Q: You mean the Kerry campaign strategy?

LOCKHART: The Kerry campaign. And I think, two or three weeks. And again, not an unreasonable place to land, in the strategy. I think, in the end, it proved to be flawed, but it’s not like the people who were sitting around the table didn’t know what they were doing. It was a political call, and they made a lot — most of the calls that that group made were right in that campaign, and some of them were wrong, like in any campaign. But I know when I got there, it just felt like, that the gloves had to come off, and Kerry had already paid a big price, and the only way [00:43:00] to mitigate this at this point was to make Bush pay a price too.

And I remember, I hadn’t even joined the campaign yet. And, we were on a call, and they were talking about response, and I — you know, someone said, what are you thinking? I said, this may seem — this just seems self-evident to me, but we’ve got to get aggressive, and we’ve got to just assert that President Bush is behind this, even though we can’t prove it. And we all know that Karl Rove went directly to someone, who went directly to someone. So it wasn’t like an absurd assertion. And I think Max Cleland, Senator Cleland was on the phone, and he was hot and bothered by all this, and I just said — maybe he wasn’t, because I think someone had to go ask him. But I remember he was enthusiastic about the idea. And you know, I said, you ought to just go down to Crawford and knock on the front door, and tell the president, as a wounded war hero, someone who actually knows [00:44:00] what it was like to serve in that war, that you’re personally offended, and he should apologize.

Max was not the problems. I mean, I think there was enough sort of agita in the campaign to, boy, can we do that? But, kind of push through through that. And you know, I don’t think that turned anything, but I think maybe the Bush people were done with this, and you know, the Republicans were not going to push Swift Boats anymore, and the Vietnam record. But they — you know, so it may have just been a timing thing, but the — it did feel like it neutralized a little bit of it, and actually — you know, it’s like — you know, it’s like a street fight, you know. The other guy gets five good shots in, and you’re willing to take a few more shots just to get one in, you know, and to bring either — they pushed him down a notch. We wanted to drag the President down with him, and Senator Cleland was [00:45:00] the right guy to do it, because of who he was, and what he’d been through. And I do think it also had the impact of, a lot of the political press was just reporting this tactically, like it’s this tactic — and you know, Senator Cleland didn’t walk up to the front door; he wheeled himself up to the front door, and I think that had a visceral impact on a lot of the people saying, this is screwed up. This is totally screwed up.

Now, you can argue, and you know, others have argued, I just don’t know, I wasn’t there, that the convention overplayed, you know, sort of set him up —

Q: Set Kerry up, yeah.

LOCKHART: — yeah, set Kerry up as, you know, the Vietnam experience being so prominent, and it set him up. I don’t know, I think they were going to do it anyway, so.

Q: The Bush National Guard story that CBS ran, is this part of the same narrative, in other words —

LOCKHART: In what sense? [00:46:00]

Q: — in other words, is this a story that the Kerry campaign kind of urged CBS to do?

LOCKHART: No.

Q: Or, it just —

LOCKHART: No.

Q: — it just happened?

LOCKHART: I’d say — well, stories in campaigns never just happen. It’s — particularly in the reporting culture now. But I — if that story was true, and that story was on the air, that’s devastating to the person we’re running against, so did we want to see that story on the air? Sure. Did we know whether it was true? No. Did CBS talk to us and anyone else we talked to to try to get information to corroborate it? Sure. But frankly, we didn’t have anything. There’s, you know — there were players that we didn’t know. I mean, we had some sense of who they were. There’s lots of gossip. [00:47:00] There was Ben Barnes who, I think has a role in this as someone who was close to Bush, and a Democrat, and who had certain feelings about this.

Q: Former Lieutenant Governor of Texas.

LOCKHART: Former Lieutenant Governor. But — and I know Ben, but Ben wasn’t in our strategy meetings, so it wasn’t — it wasn’t the strategy of the campaign to get the story, and it wasn’t our story to get out. We had no way of knowing what the facts were; we were not — we didn’t have the ability. You know, we were not the incumbent. We couldn’t go in. The president — Senator Kerry couldn’t order military records to be opened, and you know, wouldn’t have been appropriate if he had been, but many others have done that. Certainly, it was done in the Bush campaign against Clinton, where you know, records were accessed.

But, so we were aware of this. [00:48:00] But we had no ability to fuel it or ascertain its credibility. In that sense, we were viewers. We were certainly ready to comment on it, because if true, it says something about the character of the President, particularly a president whose loyalists have attacked their opponent for his military record, but this was not our story.