SwiftVets.com

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http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6420966/site/newsweek/

Nov. 15 issue - Looking back, as Kerry staggered in late summer and early fall, some Democrats wondered if July 29 would be remembered as the last truly happy night of the campaign. It was the last night of the Democratic convention, and the Kerry-Heinz mansion on Beacon Hill was noisy and aglow. When the nominee walked through his front door shortly after midnight, he was enveloped in a gust of revelry. His guests, intoxicated by the moment and Teresa's fine wines and champagnes, lavished praise on Kerry's speech. Grinning, buoyant, the candidate kept apologizing for having raced through the applause lines. "I just had to get it done in time," he kept saying. He had not wanted to run over the witching hour of 11 p.m., when the networks had threatened to cut him off to return to their regular programming.

Kerry's extended family, generations of WASPy-looking Forbes and Winthrop scions (Kerry had 32 first cousins on his mother's side), had marched up Beacon Hill to attend the party in force. Later, repairing to one of their ancestral haunts on Boston's North Shore, they observed how relaxed and gracious Teresa seemed to be that evening. A few years before, at her first family Thanksgiving with her proper Bostonian in-laws, Teresa had recoiled at the Puritan simplicity of the affair. Accustomed to the lavish and formal holiday celebrations of a Pittsburgh heiress, Teresa had made clear that she was put off by shabby gentility. But this night, in their grand house on Louisburg Square, as the waiters bustled about with heaping silver trays, she was in her element. To one of the Kerry cousins it really did seem like Camelot redux, a brief and shining moment—all too brief, as it turned out.

The Kerry for President "Sea to Shining Sea" tour left at 7 that morning, its participants hung over and exhausted. The 3,500-mile bus-and-train campaign tour was not a happy trip, certainly not for the candidate's wife. With each passing day she made less effort to hide her displeasure. Audiences were mystified when Teresa turned her back to them at daylight rallies and wore dark sunglasses and a hat at night (backstage, the candidate's wife complained of migraines and sore eyes). In town after town, state after state, she would flit about the stage, leaning in to make requests of her husband, sending him off on small errands—to fetch bottled water or deliver a message to an aide behind the scenes—while other people spoke. When she took the podium, audiences seemed baffled, and some cringed. Speaking of everything from clothes to her dead sister, she seemed to have a singular ability (though matched at times by her husband's) for sobering and silencing a cheering crowd.

The climax of the tour was an hourlong "family vacation" hike in the Grand Canyon. The idea was to watch Kerry's photogenic family appearing hale and vigorous on the way to a picturesque overlook, where Kerry would hold a press conference to castigate President Bush's environmental record. The imagery was not subtle: the Kerry family loves nature; Bush wants to ruin it.

Vanessa Kerry thought the whole thing was a little silly. Kerry's daughter, like her older sister, Alexandra, had appeared lovely and poised during their brief convention turn at the podium. But while Alex, an aspiring filmmaker and actress, seemed to enjoy playing the part of candidate's daughter, Vanessa was still having trouble saying goodbye to her private life. She traveled under an assumed name and, in the early days of the campaign, sometimes ran from well-wishers at airports. She had dropped out of Harvard Medical School for the year, partly to avoid the stares of her own teachers. Moving from her apartment in late June, she had been accosted by a man who said, "Hey, you look just like that Kerry girl." Lugging a bureau, dressed in a stained T shirt, Vanessa replied, "You know, I get that all the time." "Don't worry about it," said the stranger. "She's not that bad-looking." (Kerry told the story to her father. When he got over laughing, he teased her mercilessly, repeating whenever she was cranky or sulky: "Don't worry about it, you're not that bad-looking.")

Now, as she hurried along a hiking path down the Grand Canyon, trying to get ahead of the press gaggle and enjoy the scenery without feeling like a TV prop, campaign handlers kept whispering, "You should hang back, walk with the family." Vanessa was unhappily muttering to herself about the absurdity of staged family vacations, but the reporters weren't noticing. They were too busy watching Teresa.

On the campaign bus, there had been constant talk of marital spats between the candidate and his wife for the past several days: Teresa wasn't speaking to her husband, she wanted to go home, she was driving the Secret Service crazy with her chronic lateness, she was having perhaps a glass of wine too many at night. Or so it appeared to the traveling press corps and not a few of Kerry's own entourage. (Teresa's friends scoffed at the suggestion that she overimbibed; they described her as a European bon vivant who enjoyed a glass of wine or two.) That morning at the Grand Canyon, the press corps was atwitter over the rumor published in the Drudge Report that the night before in Flagstaff, Ariz., Teresa had requested separate accommodations from Kerry, on the other side of the Little America Hotel. ("It's wrong, they did not have separate rooms," said Kerry aide Michael Meehan.) On the Grand Canyon hike, Teresa was soon complaining of migraines and telling her husband she couldn't walk anymore.

The happy-family-vacation scenario was disintegrating in plain view. The candidate tried to bravely soldier on, pulling along his sullen wife and children to show them the magnificent condors flying overhead. It was a losing battle; he was the only one who looked interested.

CONTINUED>>
Page 2: Strains and Stumbles in Kerry Camp
Page 3: Kerry Campaign Trumped By Old Tricks
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