The questions surrounding Senator Kerry’s involvement with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War are mounting now that newspapers are starting to look at the meeting that took place between November 12 and 15, 1971, at Kansas City, where the group debated and voted down a plot to kill American senators who backed the war.

Was Mr. Kerry at the Kansas City meeting? Two veterans — Randy Barnes and Terry DuBose — told The New York Sun that they remember Mr. Kerry being at the meeting. A third veteran, John Musgrave, told the Kansas City Star that Mr. Kerry was at the meeting. Yet a spokesman for Mr. Kerry’s presidential campaign, David Wade, insists that Mr. Kerry was not at the meeting. Mr. Kerry’s biographer, Douglas Brinkley, says Mr. Kerry told him he wasn’t at the meeting.

Was Mr. Kerry at the July 1971 national steering committee meeting of the group, in St. Louis? Messrs. DuBose and Brinkley say he was. So does author Gerald Nicosia, who in his 2001 book “Home to War” recounts: “Kerry made a long speech punctuated at frequent intervals by the demand: ‘Who is Al Hubbard?'” and “challenged him to prove he was a Vietnam Veteran.” Mr. Hubbard, according to the book, “freaked out”and yelled insults at Mr. Kerry. Mr. Kerry praised Mr. Nicosia’s book in a cover blurb and hosted a book party for it on Capitol Hill. The national director of Veterans for Kerry, John Hurley, told the Kansas City Star he thinks Mr. Kerry was at the St. Louis meeting. Mr. Kerry’s campaign spokesman, Mr. Wade, initially said that Mr. Kerry wasn’t there, based on a 1999 history of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, “The Turning,” by Andrew Hunt, that claims Mr. Kerry “skipped” the meeting. Now Mr. Wade says he thinks Mr. Kerry was at the St. Louis meeting.

When did Mr. Kerry last see Al Hubbard? Mr. Kerry was asked at a press stakeout Thursday, “Senator, Vietnam keeps coming up in the election, keeps getting brought up. In 1971, you appeared with a man named Al Hubbard on ‘Meet the Press,’ and Al Hubbard later turned out to have fabricated his Vietnam war record. Do you repudiate Al Hubbard? And are you still in contact with Al Hubbard? This was the executive director of your old group.”

Mr. Kerry replied,”I haven’t talked to Al Hubbard since that week. And everybody was disappointed by what they learned back in 1971. To his credit, he did serve his nation. He had simply exaggerated his particular position. But nobody knew it at the time. And those things happen.” By “that week,” Mr. Kerry seemed to be referring to the week of their April 18, 1971, “Meet the Press” appearance. But the Nicosia book that Mr. Kerry blurbed and hosted a party for in 2001 reports that Mr. Hubbard and Mr. Kerry debated each other at that July 1971 St. Louis meeting. And the New York Times of August 30, 1971, reports a joint fund-raising appearance by Mr. Kerry and Mr. Hubbard at East Hampton, Long Island, on August 29.

When did Mr. Kerry quit Vietnam Veterans Against the War? Mr. Barnes, the head of Missouri Veterans for Kerry, told us that Mr. Kerry resigned from the group in November after the meeting at which the assassination plot was debated. The Brinkley biography claims Mr. Kerry quit on November 10. Another leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Barry Romo, told the Capital Times newspaper of Madison, Wis., that he remembers Mr. Kerry quitting in October. Mr. Wade, the campaign spokesman, claimed Mr. Kerry quit the group in the summer of 1971. The November 1971 newsletter of Colorado Vietnam Veterans Against the War reported that Mr. Kerry “this month”resigned his position as a paid national coordinator of VVAW.

Mr. Kerry was publicly expressing differences with the group as early as June of 1971, telling National Review that the VVAW Mayday protests were “horrible.” “Ripping out wires from cars, slashing tires — it’s criminal. It should be punished,” he said, while, in a classic Kerry straddle, continuing to fund-raise for the group and serve as a member of its national leadership.

All this could be dismissed as understandably imprecise recollections of matters that, after all, happened 32 years ago. But the passage of time hasn’t stopped the Democratic National Committee from trying to make an issue of George W. Bush’s service in the National Guard. No account of the VVAW accuses Mr. Kerry of supporting the aborted plot to kill senators. But even if Mr. Kerry quit the VVAW when he says he did, it starts to look like Americans need to know more about the values and agenda of the organization that was the launching pad for his political career.