As the special report on the scandal at CBS and “60 Minutes” was circulating around town, I was at a long-scheduled editorial dinner with the leader of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth, John O’Neill. Among the guests at the table was Jerry Corsi, co-author, with Mr. O’Neill, of the book that halted Senator Kerry’s surge in the polls, “Unfit for Command.” The Swiftboat Veterans for Truth is the 527 group that ran the advertisements on television and the Internet that so startled the American people and, many believe, did as much as any other single factor in delivering a second term to the president.

I’ve attended at a lot of editorial dinners over the years, but it is hard to recall one as enjoyable – or illuminating – as the sitting with Mr. O’Neill. One can call the story of the Swiftboat Veterans for Truth the flip side of the tarnished coin of CBS. One was the vaunted network that flubbed the story of a generation. The other was a true band of brothers, professional newsmen not, who had a story that none of the big institutions wanted. They put it on the air themselves with the contributions of more than 150,000 ordinary Americans and discovered that it resonated powerfully with an electorate that had grown tired of being treated with cynicism.

Quite a bit of discussion has taken place in respect of whether the Swiftboat Veterans should have focused on not only Mr. Kerry’s testimony before the Senate in 1971, when the future senator likened Americans in Vietnam to Genghis Khan, but also questioned Mr. Kerry’s medals for his service in the war itself. Here Mr. O’Neill was ahead of the curve. He understood before others the significance of the exaggerations about Mr. Kerry’s medals and grasped that it was precisely the legend built up around the medals that had served as the shield for his anti-war agitation.

A good bit of discussion rippled around the dinner table in respect of the bias at CBS and some of the other big news institutions. I don’t gainsay the allegation, even while the special panel at CBS seems to belittle it. But neither am I terribly troubled by the prospect of bias at one, or even several, of the big networks or newspapers. The First Amendment doesn’t require that one must check his or her biases to enter journalism. On the contrary, to protect the airing of bias is precisely one of the purposes of the Founders in crafting the First Amendment.

What impresses is the spirit of the American people and the point that Lincoln made, about how you can’t fool them all the time. The country finally handed up, in Mr. O’Neill, a man of extraordinary quality, a graduate of the Naval Academy who spent two years in combat in Vietnam, graduated first in his class at the University of Texas law school, and clerked on the Supreme Court for Justice Rehnquist. Mr. O’Neill, once summoned by his Vietnam commander, Admiral Roy Hoffmann, had to make but one or two calls to bring the Swiftboat Veterans scrambling to the defense of the Navy’s honor – and America’s.

Threats of lawsuits didn’t faze any of them. In the case of the sailors, they had already put their lives on the line, and in the case of the prisoners of war, they had already withstood torture on behalf of America’s cause. Telephoned death threats and the sneers of the glitterati meant little. And they knew their story. The moment Senator Kerry stepped onto the podium of the Democratic Convention in Boston, snapped a salute, and announced he was reporting for duty, Mr. Corsi, who had been studying the anti-war movement for years, knew that “Unfit for Command” was going to become a runaway best-seller.

It’s something to reflect on Mr. O’Neill’s story. Back in 1971, Mr. O’Neill had asked to appear before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to answer the libels that had been uttered by Mr. Kerry. He was told there was no time available. He then confronted the future senator on “The Dick Cavett Show,” stated his case and went home. He felt he’d made a good case, and never expected to run into Mr. Kerry again. He married, launched his law career, litigated great cases, and raised his children. And then history happened. The showdown that finally came was all the more dramatic for the fact that it was 33 years in the making.

Toward the end of the dinner, we asked Mr. O’Neill whether he has thought of converting his fame from the Swiftboats into a career in politics, perhaps running for the Senate from Texas. It turns out he has been all his life a champion debater. But he made it clear, as he had done earlier during the dinner, that he and his comrades in the Swiftboat Veterans were in it not for the politics but for the honor of their fellow veterans of Vietnam and that what they were going to do now was what they had been doing before they were interrupted – to go home, back to the families and jobs to which they’d been devoting themselves since the war.