Voters in Ohio need to think long and hard about whether they want to give Democrat Sherrod Brown another crack at being their senator. And they might want to listen to this story while they're making up their minds.
The guys at the Ruthless podcast have unearthed a remarkable letter Brown, 72, wrote during the Vietnam War in which he argued that American prisoners of war (POWs) should be kept in captivity to keep the U.S. from bombing Hanoi.
A college student at the time, Brown wrote a letter to an editor during the summer of 1971 that questioned whether the American POWs being held by the North Vietnamese were a valuable deterrent to keeping hostilities from escalating.
"If North Vietnam released our POWs, what would stop the U.S. from bombing Hanoi and Haiphong?" Brown wrote, according to the letter revealed Wednesday by the Ruthless crew.
Well, that's quite something, isn't it?
The Americans Brown was talking about at the time weren't mere inanimate chess pieces on a geopolitical chessboard. They were our boys being held captive by the communist North Vietnamese, and many of them, like John McCain, endured years of torture, starvation, isolation, and beatings before finally coming home.
One of my older sisters wore a bracelet for years that bore the name of one of those boys.
Who was to know that a future U.S. senator, at that exact same time, was more concerned about stopping the U.S. military from carrying out operations than he was about the safety of his fellow countrymen who were being held captive in unimaginable conditions.
And, no, Sherrod Brown never served in the military. He went right from college into a political career.
Watch: @RuthlessPodcast on @SherrodBrown arguing AGAINST releasing American POWs in the Vietnam War. "Just in case you were wondering how long [Sherrod Brown's] been in politics, the subject of the oped was the Vietnam War...Brown argued against North Vietnam releasing POWs..." https://t.co/dBVSGUwqsL
— Senate Leadership Fund (@Senate_Fund) October 14, 2026
Naturally, Brown's supporters are going to argue that he was a teenager at the time and people change. Fair enough.
But, is there any actual proof that his political instincts have changed over the past 55 years?
Not exactly. Brown went on to build a five-decade political career as a reliable liberal – he opposed the Iraq War, backed Obamacare and Biden's major spending bills, supported abortion rights, was a strong defender of unions, wanted tougher gun laws, and advocated for more permissive immigration policies.
In other words, his political DNA hasn't really changed an iota from his days of using American POWs as a prop for his ideological reasonsings (such as they were).
The interesting part about that old letter isn't that it proves Sherrod Brown believes the exact same things he believed in 1971. Its value, instead, is that Sherrod Brown told the world very early on who he was – and who he still is.