McCain Hit For 'Gooks' Slur
Gov. Gray Davis rebuked GOP presidential contender Sen. John McCain, a fellow Vietnam War veteran, for calling his wartime captors “gooks.”
At the same time, Davis warned: “Those who criticize should just mentally put themselves in his place - five and a half years of being beaten regularly in a cell about five and a half feet wide.”
McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. The Arizona senator apologized Monday for his use of the slur to condemn North Vietnamese prison guards, who he said tortured him in captivity during the war.
Asked by reporters Wednesday about McCain's use of the term, Davis initially declined to comment.
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Pressed, he said: “I'm not going to give him a pass on that phraseology.”
“On the other hand, if you've been in a life-or-death struggle, your animosities are pretty strong and they tend to last for a long time. That's all I'm going to say about that.”
But Davis was peppered with more questions about the slur.
“You need to get beyond it,” Davis said. “We've gotten beyond Pearl Harbor -- unprovoked attack. We've gotten beyond Germany's two world wars, they're now (one) of our biggest trading partners. We've opened up relationships with Vietnam. We've somehow learned to move on.”
Yet the Democratic governor, who served in the U.S. Army in Vietnam from December 1968 to June 1969, said he is still working to put the experience behind him.
“Frankly, I have not been all that anxious to go back to Vietnam,” he said. “A lot of people have encouraged me to do it, and I haven't yet decided to do so. I'm just not yet prepared to do that.”
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Davis took pains to emphasize that he empathized with McCain's ordeal.
“I can certainly relate to him, being in a much less difficult situation than he was, that he's still hanging on to bitterness,” he said.
“It's one thing to be in the war, it's another thing to be in combat, another thing to be a prisoner of war,” Davis said. “You really can't put all those people in the same level.”
Seeking again to change the subject, he said: “I think we have more important issues to deal with than whether he used the appropriate word, which he did not.”
Peter DeMarco, a spokesman for McCain, reiterated that the senator had apologized for the remark and had promised not to use it again.
“Senator McCain has always held the people of Vietnam in the highest regard,” he said. “He has renounced his specific use of that word.”
The issue presented a potential quandary for Davis.
War veterans helped carry him to the governor's office in 1998. Asian-Americans constitute about 9 percent of the state's population, and McCain's remark prompted some anger in that community.
Davis has endorsed Democratic front-runner Al Gore, another Vietnam War veteran, for president.