SwiftVets.com

[hanna]

Michael Flynn, a defense attorney who worked extensively in Middlesex County in this period, said. To be sure, Kerry’s industry became the stuff of later campaign exaggerations: he has boasted that he wiped out an inventory of eleven thousand cases, but the Boston Globe has reported that during his tenure the entire superior-court caseload, including backlog, never exceeded seven thousand two hundred and sixty-five cases.

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Kerry has vivid memories of the daily obligations of running a D.A.’s office, some of them bizarre. “Once I got a call in the morning from the chief of police of Somerville, and he told me, ‘We are about to arrest the mayor for rape,’” Kerry said. “I told him, ‘Before you make any arrests, I want you in my office in an hour.’ So he starts telling me about the case, and the case gets weirder and weirder by the moment. To make things even more complicated, the victim in the case was male. So we bring in the victim, and we ask him to take a lie-detector test, and as soon as he comes in he breaks down and says the whole thing was a lie. Just totally broke down, said it never happened, blah blah blah. If that accusation had been made in public, there is no way that the mayor’s reputation would ever have recovered, even if it had been later proved false.”

It was, it seems, a relatively carefree moment in Kerry’s life. He was clearly casting about for a political office to run for. As his former colleague Rikki Klieman recalled, “He said he wanted one day to be President of the United States. I wouldn’t call it a joke, just more of an offhand remark. He meant it.”

http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?040510fa_fact1