kerry.
The Weiss wealth is fortunate for her friends as she has helped many of them (and Kerry's friends) fund projects by way of the Samuel Rubin Foundation, of which she is president. There is Washington's Institute for Policy Studies (IPS), the Geneva-based International Peace Bureau, the Peace Action Network and its related Student Peace Action Network, and the New York-based Hague Appeal for Peace (HAP). Cora Weiss has been director of disarmament programs of Riverside Church and is the founder of Women Strike for Peace, a group that never questioned its Soviet masters.
Not content with merely funding such groups, she is the Marxist hatchet-lady who combines membership in the influential Council on Foreign Relations with being boss-woman of the Peace Action Bureau and the Hague Appeal.
Often seen with Cora at the U.N. is her husband, Peter, a former chairman of IPS, a board member of HAP and a stalwart of the National Lawyers Guild.
Her ties with John Kerry date to 1970, when Mrs. Weiss was co-chair of the notorious Committee of Liaison with Families of Servicemen Detained in North Vietnam. Her reward for wartime travel to Hanoi and for exploiting the miseries of these GIs and their families was to be nominated chairwoman of the committee celebrating Vietnam's admission to the United Nations.
Weiss was a visitor to Hanoi during hostilities and, like John Kerry, had contact with the highest levels of the North Vietnamese. Sometimes it was by way of Swedish Prime Minister Olaf Palme, a visitor to her home in the Bronx. Information brought back to Washington by Weiss, and passed to President Richard Nixon, resulted in the abortive Son Tay prison raid. Kerry's contribution to treachery was his development -- after meeting with the Viet Cong in Paris -- into a leading anti-war activist.
On May 23, 1970, John Kerry married the beautiful and wealthy Julia Stimson Thorne in New York. Their honeymoon was spent in Paris, with the future presidential hopeful meeting with Madam Nguyen Thi Binh (otherwise known as "the Dragon Lady") and the foreign minister of the Provisional Revolutionary Government of Vietnam, the political wing of the Viet Cong, and her cadres.
In June, one honeymoon over, Kerry began another by joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), part of a coalition that included the Communist Party. During the next few weeks, Kerry, with the active help of communists embedded in the organization, bypassed the normal election process and was appointed to VVAW's executive committee.
While his initial meetings with the V.C. in Paris were fresh in his memory, Kerry helped a small group of activists -- Jeremy Rifkin, Tod Ensign, Jane Fonda, Attorney Mark Lane and others -- set up "Winter Soldier" hearings in Detroit. By way of closed-circuit television via Windsor, Canada, these hearings featuring VVAW members told of the atrocities they had committed on their Vietnamese victims and spoke of their horror, shock and pain at what they had done while wearing Uncle Sam's uniform.
John Kerry told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee all about the atrocities and his shame in being an American on April 22, 1971. The next day, Sen. George McGovern gave the principal speakers -- those with the worst horror stories of murder, rape and mutilation -- the opportunity to tell them to the world by way of a spurious Senate hearing.
Within a few months, its purpose served, John Kerry, the pretty young hero turned anti-American activist, lost interest in VVAW and, using Julia Thorne's money, made an attempt to win a congressional election. He failed and his marriage began to founder, culminating in an unpleasant divorce in 1988.
For his second marriage, to Teresa Heinz, Kerry sought an annulment from the Catholic Church for his marriage to Julia, which she bitterly fought -- as under Catholic rules it would affect the legitimacy of their two daughters.
Kerry refuses any and all comments about his activities, including an alleged spanking of Julia Thorne, with Teddy Kennedy as a witness. He should learn from Cora Weiss that a thorough tongue-thrashing is the way to go.
Do we really want a president who doesn't get it right the first time -- ever?
Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.
