National Review has helpfully posted the transcript of John Kerry’s April 1971 testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. It’s an occasionally interesting exercise in brown-nosing and carefully scripted compliments and insults (the former between committee members and Kerry, the latter mostly tossed at Nixon and his administration).

As other people have pointed out, it’s also a shameless of example of a young man not just willing, but eager to malign and destroy the lives and honor of his fellow soldiers, in order to feed his very personal appetite for power and attention.

But I found it a curious spectacle to read John Kerry, circa 1971, complaining of media blackout.

See if any of this sounds familiar. After pointing out the difficulty of competing with “vested power” and “those bodies which have the funds and the ability to lobby” (citing as specific examples the AMA and the American Legion), Kerry said:

There is one other body that has tremendous power in this country, which is a favorite topic of Vice President Agnew and I would take some agreement with him. That would be the fourth estate. The press. I think the very reason that we veterans are here today is the result partially of our inability to get our story out through the legitimate channels.

That is to say, for instance, I held a press conference here in Washington, D.C., some weeks ago with General Shoup, with General Hester, with the mother of a prisoner of war, the wife of a man who was killed, the mother of a soldier who was killed, and with a bilateral amputee, all representing the so-called silence majority, the silent so-called majority which the President used to perpetuate the war, and because it was a press conference and an antiwar conference and people simply exposing ideas we had no electronic media there.

I called the media afterward and asked them why and the answer was, from one of the networks, it doesn’t have to be identified, “because, is, new business is really partly entertainment business visually, you see, and a press conference like that is not visual.”

Of course, we don’t have the position of power to get our ideas out. I said, “If I take some crippled veterans down to the White House and we chain ourselves to the gates, will we get coverage?” “Oh, yes, we will cover that.”

So you are reduced to a position where the only way you can get your ideas out is to stage events, because had we not staged the events, with all due respect, Senator, and I really appreciate the fact that I am here obviously, and I know you are committed to this, but with all due respect I probably wouldn’t be sitting at this table. You see this is the problem.

Indeed, Mr. Kerry. Indeed it is. And so it remains, or tries to. The difference is that today, *you’re* the Senator trying to hide, trying to drown out the raggedy “little people” making a fuss outside the gates, and the Internet, the independent press, the independent media (talk
radio, Fox News, the WSJ, and our beloved bloggers) are circumventing the same wall of silence that you decried back then. But now that you’re part of that establishment, now that you married into some “funds and power to lobby,” your response is to try to shut them up in any way
you can.

But as Dean Esmay memorably said, “The Internet has detected the mainstream media as a form of censorship and simply routed around them” (updating the inimitable Barlow).