A brief history of swift boating, from John Kerry to Tim Walz

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In questioning Democratic vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s military record, Republicans are dusting off a political playbook they last used successfully exactly 20 years ago.

There’s even a name for it: swift boating.

The term — which has since made its way into dictionaries — refers to an unfair or untrue political attack. It gets its name from a Vietnam War veterans’ group’s smear campaign against John Kerry during his 2004 presidential bid.

Long before Kerry represented Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate, he served as a Naval officer during the Vietnam War. He spent four months of 1969 in Vietnam in charge of a type of patrol craft called a swift boat, leaving with multiple combat medals including three Purple Hearts.

Back home, as the war dragged on, Kerry emerged as a leading anti-war activist. In 1971, as the spokesperson for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, he spoke critically and graphically about the war in now-famous testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

“He was an anti-war activist as well as a veteran, and that combination was a big deal,” says Derek Buckaloo, a professor of American history at Coe College in Iowa who specializes in the Vietnam War and its aftereffects.

Decades later, against the still-fresh backdrop of the Sept. 11 attacks and the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Kerry’s military heroism was a major selling point of his 2004 presidential campaign. Even his nomination acceptance speech began with the line: “I’m John Kerry, and I’m reporting for duty.”

Democrats hoped that Kerry’s status as a decorated veteran might protect him from Republicans’ accusations that the party was soft on defense, as Buckaloo