The Swift boat commander who worked to discredit Senator Kerry’s version of the Vietnam War, John O’Neill, said yesterday he didn’t know if he could take credit for the Massachusetts senator’s defeat, but he said his involvement certainly didn’t hurt.

“We felt like we were able to make a contribution in general to the national understanding,” he told The New York Sun from his Houston law office.

A year ago, Mr. O’Neill said, he didn’t plan on returning to the national stage he left in the 1970s after he debated Mr. Kerry on national television and met with President Nixon when he returned from Vietnam.

But about nine months ago, Mr. O’Neill was in an intensive care unit, recovering from donating a kidney to his wife, Anne. He heard that Mr. Kerry was leading in the primary elections and realized that the man who had accused veterans of being war criminals could be president. He quickly jumped into action.

Mr. O’Neill reached out to fellow veterans. Together they planned a press conference in Washington to share their war memories with reporters. To Mr. O’Neill’s dismay, the television networks and national newspapers didn’t bite.

So, he said, he and the men he had fought with 30 years before decided to try to bypass the mainstream press and deliver their message straight to the American people – using a Web site, advertising, and a book, “Unfit for Command,” which Mr. O’Neill co-authored.

“The one thing that united us was the belief that Kerry would have been a terrible commander in chief for our kids,” he said.

He and the other members of his group, the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, eventually did more than 2,000 interviews and raised contributions totaling $24 million from 110,000 individuals. Every penny, he said, was spent on the effort to defeat Mr. Kerry.

Tuesday night, when it seemed like Mr. Bush was going to win, the group held a 20-minute telephone conference, where they talked about what they had accomplished. He said the group was happy that Mr. Kerry was defeated, but it was happier about the veterans’ impact on the “national perspective.”

“I think that there will never be another presidential candidate who takes the position that our involvement in Vietnam was a crime,” he said.

Now that the election is over, Mr. O’Neill said he assumes Mr. Kerry will recede back to being a senator. “It doesn’t look like he’ll have any problem coming up with change to eat,” he said. “He seems to be pretty well off.”

As for Mr. O’Neill, he plans to step down from the national stage for good.

“If it was possible, this more firmly resolved me never to get involved again in politics,” he said. “It’s over and I’m going home. It’s happily over. I want to catch up on all the work I was supposed to do for the last year.”