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Denis
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Joined: 24 Aug 2004
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Location: North Carolina
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 Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2004 7:43 pm Post subject: So, who is Vallely, and exactly how.... |
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....has he beaten back attacks on Kerry's record?
From Newsweek:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5916073/site/newsweek/
| Quote: | In Bush's Shadow
Striking Back: Reeling from tough attacks and bad advice, Kerry launches a counteroffensive against a resurgent president
By Richard Wolffe and Susannah Meadows
Newsweek
Sept. 13 issue - John Kerry wanted to hit back. It had been a miserable August as he took incoming fire about his military service from a gang of hostile Vietnam vets. But no, campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill and other staffers argued, the Swift Boat ads would blow over. Finally, Kerry had had enough. For three or four days, as he campaigned across the country, Kerry ripped into Cahill, furious that the mostly baseless attacks on his valor were driving his numbers down. "He was very angry," one old friend says. "The calculation had been made that this wasn't going to hurt him." Kerry's solution was to reach for an old ally. "Get Vallely," he screamed.
Thomas Vallely is the leader of the pack of vets that Kerry calls his dog-hunters, a group that has beaten back the attacks on his Vietnam record since his first Senate race 20 years ago. "He knows that I know the other players," Vallely says of Kerry's Mayday call. "He knows that I also like this stuff."
The return of the old warriors marked a turning point in the Swift Boat controversy, and a rare moment when Kerry stamped his authority on a drifting campaign. "OK, time to break out the fatigues. We've been there, done that. Time to do it again," says David Thorne, Kerry's close friend, of the mood among the senator's inner circle.
And so, even as the balloons were falling at the Republicans' party in Madison Square Garden, Kerry's motorcade pulled into Clark County, Ohio, where Al Gore beat George W. Bush by just 324 votes. There, Kerry finally struck hard at his opponents' record during Vietnam. "I will not have my commitment to defend this country questioned by those who refused to serve when they could have, and who misled America into Iraq," Kerry told a crowd of several thousand supporters at a midnight rally in Springfield. The Bush team, as usual, responded rapidly to Kerry's decidedly unrapid response. Karen Hughes, the president's longtime message maven, accused Kerry of being "consumed" by Vietnam, saying he had "diminished himself" with the attack. |
It would be good to be prepared for this rehash, but it doesn't strike me a Kerry being smart, period. It looks like someone who is so absolutely stuck in hs own past practices and myth, he can't figure out what to do! I mean, did this VCallely ever have to deal with Kerry being challenged by, say, dozens and even hundreds of Veterans, including men who served with him and POWs?
Denis |
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Bystander
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| Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2004 8:19 pm Post subject: |
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| Quote: | | David Thorne, Kerry's close friend |
Is this the twin brother of Julia, Kerry's ex-wife?
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Denis
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Joined: 24 Aug 2004
Posts: 48
Location: North Carolina
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| Posted: Sun Sep 05, 2004 8:20 pm Post subject: |
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From the Boston Globe, some info on Vallely:
| Quote: | First campaign ends in defeat
By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff, 6/18/2003
y 1972, John F. Kerry was a national figure, but without roots in one place he could call home. For a young man with congressional ambitions, that was a handicap, one he would quickly compound.
The 28-year-old activist believed Congress was the logical extension of his activism to end the Vietnam War. He was ready to leave the streets to work within what some fellow protesters scorned as "the system."
His ambition tempered only by political naivete, Kerry tried on congressional districts like suits off the rack. In less than two months in early 1972, the antiwar leader called three different districts in Massachusetts home. To this day, he bears the brand of opportunist from that brazen district-hopping, which he acknowledges as part of his political "baggage."...
In early February, Kerry's wife, Julia, bought a house in Worcester, where Kerry intended to take on Harold D. Donohue, a longtime Democratic incumbent, in a central Massachusetts district. They never moved in. Instead, the couple rented an apartment in Lowell late in March after learning that Representative F. Bradford Morse would be named undersecretary general of the United Nations. His departure would open up the Fifth District seat held by Republicans for generations.
Kerry had tenuous ties to the Fifth District that proved to be a flimsy shield against the withering assaults of critics. Leading the attack was The Sun, the conservative daily in Lowell, the old, parochial mill city that anchored the district.
Resentment poured from many of the other nine candidates, whom Kerry would leave in the dust of a freewheeling Democratic primary.
In the wait-your-turn political culture of Lowell and nearby Lawrence, Kerry was a carpetbagger trying to cherrypick a seat in Congress.
In the general election campaign, Kerry was lashed relentlessly by The Sun, which questioned his patriotism, his loyalty to the district, and his financial backers. He blew a huge lead and lost to the Republican nominee, Paul W. Cronin, a former state representative who had served on Morse's staff.
Suddenly, the fast track to political glory vanished beneath the feet of the war hero turned war protester. There would be no official soapbox in the nation's capital, not any time soon at least. Kerry's first campaign for elected office had failed. And he was unemployed.
In defeat, he retreated to the outskirts of politics. ``The years in exile'' is how Cameron F. Kerry describes the next decade of his older brother's life.
John Kerry settled down, became a father, a lawyer, and, to the shock of some liberal admirers, a prosecutor. As the top assistant to the Middlesex County district attorney, he would display the same brashness that bred resentment among his allies in the antiwar movement and fearful envy among his adversaries in President Richard M. Nixon's White House.
In this little-examined period of transition, Kerry's youthful audacity yielded to pragmatic maturity. He learned lessons of life and politics. He paid some dues. But at each step, his single-mindedness to pursue elected office reappeared. After falling from the slippery pole of politics, he tenaciously prepared to resume the ascent.
Lessons in Lowell
Kerry, with his first wife, Julia Thorne, celebrating his win in the 1972 primary. Kerry buried the field of Democrats with huge tallies in the towns where antiwar sentiment was strongest.
Politics has always been blood sport in blue-collar Lowell. Kerry learned that the hard way after parachuting in during the spring of 1972. His rootless upbringing had brought him no nearer to Lowell than leafy Groton, 15 miles to the west. Kerry's family lived in the affluent town briefly when he was a toddler, and his parents had resettled in Groton in 1962, when John went off to Yale.
Lowell's "mile of mills" along the Merrimack River had provided work for generations of immigrants, but by the early '70s most of the weaving looms had fallen silent after the textile industry's flight to the South. Lowell and Lawrence, 10 miles downriver, were also hard hit by the deep economic recession. Unemployment rates were at or near double digits.
Politics in both cities was infused with ethnic survivalism. Careers were built one favor, one patronage job at a time in heavily Democratic, socially conservative, and mostly Catholic enclaves.
Kerry was a Democrat and a Catholic, but otherwise an alien political life form to most residents of the cities and their conservative suburbs. In a 10-candidate field, he veered left, not only with his antiwar rhetoric but on social and economic issues.
"I can understand people who were pissed at me," Kerry says today of the congressional run. "I came into the district, crash, `Here I am.' There was a brashness to it. ... If I had known what I knew today about politics, I'm not sure I would have done it."
The open seat attracted a throng of candidates. Jumping in besides Kerry were seven Democrats from the Lowell area, plus two from Lawrence. Cronin faced three other Republicans. Roger P. Durkin, a conservative Lowell Democrat, ran as an Independent.
Kerry waged a very expensive, sophisticated campaign, driven by well-heeled contributors from outside the district and an army of young, idealistic volunteers, who worked feverishly to identify Kerry supporters and then pull them to the polls on primary day. They also distributed leaflets to the elderly, describing available government services and benefits; prepared a consumer guide comparing supermarket prices in the district; and operated a "renter's hot-line" to handle complaints.
Filmmaker Otto Preminger, author George Plimpton, composer Leonard Bernstein, and other celebrities backed Kerry, who spent $279,746 on the primary and general election. The fifth district was the most expensive congressional race in the country that year.
To win the primary, the newcomer overcame the election eve arrest of his brother, Cameron, and campaign field director Thomas J. Vallely, both then 22, in the basement of a Lowell building that housed the headquarters of Kerry and another Democratic contender, state Representative Anthony R. DiFruscia of Lawrence. It was almost 2 a.m. - 30 hours before the polls opened - when the two were arrested on charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit larceny.
That day's Sun blared a memorable, double-deck headline: "Kerry brother arrested in Lowell `Watergate."' DiFruscia, getting some extra ink in the campaign's waning hours, had drawn the parallel to the break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington three months earlier.
The Kerry camp declared it a setup, saying that the two responded to an anonymous phone call, minutes earlier, threatening to cut the campaign's 36 phone lines on the day before its get-out-the-vote effort. Lowell Police arrested the pair in an area near the trunk line for all of the building's phones.
To this day Kerry becomes animated talking about the episode, convinced it was part of a conspiracy against his insurgency. He said he does not know who was involved. He dismissed as ridiculous the charge that DiFruscia was a target. "He didn't figure in the race," said Kerry.
But some of Kerry's claims in the Lowell break-in are wildly at odds with the facts.
"That headline was held open. That page was held open, according to [Sun] typesetters, at 1 o'clock in the morning," Kerry said. "That doesn't happen at a newspaper, you know that. And that headline was out there on the streets the next morning, first thing."
The Sun, however, was an afternoon paper, and its first deadline was hours after the arrests, in plenty of time to write the story for that day's editions. The Eagle-Tribune of Lawrence also reported the arrests that day, in a smaller story under the headline "Shades of Watergate?"
Kerry's brother today declines to elaborate on the circumstances surrounding the arrests and the charges, which were dropped a year later.
"It was an impulsive, rash thing that we did and that John Kerry ended up having to deal with," said Cam Kerry, now a partner at the Boston law firm of Mintz Levin Cohn Ferris Glovsky and Popeo. "That's all we're going to say on that one."
Vallely, a former Marine who served in Vietnam and later became a state representative in Boston, had more to say.
"I kicked in the door," he said, and then, police swarmed the area. Vallely said DiFruscia's office was of no interest; the Kerry phone lines were. In hindsight, he said, "We probably were overreacting to someone who was joking."
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 6/18/2003.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. |
More from the Globe:
| Quote: | After 34 years, Kerry supporter remains steadfast
By Brian C. Mooney, Globe Staff | July 29, 2004
When John Kerry delivers the most important speech of his career tonight, Tommy Vallely will be there, as he has been for many of the memorable moments of his friend's rise toward the pinnacle of American politics.
Vallely was in the room, clad in fatigues, for Kerry's famous address to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago, one of the many steps he has taken with Kerry on the long march to the presidency.
The Marine combat veteran was there in 1971, on the National Mall for the antiwar protest before Kerry's speech. |
From Harvard:
| Quote: | | Thomas J. Vallely Thomas J. Vallely is the director of the Vietnam Program and a research associate at the Center for Business and Government. He is responsible for directing the Program's research efforts into Vietnam's economy, as well as its teaching and exchange programs, both in the United States and Vietnam. He helped to establish the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City. In addition, Vallely conducts research on specific aspects of Vietnam's development for the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, and the Japanese Ministry of Finance. Prior to becoming director of the Vietnam Program, Vallely served with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy School, where he worked on strategic and military issues in East and Southeast Asia. He has worked as a political consultant and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1980, serving until 1987. Vallely received a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government. |
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/cbg/asia/people.html
Okay, from Vallely’s own site:
http://vallely.com/tomvallely.html
| Quote: | The first time I went to Vietnam, I prayed to go home," says Thomas J. Vallely (MPA '83) who was 18 years old when he was sent to fight in the Vietnam War. A member of the U.S. Marine Corps infantry, Vallely was stationed at the coastal city of Danang, a strategic center dominated by Communist forces. "The second time, I went and never really came back."...
Vallely returned to Vietnam in 1985 as a Massachusetts State Representative, invited by Senator John Kerry as part of a goodwill delegation. The trip marked the beginning of Vallely's commitment to fostering exchange between the two countries. Awarded a scholarship to the Kennedy School, the Newton, Mass. native gave a cash donation to the School to help a Vietnamese student as a way of thanking his hosts. While his generosity ultimately aided a Chinese student, the seed for what would become the Vietnam Program had been planted.
Established in 1988, the Vietnam Program at the Kennedy School's Center for Business and Government serves as a central organizing point for a variety of research, teaching, and policy advising activities with the dual goal of promoting U.S.-Vietnamese understanding and enabling Vietnam to integrate successfully into the global economy.
... As director, Vallely coordinates a public policy program at the University of Economics of Ho Chi Minh City, as well as a Fulbright Exchange Program, which selects qualified Vietnamese professionals to study at U.S. graduate programs. "We were lucky enough to be in the human capital business early on," remarks Vallely, noting that the program's launch established its presence several years before the U.S. and Vietnam resumed diplomatic relations....
... "Vietnam is a big part of American history," he continues. "I was lucky enough to come home from the war in one piece, go to school, and be involved public life before I realized I wanted to think more about the country and its issues. Now I want to continue doing that. My best friends in the world live in Vietnam."... |
So, at this point, it would seem clear that Vallely is an old time leftist, who has worked for the interests of Vietnam for quite some time. Fine! So is there any reason to think that this guy can be effective against actual Vets and POWs challenging Kerry? I don’t see it.
If Vallely was also in VVAW and was behind Kerry for the 1971 Senate speech, he has his own baggage.
Anyone have any familiarity about how Vallely did this job for Kerry in the past, and did it maybe only relate to Kerry’s havibg served and his opponents not having so served? If so, he can’t take on the Swift Vets. He’ll be used to attack Bush and Cheney, and try to implicate them with the Swiftees.
The SwiftVets will have to challenge him on that, constantly, and not let him chgange the subject from the issues they’ve raised.
Rather than this going to Vallely being a sign of Kerry taking charge, it's a sign of his being completely lost!
This is not the kind of strategic thinking one needs in a Commander-in-Chief. This gy can't adapt to changed circumstances!
Denis |
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baldeagl
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poseidon
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Joined: 20 Aug 2004
Posts: 97
Location: Massachusetts
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| Posted: Mon Sep 06, 2004 3:44 pm Post subject: |
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| Bystander wrote: | | Quote: | | David Thorne, Kerry's close friend |
Is this the twin brother of Julia, Kerry's ex-wife? |
Yes
| Quote: | | When Kerry was 20 years old, he visited Thorne's family and met David's twin sister, Julia. |
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061503.shtml
| Quote: | | Out of the Navy and with a political failure behind him, Kerry refocused on his personal life. In May 1970, he married the woman he had been dating for more than six years, Julia Thorne, the sister of his best friend, David Thorne. |
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml
There is lot's more in these articles -- for example
| Quote: | On Jan. 3, 1970, Kerry requested that his superior, Rear Admiral Walter F. Schlech, Jr., grant him an early discharge so that he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform.
"I just said to the admiral: `I've got to get out. I've got to go do what I came back here to do, which is, end this thing,'" Kerry recalled, referring to the war. The request was approved, and Kerry was honorably discharged, which he said shaved six months from his commitment. |
edited one time for correction - poseidon |
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