Ben Ginsberg was the chief lawyer for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign. But he handled other clients as well, and in July he was approached by a group of Vietnam veterans who wanted some legal advice. They were angry, they said, about historian Douglas Brinkley's Vietnam War biography of Kerry, "Tour of Duty." They said they had served in Swift Boats with Kerry, and that he had exaggerated or even lied about his exploits, while denigrating his old buddies as war criminals. Because of his three Purple Hearts (one undeserved, according to the Swifties), Kerry had been allowed to go home to preen for the cameras, while the rest of them were stuck in the Mekong Delta. Still nursing the resentments of more than three decades, the Swift Boat vets were raising money to run an ad exposing Kerry. They needed a lawyer to help them navigate the campaign-finance laws.
Ginsberg liked the vets. He had been feeling guilty about his generation's sneering contempt for the military as a Vietnam-era college student. He wanted to help out. He did not worry—at the time—that it would be somehow improper for the Bush-Cheney campaign lawyer to be advising a 527 group. He wasn't doing anything that the other side wasn't already doing, he figured. He knew that the lawyers in the Kerry campaign and at the DNC were giving legal counsel to 527s, and nobody seemed to object. Besides, the Swift Boat vets didn't think they'd cause much of a stir. At a picnic on a muggy night in July, they told Ginsberg that they were pretty sure the establishment press would just blow them off.
Later, after the swift boat ads became a sensation that threatened to sink the Kerry campaign, not a few pundits and politicos speculated that Karl Rove had been behind the whole thing. After all, Rove was reputed to be a great lover of political dirty tricks, an expert at running smear campaigns through go-betweens or, in spy jargon, "cutouts." Rove was an old friend of a wealthy Texan named Bob Perry, who had given the Swift Boat vets $200,000 to buy some ads. Rove insisted that he had not spoken to Perry in more than a year and that he had played no role in setting up the Swift Boat vets, but political insiders all winked knowingly at each other.
Rove is a likely and even plausible target for conspiracy theories. But if he was running a covert operation to attack Kerry through the Swift Boat vets, it was a pretty sloppy one. How could he have allowed BC04's own lawyer to represent the vets if he wanted to conceal the hand of the Bush campaign? Ginsberg maintains that he never told Rove he had taken on the Swifties as clients; even so, if Rove had been worried about disguising any link between the Bush campaign and the Swift Boat vets, he would presumably have taken more pains to warn top BC04 staffers to keep their hands off.
Ginsberg realized soon enough that he had an image problem working for the Swift Boat vets at the same time that he was representing BC04. A few days before the Republican convention, he was called by Jim Rutenberg of The New York Times. Rutenberg had been tipped off to Ginsberg's role, presumably by the Democrats. At first Ginsberg tried to argue with the Times reporter that there was nothing improper, no story here, but he had a sinking feeling that he would soon be reading about himself in the papers. He called Rove and the other top BC04 officials and offered to resign from the campaign. They told him to hold off until they saw Rutenberg's article in print.
At about 11 p.m., a very agitated Ginsberg was waiting to read the early online version of the next day's New York Times when Rutenberg called. "God, we just thought of something," said Rutenberg (as Ginsberg recalled the conversation). "This isn't going to have any impact on your role in the campaign, is it? We haven't, like, screwed you over?" Ginsberg responded, "You've got to be kidding me. How f---ing out to lunch are you!" (Rutenberg agreed his conversations with Ginsberg were heated, but insisted to NEWSWEEK that the Times was fair in its reporting on both Republican and Democratic 527s.) Before Ginsberg could hurl the phone against the wall, he hung up. He wrote his letter of resignation at 4 a.m. As he watched the story of his demise that morning on CNN, he noticed old photos of him from the 2000 campaign. He was taken aback at how much grayer his hair had become.