The controversy about Mr. Kerry's presence at a meeting of the VVAW steering committee on Nov. 12 through 15, 1971, seven months after his testimony, erupted this month after writer Thomas Lipscomb broke the story in the New York Sun that several veterans remembered Mr. Kerry being present at the meeting when Scott Camil, a key leader of the VWAW from Florida, proposed the assassination of key pro-war senators, including Republican Strom Thurmond of South Carolina and Democrat John Stennis of Mississippi.

Mr. Camil was known to fellow VVAW activists as "Scott the Assassin." He says he got the name in Vietnam for "sneaking down to the Vietnamese villages at night and killing people." He says he organized eight to 10 former Marines to plan the project.

Gerald Nicosia, a historian who supports Mr. Kerry and whose 2001 book "Home to War" sympathetically chronicled the activities of the VVAW, told the New York Sun that "Camil was deadly serious, brilliant and highly logical." In his book he reports that "what Camil sketched was so explosive that the coordinators feared lest government agents even hear of it," so they moved their meeting to a Mennonite hall.

There, according to six eyewitnesses interviewed by the Sun, the plan was discussed and voted down, with Mr. Kerry speaking out against it, although there is disagreement about how narrow the margin of defeat was. On the third day of the meeting, Mr. Kerry and three other people resigned from their posts as national coordinators of VVAW. Historian Douglas Brinkley says Mr. Kerry told him he quit because of "personality conflicts and differences in political philosophy." Mr. Kerry also told Mr. Brinkley that he was a "no show" in Kansas City.

Mr. Camil doesn't dispute the Nicosia book's accounts. "I'm sorry about those discussions now, but they did take place," he says.