Rick Reed, G.O.P. Adman of ‘Swift Boat’ Campaign, Dies at 69

In Mr. Reed’s telling, his work with the Swift Boat group was a matter of serendipity. It began with a May 2004 email from an uncle, Adrian Lonsdale, a retired Coast Guard captain who had been one of Mr. Kerry’s commanders in Vietnam and was on his way to Washington for a news conference.

“I said, ‘What’s this about?’” Mr. Reed recalled last year in an interview with the podcast “First Right.”

Captain Lonsdale, Mr. Reed said, replied that he and “a bunch officers from Vietnam who served together” were coming to “talk about” Mr. Kerry, who had effectively locked up the Democratic nomination to challenge Mr. Bush in that year’s race.

Mr. Reed went to the news conference, where Captain Lonsdale and others denounced Mr. Kerry, primarily because of an issue that had been simmering since the 1970s: his antiwar activism upon returning home after a tour of duty commanding Swift boats — 50-foot aluminum Navy vessels used to patrol Vietnam’s waterways — in the Mekong Delta.

The news conference was lightly attended and generated modest coverage. But Mr. Reed, a longtime partner at the political advertising firm Stevens Reed Curcio Potholm, was struck by the veterans’ arguments against Mr. Kerry, which also included challenging his honesty about how he had earned some of his medals.

“I said, ‘Boy, this story has to get out,’” he recalled in the “First Right” interview.

Get out it did.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/28/us/politics/rick-reed-dead.html