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THE LONG WAR OF JOHN KERRY
by JOE KLEIN
Can a Massachusetts Brahmin become President?
Issue of 2002-12-02
Posted 2002-11-25


On a rainy October morning, the day after Senator John Forbes Kerry, of Massachusetts, announced that he would reluctantly vote to give President George W. Bush the authority to use lethal force against Iraq, the Senator sat in his Capitol Hill office reminiscing about another war and another speech. The war was Vietnam.

The speech was one he had delivered upon graduating from Yale, in 1966. Kerry was twenty-two at the time; he had already enlisted in the Navy. As one of Yale's champion debaters and president of the Political Union, he had been selected to deliver the Class Oration, traditionally an Ivy-draped nostalgia piece. But the speech he gave, hastily rewritten at the last moment, was anything but traditional: it was a broad, passionate criticism of American foreign policy, including the war that he would soon be fighting.

I'd been trying to get a copy of this speech for several weeks, but Kerry's staff had been unable to find one. There seemed a parallel—at least, a convenient journalistic analogy—to his statement the day before about Iraq: two questionable wars, both of which Kerry had decided to support, conditionally, even as he raised serious doubts about their propriety.

Kerry bristled at the analogy. He assumed that a familiar accusation was inherent in the comparison: that he was guilty of speaking boldly but acting politically. And it is true that from his earliest days in public life—a career that seems to have begun in prep school—even John Kerry's closest friends have teased him about his overactive sense of destiny, his theatrical sense of gravitas, and his initials, which are the same as John Fitzgerald Kennedy's. "I signed up for the Navy in 1965, the year before the Class Oration," Kerry said now, with quiet vehemence. He repeated it, for emphasis: "I signed up for the Navy. There was very little thought of Vietnam. It seemed very far away. There was no connection between my decision to serve and the speech I made."

But there was a connection, of sorts. Kerry had made the decision along with three close friends, classmates and fellow-members of Yale's not so secret society, Skull and Bones: David Thorne, Richard Pershing, and Frederick Smith. All came from families with strong traditions of military and public service. Pershing was the grandson of General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. (Richard Pershing was killed during the Tet offensive.) "Our decisions were all about our sense of duty," Fred Smith, who went on to found Federal Express, recalls. "We were the Kennedy generation—you know, 'Pay any price, bear any burden.' That was the ethos."

The week before John Kerry delivered the Class Oration, the fifteen Skull and Bones seniors went off on a final jaunt together to a fishing camp on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Fred Smith remembers spending the days idly, playing cards and drinking beer. David Thorne, however, says that there was a serious running discussion about Vietnam. "There were four of us going to war in a matter of months. That tends to concentrate the mind. This may have been the first time we really seriously began to question Vietnam. It was: 'Hey, what the hell is going on over there? What the hell are we in for?' "

Kerry's reaction to these discussions was intense and precipitate. He decided to rewrite the speech. His original address, which can still be found in the 1966 Yale yearbook, was "rather sophomoric," he recalled. "I decided that I couldn't give that speech. I couldn't get up there and go through that claptrap. I remember there was no electricity in the cabin. I remember staying up with a candle writing my speech in the wee hours of the night, rewriting and rewriting. It reflected what I felt and what we were all thinking about. It got an incredible reception, a standing ovation."

The Senator and I were sitting in wing chairs in his office, which is rather more elegant than those of his peers—the walls painted Chinese red with a dark lacquer glaze and covered with nineteenth-century nautical prints. There is a marble fireplace, a couch, a coffee table, the wing chairs: in sum, a room with a distinct sensibility, a reserved and private place.

Kerry seemed weary. Our conversation was interrupted, from time to time, by phone calls from his supporters—most of whom seemed unhappy about his Iraq vote. At one point, he had to rush over to the Senate chamber to vote on another issue. When he returned, we began to talk about his time in Vietnam. He served as the captain of a small "swift boat," ferrying troops up the rivers of the Mekong Delta.

He was wounded three times in four months, and then sent home—the policy in Vietnam was three wounds and you're out. He received a Bronze Star, for saving the life of a Special Forces lieutenant who had fallen overboard during a firefight, and a Silver Star. The latter, a medal awarded only for significant acts of courage, was the result of a three-boat counterattack Kerry had led against a Vietcong position on a riverbank. He had chased down, shot, and killed a man that day. The man had been carrying a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "You want to see what one of those can do to a boat?" he asked. "A couple of weeks after I left Vietnam, a swift boat captained by my close friend Don Droz—we called him Dinky—got hit with a B-40. He was killed. I still have the photo here somewhere."

Kerry began to rummage around his desk and eventually pulled out a manila folder. "Here it is," he said. The boat was mangled beyond recognition. "Oh my, look at this!" He held up a sheaf of yellowed, double-spaced, typewritten pages. It looked like an old college term paper, taken from a three-ring binder. "It's the original copy of my Class Oration. What on earth is it doing here?"

He sat down again and studied the speech, transfixed. Then he began to read it aloud, curious, nostalgic, embarrassed by, and yet impressed with, his undergraduate eloquence. He read several pages. Worried looks passed between the two staff members who were in the room: Was he going to read the whole damn thing?

" 'It is misleading to mention right and wrong in this issue, for to every thinking man, the semantics of this contest often find the United States right in its wrongness and wrong in its rightness,' " he read, swiftly, without oratorical flourish. " 'Neither am I arguing against the war itself. . . . I am criticizing the propensity—the ease—which the United States has for getting into this kind of situation—' "

He stopped and looked up, shaking his head, "Boy, was I a sophisticated nabob!" The two staff members exhaled. "You have to laugh at this now. . . . Do I even want this out?"

But he continued reading, unable to stop himself. He skipped several pages in the middle, then recited the entire peroration.

The Class Oration says a lot about John Kerry, who will soon announce his intention to run for President of the United States. It is a nuanced assessment of American foreign policy at a crossroads—delivered at a moment when the political leaders of the country should have been questioning basic assumptions but weren't. Kerry did, however—a year before the antiwar movement began to gather strength and coherence. The speech was notable for its central thesis: "The United States must . . . bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention"—against Communism—"that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world."

Kerry went on:

"In most emerging nations, the spectre of imperialist capitalism stirs as much fear and hatred as that of communism. To compound the problem, we continue to push forward our will only as we see it and in a fashion that only leads to more mistakes and deeper commitment. Where we should have instructed, it seems we did not; where we should have been patient, it seems we were not; where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not. . . . Never in the last twenty years has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today."


There is, nonetheless, something slightly off-putting about the speech. The portentous quality, the hijacking of Kennedyesque tics and switchbacks ("Where we should have instructed . . ."), the absence of irony, the absence of any sort of joy—all these rankle, and in a familiar way. This has been the knock against John Kerry for the past thirty years, ever since he captured the nation's attention as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group whose members staged a dramatic protest in Washington in April of 1971, camping out on the Mall and tossing their medals and combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps.

He seemed the world's oldest twenty-seven-year-old that week, even though he was dressed in scruffy combat fatigues, his extravagant thatch of black hair gleaming, flopping over his ears and eyebrows—he looked a bit like the pre-hallucinogenic George Harrison. Kerry spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in much the same style as he'd spoken at Yale. His testimony was brilliant and succinct: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

He was an immediate celebrity. He was also an immediate target of the Nixon Administration. Years later, Chuck Colson—who was Nixon's political enforcer—told me, "He was a thorn in our flesh. He was very articulate, a credible leader of the opposition. He forced us to create a counterfoil. We found a vet named John O'Neill and formed a group called Vietnam Veterans for a Just Peace. We had O'Neill meet the President, and we did everything we could do to boost his group."

Kerry launched a national speaking tour; he spoke to the National Baptist Convention, was named an honorary member of the United Auto Workers, and spoke on campuses across the country. He was the subject of a "60 Minutes" profile. Morley Safer asked him if he wanted to be President of the United States. "No," he said with a chuckle, after an instant's surprise and calculation.

Serious as all this was—he was, for a moment, as Colson suggests, the most compelling leader of the antiwar movement—there was something uneasy, and perhaps even faintly risible, about it, too, particularly the ill-disguised Kennedy playacting.

Even as Kerry delivered his Senate testimony, he distorted his natural speech to sound more like that earlier J.F.K.; for example, he occasionally "ahsked" questions. (Kerry had befriended Robert F. Kennedy's speechwriter Adam Walinsky and consulted him about the speech, bouncing phrases and ideas off the old master.)

This sort of thing had been a source of merriment for his classmates ever since prep school, where the joke was that his initials really stood for "Just For Kerry." He had volunteered to work on Edward Kennedy's 1962 Senate campaign, had dated Janet Auchincloss, who was Jacqueline Kennedy's half sister, had hung out at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss family's estate in Newport, and had gone sailing with the President. A practical joke—one of many, apparently—was played on him in the 1966 Yale yearbook: he was listed as a member of the Young Republicans. After his 1971 antiwar début in Washington, his fellow-Yalie Garry Trudeau lampooned him in the "Doonesbury" comic strip.

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Kerry's physical daring—as a skier, a windsurfer, a motorcycle rider, a stunt pilot—remains a source of wonder among his friends. He was, apparently, something of a cowboy in Vietnam as well. His old crewmates remember that he played rock music over the boat's loudspeaker system—the Doors, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix—before they went on patrol. "He starred in that Marlon Brando movie, 'Apocalypse Now,' long before they ever made it," Gene Thorson, a former crewmate, says.

To release the tension after a trip up the river, Kerry would often instigate chicken races between the swift boats, cutting over each other's wakes. He also organized water-balloon battles. Once, his three-boat squadron attacked an American supply ship at night with flares. "The brass was not too happy about that," Kerry recalled. "But what were they going to do to us, send us to Vietnam?"

Admiral Elmo Zumwalt later joked that he wasn't sure if he should give Kerry the Silver Star or court-martial him for his actions on February 28, 1969. Kerry had ignored standard operating procedure as his squadron ferried troops up the river that day. "He had talked to me about trying something different," Mike Medeiros, a crew member from San Leandro, California, said. "He said he was tired of just going up the river and getting shot at. He asked me what I thought about turning to attack the enemy positions if we took fire and no one was hurt. I said it might not be a bad idea."

If he turned his boats toward the shore, Kerry believed, he would transform a long, horizontal target into a narrower, vertical one. "It would concentrate both of our machine guns directly on the point of fire and surprise the hell out of them," and it would keep the twenty soldiers each boat was carrying astern out of the line of fire, Kerry recalled. "When the firing began, I gave the order to turn and—phoom!—we just went in and beached and took them by complete surprise, and we routed them and we didn't take a wound."

As Kerry's boat crashed ashore, a lone Vietcong stood up holding a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "When he first stood up, he froze, because he didn't expect to see us staring him in the face, literally ten yards away." The man was wounded by one of Kerry's crewmates and began to run; Kerry leaped off the boat and chased him. "I didn't want to let him get away. I didn't want him to run away and turn around with an active B-40 and take us out. There but for the grace of God . . . The guy could have pulled the trigger and I wouldn't be here today."

It has been widely, and inaccurately, reported that Kerry filmed this and other actions with an 8-mm. movie camera. The films were in fact mostly travelogues and clowning-around shots on the boat. More than a few other vets recorded their adventures in Vietnam. "We did it for our families," Kerry told me. "We wanted to have a record of where we'd been. We wanted them to know what it had been like if we got killed."

As always, however, there was a sense that Kerry saw these home movies as part of a larger, more heroic film. "He was very much aware of the stage," David Thorne says. "He knew that his actions in Vietnam might have some bearing on his future life. But none of us could anticipate the impact—the psychological trauma—the war would have on us. John's been able to live with the demons of combat, but they are there and they've given his life shape and meaning in a way that he never anticipated." Thorne went on, "In a way, it was harder coming back than being there. You know, we got home, and it was, 'What the $%&! was that all about?' Vietnam Veterans Against the War was one big T-group. People like Jane Fonda wanted to make it into a political movement, but all we wanted to do was hug each other."

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Kerry is understandably loath to talk about the details of the marriage; his reticence is compounded by the fact that Julia was suffering from severe depression. She eventually wrote a book about the illness, called "You Are Not Alone." It began:

February 1980, five months after my thirty-sixth birthday, my mind ravaged by corroding voices, my body defeated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on the edge of my bed minutes from taking my life. . . . I could no longer pretend I was of use to my husband or my children. . . . I knew that, once I was gone, my family and friends would be relieved of the burden of my incompetency.

They separated in 1982, after Kerry decided to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Julia's mental condition was precarious, but Kerry chose to push ahead with the race. "When I get focussed and set out to do something, I'm pretty good at staying focussed," Kerry told me. "You don't want to let yourself down, you know what I'm saying? One loss is enough. You don't have to screw up everything else." He went on to say that there were days during the campaign when he and Julia would have wrenching morning discussions about their children and their future living arrangements, "and then, in the afternoon, I'd have to put on a smiling face and say, 'Hi, I'm John Kerry, I'd like you to vote for me,' and I'd feel empty inside doing it. It was not an easy process."

-snip-

But the third reel of John Kerry's Heroic Life Story was about to begin; and it started where the first had ended, in Vietnam.

"When he ran for lieutenant governor in 1982, John didn't want to have anything to do with Vietnam," Cameron Kerry, the Senator's younger brother, who managed the campaign, says. "He didn't even want us to show a picture of him in uniform in the campaign ads."

Vietnam was inescapable, of course. In 1984, Jim Shannon had deployed a group of anti-Kerry veterans; their attacks were effective and discomfiting. The Kerry campaign found no effective response until after the final debate, and then the antidote arrived by accident. Shannon brought up Vietnam and, in effect, called Kerry a hypocrite because he'd fought in a war he didn't believe in.

The next day, Kerry headquarters was deluged with calls from infuriated veterans: Shannon hadn't fought in Vietnam; they hadn't been so lucky—and they hadn't "chosen" to go to war, either. In their final debate, Kerry asked for an apology, and Shannon said, "That dog won't hunt."

An emotional rally of Vietnam veterans had already been held at the State House, and now a flying squad, which called itself the Doghunters, was organized to confront Shannon. It has been a fixture in every Kerry campaign since. "After the 1984 election, the Doghunters had a black-tie dinner at my house, and the only thing we didn't drink was the Aqua Velva," John Marttila, a political consultant who has worked on every Kerry campaign, says. "They've had regular dinners ever since. When you see John with those guys, you realize what ******** the stuffy, aloof caricature of him is. I think he may be at his best, his most comfortable, with other Vietnam veterans."

Over time, that proved to be true in the Senate as well. In 1991, the Majority Leader, George Mitchell, of Maine, asked Kerry to chair a committee to investigate the possibility that American prisoners of war were still being held in Vietnam. The Rambo films were in vogue then; various paramilitary charlatans were raising money from the families of those missing in action to go on "rescue" missions in Vietnam; Newsweek had published, on its cover, a photograph of three Americans allegedly held in a Vietnamese prison camp (the picture was soon found to have been doctored).

"Nobody wanted to be on that damn committee," Bob Kerrey said. "It was an absolute loser. Everyone knew that the P.O.W. stories were fabrications, but no one wanted to offend the vet community." George Mitchell and John Kerry began twisting arms. Kerrey, John McCain, Chuck Robb, and Hank Brown—all the other Vietnam combat vets then in the Senate—agreed to serve on the committee, as did Daniel Inouye and Bob Dole, who were Second World War veterans. (Al Gore was the only Vietnam-era vet who refused.)

"I wasn't very close to John before that," John McCain recalls. "I thought he was standoffish and pedantic. Actually, no—I was the standoffish one, because I didn't agree with what he'd done, the protest where they threw away their medals." In fact, McCain had campaigned against Kerry during the general election of 1984. "But I gained a great deal of respect, and affection, for John during those P.O.W.-M.I.A. hearings. He was a lot more mature, a lot more patient than I was." Kerry was especially helpful when some of the more extreme P.O.W.-movement types testified before the committee. "I'd see the way some of these guys were exploiting the families of those missing in action, and I'd begin to get angry," McCain went on, "and John would sense it and put his hand on my arm to calm me down before I'd lose"—McCain paused and smiled—"my effectiveness."

Kerry and McCain went to Vietnam together; they visited the cell where McCain had been held as a prisoner of war. "Just to stand there alone in this tiny cell with McCain, just to look at this guy who was now a United States senator, and my friend, in the very place where he'd been tortured, and kept for so many years, not knowing if he might live," Kerry began a sentence one day, sitting in his Capitol office—and then he seemed unable to finish the thought, unwilling to break through his public reserve. "We found this common ground in this far-off place."

After more than a year of research and eight trips to Vietnam, Kerry managed to cajole a unanimous vote from his committee—including two Republicans, Bob Smith, of New Hampshire, and Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, who had been banging the P.O.W. drum the loudest—in favor of a report saying it was very unlikely that any Americans had been left behind in Vietnam. It was the sort of labor-intensive, quietly useful work that other senators notice and respect. The committee's unanimity made it possible for Bill Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam, in 1995. In a practical way, Kerry had at last brought an end to the war that had dominated so much of his adult life.

There was a personal consequence as well. The time Kerry spent with McCain—and, to a lesser extent, with Bob Kerrey and Chuck Robb—completed the transformation that the Doghunters had begun. He was no longer a political loner; he was, finally, part of a distinct, bipartisan, and emotionally intense group: the Vietnam combat veterans in the United States Senate. (Max Cleland, of Georgia, and Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska joined the group in 1996; Kerrey and Robb departed in 2000.) They took common positions on veterans' issues, and sometimes on questions of war and peace, but they were most passionately united when one or another of them was attacked.

Remarkably, most have had aspects of their service called into question over the past decade—evidence that Vietnam remains the primary political battlefield of the baby-boom generation. Kerry's service was questioned during his 1996 Senate race against Governor William Weld; a column in the Boston Globe asserted that his actions had been imprudent and excessive in the battle for which he received the Silver Star. Earlier, in 1984, the Wall Street Journal reported that Kerry had tossed away his combat ribbons, not his medals, at the 1971 protest in Washington. Kerry had never implied otherwise (indeed, the protesters that day had tossed all sorts of things—dog tags, photographs, discharge papers, insignia), but he had complicated the story with an excess of honesty, recalling that he'd also tossed several medals that had been given him by veterans who were unable to make the trip. The journalistic shorthand became: Kerry tossed someone else's medals.

The Doghunters came to Kerry's defense in both cases, and the stories had little impact. Others in the Senate caucus didn't get off so easily. There were the attacks on McCain by pro-Bush veterans in 2000, which helped scuttle his Presidential campaign in South Carolina. And then, in the spring of 2001, Bob Kerrey was accused of participating in a massacre of Vietnamese women and children. "John called and asked me to go to New York to help Bob get through it," Tom Vallely, a veteran and longtime Kerry friend who advised the P.O.W.-M.I.A. committee, said. "I stayed there for several weeks, helping Bob with the press strategy, doing whatever I could."
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The article concludes: