It’s been a full week now since Thos. Lipscomb first reported, on page one of The New York Sun, that two veterans remembered John Kerry being present at a November 12 to 15, 1971, meeting at which a plot to assassinate American senators was discussed and voted down.

Since then, the evidence has mounted that Mr. Kerry was actually there. Four more witnesses have emerged — three in interviews with The New York Sun, one in an interview with the Kansas City Star — who remember Mr. Kerry being there. That brings the total to six. Nearly all of these persons are political supporters of Senator Kerry who would have no apparent motive to make up stories about him. What’s more, our Josh Gerstein reports today at page one, Mr. Kerry was placed at the Kansas City meeting by contemporaneous FBI records and internal minutes of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, the group that held the Kansas City meeting. Those minutes and records were provided by Gerald Nicosia, an author and Kerry supporter for whom Mr. Kerry hosted a Capitol Hill book party in 2001. Mr. Nicosia says there is no question about it: Mr. Kerry was at the November 1971 Kansas City meeting.

The Kerry campaign’s reaction until yesterday had been to insist, despite all the evidence to the contrary, that Mr. Kerry wasn’t there. A spokesman for Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign, David Wade, told our Mr. Lipscomb last week,”Kerry was not at the Kansas City meeting.” Another Kerry campaign official, John Hurley, this week claimed to us that a Kerry appearance on a New York–based television program on November 14, 1971, meant that Mr. Kerry could not have been in Kansas City. Nice try. It turns out the program was pre-taped on November 2. Douglas Brinkley’s bestselling Kerry biography, which the senator cooperated with and which the Kerry presidential campaign is promoting on its Web site, claims that Mr. Kerry was a “no-show” at the Kansas City meeting. Mr. Brinkley told us that Mr. Kerry himself had told him that.

We’re now persuaded that Mr. Kerry was at the Kansas City meeting and that, as several witnesses recall, he voted against the murder plot and resigned in protest. So, too, apparently, is the Kerry campaign, which yesterday issued a statement retreating from its denials to reality. The statement acknowledged, “we accept” that Mr. Kerry was in Kansas City, but it said Mr. Kerry “had no personal recollection of this meeting.”

It’s possible — it was 32 years ago — that Mr. Kerry’s memory has faded. Or it’s possible, too, that Mr. Kerry would have preferred not to have to answer to the voters on the questions that now naturally follow: If you resigned because there were people seriously advocating an assassination plot, did you tell the authorities or warn the potential targets about it? Was it the group you resigned from in Kansas City, or just your paid national leadership position?

And if the discussion of the assassination plot was so troubling that it was worth resigning as a leader of the group, why did you continue to represent the group in public at events like a speech at Dartmouth College on January 11, 1972, where an account in the New York Times described you as a “spokesman for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War”? Or at a Washington protest meeting on January 26, 1972, coverage of which in the Times also described Mr. Kerry as “a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War”? And if indeed you were so upset at the anti-war group’s tactics that you denounced them in an account in the June 1, 1971, National Review as “horrible…Ripping out wires from cars, slashing tires — it’s criminal. It should be punished,” then what were you doing in Kansas City in November, anyway?

We don’t mind saying that we don’t question Mr. Kerry’s patriotism. The path he has chosen — leaving a radical organization and entering the political lists to pursue elective office — is as American as apple pie. But the 2004 presidential campaign takes place in the context of a war against Islamic terrorism that, like the Cold War against communism, is a long, twilight struggle against a foe bent on destroying our country. Americans deserve an honest look at what Mr. Kerry did in the last war, not only abroad but at home, as we once again try to choose a leader to carry the fight.