Rick Reed, a Republican promoting govt whose work within the 2004 presidential race tarnished Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, by attacking his report as a Swift boat commander throughout the Vietnam Struggle — giving rise to the time period “swift boating” as a synonym for making advert hominem assaults, usually unfair, on a public determine — died on Aug. 17 at his house in Alexandria, Va. He was 69.
His daughter Mackey Reed confirmed the loss of life however didn’t present a trigger.
The 2004 advertisements Mr. Reed helped produce, for a gaggle known as Swift Boat Veterans for Reality, had been extremely contentious and stay so. Mr. Kerry and his allies, together with various those that served with him, disputed the group’s claims that he had lied about his service and had betrayed his nation by talking out in opposition to the struggle later.
Journalists discredited a number of of the advertisements, which had been a part of a broader effort to problem Mr. Kerry’s struggle report that additionally included a best-selling e-book. Senator John McCain, a Republican and a former prisoner of struggle, known as them “dishonest and dishonorable.”
Mr. Reed argued that they raised reputable questions on Mr. Kerry’s health to be president. And regardless of reporting that undermined the accusations, he insisted as just lately as final 12 months, in an interview, that the advertisements “had been by no means discredited.”
There is no such thing as a doubt that the Swift Boat marketing campaign damage Mr. Kerry’s candidacy, mentioned Kathleen Corridor Jamieson, the director of the Annenberg Public Coverage Heart on the College of Pennsylvania.
Citing a rolling cross-sectional survey the middle performed throughout the marketing campaign of the general public’s every day responses to messages from the candidates and the information media, she mentioned that the advertisements themselves had little direct impact on voters’ consciousness, however that the vast media consideration they attracted did.
“They broken the notion of Kerry as a robust chief, particularly amongst suburban ladies,” Professor Jamieson mentioned. Mr. Kerry misplaced the election to President George W. Bush, whose personal lack of fight service largely receded as a difficulty after the emergence of the Swift Boat assaults.
Richard Gardner Reed was born on Could 24, 1953, in Wakefield, Mass., to Gardner Chase Reed, a monetary adviser, and Priscilla (Swett) Reed. He grew up in Chatham, on Cape Cod.
He graduated from Franklin & Marshall School in 1975 and later earned a grasp’s diploma in public administration from the Kennedy Faculty of Authorities at Harvard College.
He first received concerned in Republican politics by doing advance work in Florida for Ronald Reagan’s unsuccessful presidential major run in 1976. He later labored for a consulting agency led by Paul Manafort and Roger Stone, who went on to play key roles within the political rise of Donald J. Trump.
Over the course of Mr. Reed’s profession, his shoppers included Senators Peter Fitzgerald of Illinois, John Warner and George Allen of Virginia, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina.
“Rick was an distinctive expertise and a gifted advert maker,” Mr. Fitzgerald mentioned in a press release offered by Mr. Reed’s household. “In my case, he took a really younger, digital neophyte, and vaulted him right into a U.S. Senate seat.”
Mr. Reed labored on John McCain’s presidential marketing campaign in 2000 and, regardless of the Arizona senator’s anger over the Swift Boat advertisements in 2004, briefly reunited with him for his 2008 run. He additionally produced advertisements for Mr. Trump’s major marketing campaign in 2016.
Mr. Reed, a part of an old-school breed of political admen who reveled in writing their very own scripts, thought-about the Republican pollster Arthur Finkelstein, whom he met early in his profession, a mentor.
“He’s not one to essentially spend a whole lot of time making an attempt to curry favor with the occasion hierarchy,” Mr. Reed mentioned of Mr. Finkelstein in a 2003 interview with Roll Call. “And that’s not essentially a nasty factor.”
Along with his daughter Mackey, Mr. Reed is survived by his spouse, Gayla, whom he met once they labored collectively for the Nationwide Senate Republican Committee; one other daughter, Carly Reed; a son, Gardner; and a sister, Melissa Reed.
In Mr. Reed’s telling, his work with the Swift Boat group was a matter of serendipity. It started with a Could 2004 e-mail from an uncle, Adrian Lonsdale, a retired Coast Guard captain who had been certainly one of Mr. Kerry’s commanders in Vietnam and was on his method to Washington for a information convention.
“I mentioned, ‘What’s this about?’” Mr. Reed recalled final 12 months in an interview with the podcast “First Proper.”
Captain Lonsdale, Mr. Reed mentioned, replied that he and “a bunch officers from Vietnam who served collectively” had been coming to “discuss” Mr. Kerry, who had successfully locked up the Democratic nomination to problem Mr. Bush in that 12 months’s race.
Mr. Reed went to the information convention, the place Captain Lonsdale and others denounced Mr. Kerry, primarily due to a difficulty that had been simmering because the Nineteen Seventies: his antiwar activism upon returning house after a tour of obligation commanding Swift boats — 50-foot aluminum Navy vessels used to patrol Vietnam’s waterways — within the Mekong Delta.
The information convention was calmly attended and generated modest protection. However Mr. Reed, a longtime companion on the political promoting agency Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, was struck by the veterans’ arguments in opposition to Mr. Kerry, which additionally included difficult his honesty about how he had earned a few of his medals.
“I mentioned, ‘Boy, this story has to get out,’” he recalled within the “First Proper” interview.
Get out it did.
A number of weeks later, Mr. Reed received a name from Chris LaCivita, a Republican political guide with whom he had labored beforehand. “I’ve been employed as a common guide to the Swift Boat group,” Mr. Reed recalled Mr. LaCivita saying. “I believe we have to make some advertisements.”
The primary fruits of that effort, a 60-second spot known as “Any Questions?,” featured greater than a dozen Swift boat veterans, most of whom had not ridden instantly alongside Mr. Kerry. They had been blunt of their assaults.
“When you have any query about what John Kerry’s manufactured from, simply spend three minutes with the boys who served with him,” the advert started. What adopted was a litany of condemnations of Mr. Kerry as somebody who was “mendacity about his report,” had “betrayed all his shipmates” and “can’t be trusted.”
With a comparatively modest price range of $500,000, the group, working as an unbiased entity, positioned the advert in a number of markets in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin in early August — after Mr. Kerry had underscored the significance he positioned on his struggle report by saying he was “reporting for obligation” on nomination night time on the Democratic Nationwide Conference.
Partly as a result of it appeared throughout the marketing campaign’s summer season doldrums and partly as a result of the Kerry marketing campaign appeared gradual to reply, the advert grabbed the eye of community and cable tv information retailers, which performed it repeatedly as a topic of protection and commentary. Discuss radio and conservative web sites offered extra gasoline, growing the influence of the advert’s message: that Mr. Kerry was to not be trusted on a basic promoting level — far past the place it first aired.
Later advertisements in what grew to become a $19 million marketing campaign, largely financed by rich Texans loyal to Mr. Bush, featured assaults on Mr. Kerry from former prisoners of struggle and their wives. The advertisements had been focused at a few dozen battleground states.
Though Mr. Kerry’s allies joined him in disputing the advertisements’ content material, they acknowledged the impact.
A check of 1,000 voters in 12 battleground states by Public Opinion Methods discovered that 75 p.c recalled the advertisements, L. Patrick Devlin, a College of Rhode Island professor, famous in a paper published in American Behavioral Scientist in 2005.
“That,” Invoice Knapp, a senior strategist for Mr. Kerry’s marketing campaign, informed Professor Devlin in a 2004 interview cited within the paper, “is a giant bang for its demagogic buck.”
Sheelagh McNeill contributed analysis.