Thursday, August 19, 2004

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, organized last March as a so-called "527" group, officially nonpartisan under the Internal Revenue Service code that govern such organizations.

Swift Boat Veterans for Truth has ties to the Republican Party and President George W. Bush, however.

The group is headed by Houston lawyer John O'Neill, whose criticism of John Kerry began in 1971 at the behest of the Nixon administration. He is the author of an upcoming book published by conservative publisher Regnery Publishing Inc. entitled "Unfit For Command," which elaborates on many of the claims in the "Any Questions?" ad, including allegations that none of Kerry's wounds in Vietnam were serious and two were self-inflicted.

O'Neill is a partner in the Houston law firm of Clements, O'Neill, Pierce, Wilson & Fulkerson, whose clients include a number of oil and energy corporations, including Exxon, Duke Energy, General Electric and Transcontinental Gas Pipeline Company.

One of O'Neill's law partners, Margaret A. Wilson, was general counsel to Bush from 1998 to 2000, his last two years as governor of Texas, during which he ran for president.

The chief financier of Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is Houston home builder Bob R. Perry, who has donated more than $5 million to Republican candidates and causes during the past five years, mostly in Texas, including Bush and Republican Majority Leader Tom Delay, whose congressional district is near Houston.

The group also received funding from the Crow family, a prominent family of Texas developers that includes Harlan Crow, who manages Crow Holdings, a Dallas-based international investment company. Harlan Crow is also a trustee of the George H.W. Bush Presidential Library Foundation.

The group was organized last spring with the assistance of Merrie Spaeth, a Republican public relations executive from Houston, who also was a public relations consultant to independent counsel Kenneth Starr during his investigation of former Democratic President Bill Clinton. Her late husband, Tex Lezar, ran for lieutenant governor of Texas on George W. Bush's GOP ticket in 1994.

Until his death this year, Lezar was a partner in O'Neill's law firm. Lezar was one of the speech writers in the Nixon White House in 1971, a special counsel in the Justice Department during Republican Ronald Reagan's first administration and vice chairman of Attorney General Ed Meese's anti-pornography commission during Reagan's second term in office.

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