The full details of how the student-organized presidential forum "Healing America" was cancelled remain unclear even now, three weeks after the event was to take place.
The roundtable's chief organizers, Kabir Sehgal '05 and Brent Reidy '05 of BuzzFlood and Janos Marton '04 and Noah Riner '06 of Student Assembly, have said in print that a Dartmouth administrator called the Kerry campaign two days before the event, resulting in the Kerry campaign's withdrawal.
The Kerry campaign's scheduling office did, in fact, receive a letter from Rockefeller Center Director Linda Fowler notifying them of the first cancellation of "Healing America" in December, an investigation by The Dartmouth has found. But Kerry campaign officials said they were unaware of any phone call from a Dartmouth administrator.
Fowler said she decided to withdraw the support of Rocky after learning that fringe candidate Lyndon LaRouche had been invited. After the event was cancelled, the organizers moved the location off-campus to the Lebanon Opera House.
Kerry's daughter Vanessa, contacted by Marton to try to bring her father to the forum, said that after the first forum was cancelled, Kerry's schedule quickly closed up. It appears that the Kerry scheduling office did not fully realize that the event was rescheduled and took Fowler's cancellation to be final.
"There may have been some confusion in the schedule," Vanessa Kerry said.
By the time Kerry contacted the scheduling office to reconfirm that the event was going on as planned, her father's schedule was "so locked" that he could not attend "Healing America." Kerry also did not attend the Lifetime/ABC women's issues forum at Dartmouth on Jan. 25 in Moore Theatre.
Mark Cornbleu, Kerry's former New Hampshire communications director, claimed no knowledge of the planned event, and said that he would have known about it if Kerry was going to attend.
"This is the first I've heard of it," Cornbleu said. "I was highly involved in planning events in New Hampshire, and it is unlikely that it was ever on the schedule."
After hearing of a letter from Kerry's speechwriting office to BuzzFlood dated Feb. 4, praising the efforts of the organizers, Cornbleu said the matter required further investigation.
Contrary to allegations that Sehgal himself penned the statement allegedly sent by Kerry's office, a Kerry speechwriter confirmed that he in fact was the author.
Andrea Batista Schlesinger, executive director of "Healing America" co-sponsor and Washington think tank Drum Major Institute, and Norm Ornstein, director of the American Enterprise Institute and planned moderator, said they had no knowledge of a phone call from the College to cancel the event.
Schlesinger blamed the cancellation on "a confluence of factors," but mainly the difficult schedules of the candidates. She also harshly criticized those trying to discredit the intentions of Sehgal.
Ornstein said that he has heard that most of the candidates were pursuing the strategy "if he was going to do it, I'll do it as well," in relation to Healing America. After Kerry's surprise margin of victory in Iowa, Ornstein said he believes he did not want to risk another face-to-face confrontation with the other candidates.
"If I had been John Kerry, I would have thought twice with a big lead," Ornstein said.
Former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop '37, who was to sit on a panel for the event, is still in the hospital recovering from a heart attack.
He has not been notified of the publicizing of the cancellation of the roundtable, organizers said.
