Gregory Vistica examines ‘the corrosive power of secrets’ in his expanded look at Bob Kerrey’s Vietnam experience.

Nearly two years ago, Greg Vistica broke the story about a massacre of some 20 women and children by a Navy SEAL team commanded by former senator Bob Kerrey that took place over 30 years ago in Vietnam. At the urging of his agent, Vistica has turned the article, which ran originally in The New York Times Magazine (April 29, 2001), into a book, “The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey.” Vistica's deeper professional motive for keeping Kerrey in his cross hairs was his desire “to get as close to the truth as possible,” closer presumably than in the initial expose.

In the magazine version, Vistica pits one eyewitness recollection of what took place in the hamlet of Thanh Phong on Feb.25, 1969, against another: Kerrey alleges that the unarmed civilians were killed from a distance of a hundred yards in the confusion of a firefight, while a fellow SEAL, Gerhard Klann, is adamant that the victims were rounded up and shot point-blank. In his book, Vistica concludes without ambiguity that “Klann's is the most accurate version,” and that “Kerrey is not a truth teller.”

In marshaling his prose over the same impressive range of sources that informed his article — not least the many interviews conducted face to face with his subject — Vistica makes clear that his revised judgment rests, not on newly minted research, but on the facts already at hand. When he first reported the massacre, Vistica was hardly alone among the media voices who chose to tread lightly in dealing with Kerrey, even after Kerrey used surplus campaign funds to hire a fast-track public relations firm to trash Klann, the man reported to have saved Kerrey's life in Vietnam, and to spin the news toward Kerrey's version of what took place at Thanh Phong.

Kerrey was, after all, a war amputee and Congressional Medal of Honor recipient, and despite having giving up his safe seat in the US Senate to serve as president of the New School University, he remained a viable candidate for national political office. So, what made Vistica vary his tune?

Vistica concedes that he was not as objective at first as he should have been. Overawed by Kerrey's “bright and charming” personality, and his expressions of apparent remorse, Vistica initially undervalued the testimony from survivors of Thanh Phong — dismissed by Kerrey as “dupes of the Communist government” — whose unrehearsed accounts of the massacre so closely parallel Klann’s.

In 1970, Richard Nixon, in one of many desperate acts to stem domestic opposition to the war, manufactured a hero; and so Kerrey accepted the nation’s highest award for valor, though he believed it undeserved. Ever since, Kerrey's life has followed a fabled trajectory. The angry antiwar vet is suddenly a local war hero who makes a killing as a health club operator. Then he enters politics and defeats a secure incumbent for the governorship of Nebraska. The fairy-tale cycle continues as Kerrey conducts a highly public romance with Hollywood actress Debra Winger, is elected to the Senate, then runs credibly as a candidate in the presidential primaries.

In the meantime, Klann has been living a nightmare. And, unfortunately for Kerrey, Klann relieved his heavy conscience about Thanh Phong by confessing to a naval officer who, only years later, told the story to Vistica, who has discovered since his original article that in the early 1970s many veterans testified publicly throughout the United States about atrocities they and their units committed as standard practice throughout Vietnam. Vistica ultimately shies from making any judgment about the wider conflict, where he now suspects such dark incidents were not uncommon.

What remains the central issue for Vistica is not Thanh Phong, but the fact that Kerrey, whose memory may indeed have failed him, has misplaced the truth. Vistica sees Kerrey's dissembling around Thanh Phong primarily as the character flaw of a particularly slippery politician, even as he dutifully reports the erratic behavior of a man clearly traumatized by war.

And for Kerrey, who has frequently deflected criticism since Vistica's original revelation by claiming, “I'm no hero,” add the pressure of having pretended to be one for the past three decades. If you strip away Kerrey's postwar life of stoned overachievement, you see a man who all but fits the classic stereotype of the disturbed Vietnam veteran. Documented throughout the Vistica profile are the constant “mood swings,” the sudden, unpredictable bouts of temper, and, in his public life, Kerrey's reputation as a chronically unreliable political ally.

As an investigation of “the corrosive power of secrets” in the life of one public figure, “The Education of Lieutenant Kerrey” is a very good read that might have claimed a longer shelf life had the author taken it a few steps further. In the end, Vistica has not just squandered his chances to explore more systematically what US units did routinely in the atrocity-producing atmosphere of Vietnam combat. He has failed to understand what Vietnam did to Kerrey, not to mention the thousands of other veterans whose troubled readjustment to postwar life was not shielded by the bright, shining lie of a Medal of Honor, which, if such an award can ever be said to be deserved, was apparently given to the wrong man.

Michael Uhl, a writer living in Maine, served with the 11th Infantry Brigade in Vietnam.