David Horowitz, editor-in-chief of the right-wing FrontPageMag.com, claimed on August 2 that, during a debate more than 30 years ago on The Dick Cavett Show, Senator John Kerry (D-MA) indicated that he thought “Communists were just nationalists and basically was happy to see them win.” Horowitz made this false accusation as a guest on C-SPAN.

From the August 2 edition of C-SPAN's Washington Journal:

HOROWITZ: I've watched Kerry on the Cavett show on C-SPAN, which has done a tremendous service by replaying these broadcasts, and you can see there that he thinks that the Communists were just nationalists and basically was happy to see them win.

Kerry said nothing of the sort. In fact, Kerry was quoted expressing exactly the opposite sentiment to Horowitz's assertion in a December 12, 1971, Boston Globe article: “I don't like Communists,” Kerry said. “In fact, I hate them. I hate all totalitarians. I'm totally dedicated to representative, pluralistic, free democracy.”

In the June 30, 1971, Cavett debate between Kerry, who was representing Vietnam Veterans Against the War (the group that he helped lead when he returned from fighting in Vietnam) and John O'Neill (who was closely tied to the Nixon administration and has since founded the anti-Kerry group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth), what Kerry actually said was that he thought that it was “unrealistic” for the administration to remain “committed to the idea totally of a non-communist regime” in South Vietnam. "[W]e simply can't impose a settlement ourselves," Kerry argued.