KERRY CAMPAIGN Swift boat vet defends Purple Heart assertion

The retired admiral contends he had no reason to hurt Kerry.
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
A retired rear admiral who contends that Sen. John Kerry didn't deserve the first of three Purple Hearts he received in Vietnam defended himself Wednesday from Democratic suggestions that he's motivated by business ties with top Republican leaders.
"They are looking to do anything to smear my name," said Rear Adm. William L. Schachte Jr., of Charleston, S.C., who before he retired in 1993 was acting judge advocate general of the Navy.
A Vietnam veteran, he issued a statement last week saying a December 1968 event in the Mekong Delta in which Kerry was wounded on the arm didn't involve enemy fire and thus didn't warrant a Purple Heart.
He suggested that Kerry had injured himself with fragments from a grenade he'd fired from a boat at what he thought were Viet Cong troops moving on shore at night.
Connection to Republicans
Schachte, now a lawyer in private practice, is associated with the Washington office of Blank Rome LLP, a national law firm based in Philadelphia. David A. Norcross, a firm partner, is chairman of the arrangements committee of the Republican National Convention. David Girard-diCarlo, the firm's chairman, is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign in Pennsylvania.
Though he's counsel to the firm, Schachte said he worked from home and had billed no work for Blank Rome in "a couple of years."
"I've never met or spoken to Mr. Norcross or David Girard-diCarlo," Schachte said in a statement issued by Xenaphon Strategies Inc., a Washington public relations firm.
Neither Norcross nor Girard-diCarlo could be reached for comment.
A report given by the firm to Congress lists Schachte as one of six Blank Rome lawyers who lobby for FastShip Inc., a Philadelphia company that received a $40 million federal grant in February to help finance a shipping terminal for carrying U.S. military equipment across the Atlantic Ocean.
Campain's suggestion
A Kerry campaign news release Tuesday suggested that the awarding of the grant had motivated Schachte to remember the 1968 Vietnam event differently from how he'd talked of it before. Speaking to Boston Globe reporters in April 2003, he'd recalled a "firefight" and had said Kerry "got hit."
The campaign charged that Schachte, a Swift boat veteran like Kerry, was part of a concerted effort to falsely undermine Kerry's war record. The Kerry press item was headlined: "$40 million memory -- smear boat veteran's fuzzy memory clears up after receiving federal contract from Bush Administration."
Schachte said in his statement that even though he might have been listed by his firm as a FastShip lobbyist, he had, in fact, done nothing for FastShip.
"I haven't done any work for Blank Rome in a couple of years, and had nothing to do with this contract," the statement said. It didn't address why he'd changed his mind about the event in 1968.
Kenneth E. Davis, a FastShip lobbyist for another firm, said it was common for lobbying firms, in making disclosure reports to Congress, to list the names of anyone who conceivably might have contact with a client. Often, he said, some don't.
Davis, the Republican chairman of Montgomery County, Pa., said: "To my knowledge, he [Schachte] has never done any work on this case."
Roland K. Bullard II, the president of FastShip, said of Schachte: "I wouldn't know him if he drove his Swift boat into my office. I never heard of him."