COLUMBIA, S.C. -- When Sen. John F. Kerry shopped his presidential wares
in a handsome old brick house here one balmy Sunday afternoon this
winter, he attracted an enviable cross section of South Carolina's
Democratic elite.
There was the ex-governor, there was the minority leader of the South
Carolina House of Representatives, there was the congressman who might
be the kingmaker in the state's landmark primary election next March.
But the most important man at Kerry's party was the one who didn't quite
belong to this world of activists, politicos and elected officials
crowded into the 1890s-vintage quarters of a well-connected law firm
near the capitol.
David Alston, a chemical operator at a local nuclear plant and a Baptist
minister, was a cut more formal in his brown plaid suit than most of the
crowd basking in 60-degree breezes around the latticed and columned
front porch.
Sturdy-looking and down-to-earth, Alston took the microphone, skipped
the preliminaries and carried the meeting straight back to the dangerous
world he once shared with Kerry, a 50-foot-long Navy "swift boat" in the
jungle estuaries of Vietnam.
"Down in the Mekong Delta, we lived together, we fought together, we
bled together and we survived together," said Alston. "Whether we were
Democratic or Republican was not the issue," he said. "The issues at
that time were trust, courage, judgment and character." Alston attached
those attributes to Kerry and introduced his friend with no further
ceremony.
Without David Alston -- without the personal link to war, that is, and
all the political promise and complication it embodies for him -- John
Kerry would be just another Democrat with big ambitions. Instead,
Kerry's time in combat sets him apart from the other contestants for the
right to challenge the wartime commander-in-chief of a nation
transformed by terrorism.
If Kerry's war medals are solid gold campaign credentials, however, his
war politics are a more ambiguous alloy. From Vietnam to the Balkans to
the battle just undertaken in Iraq -- Kerry's positions on the use of
American force are full of compromise, complexity and revision. They are
a lens on the whole of Kerry's long public record. To those who like
him, Kerry's record is subtle, intelligent and studiously built; to
those who don't, it is cunning, opportunistic and ripe for exploitation.
"He's trying to seem like a raging moderate but his record is quite
different," said Rob Gray, a Massachusetts consultant who worked on
former Republican Gov. William Weld's losing 1996 campaign against
Kerry. As a supporter of President Bush, said Gray, "I'm not at all
unhappy that John Kerry is the Democratic frontrunner."
But Sen. Edward M. Kennedy said opponents will find Kerry to be a man of
"iron determination" whose ideological appeal is "broad and wide." The
Kerry campaign is "doing well in South Carolina, Iowa, New Hampshire --
all reasonably conservative kinds of states," Kennedy said.
There may be a rough justice in the coincidence of timing that puts
Kerry, the presidential campaign's only combat veteran, in the top tier
of the 2004 Democratic field at a moment when so much in American
politics seems to hang on the outcome of the Iraq war and its aftermath.
Kerry is just one of four candidates who voted last fall to let Mr. Bush
disarm Iraq by force. He is just one of the candidates who have since
deplored Mr. Bush's efforts to build international support for the war.
To some vocally antiwar audiences, Kerry has implied that American
soldiers would be fighting to preserve America's "gluttony of fossil
fuel" -- a charge that he softened during a recent interview.
After Mr. Bush's ultimatum to Saddam Hussein Tuesday night, Kerry said
issued a statement saying that "the administration's handling of the
run-up to war with Iraq could not possibly have been more inept or
self-defeating. President Bush has arrogantly and clumsily squandered
the post 9/11 goodwill and support of the entire civilized world."
The former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, leader of the anti-war candidates,
has sharply criticized Democrats who, like Kerry, voted last fall for "a
blank check" for war and escalated their attacks on Mr. Bush as the
invasion approached.
"There's no inconsistency in that," Kerry said. "I'm in favor of holding
Saddam Hussein accountable," he said. "I'm not responsible for (Bush's)
bad diplomacy."
Kerry alone among the Democratic candidates can link the bitter
experience of Vietnam to his increasingly stinging blasts at Mr. Bush.
"David Alston and I will tell you," Kerry told his listeners in Columbia
last month, "as men who fought in a war in which we lost legitimacy and
lost the consent of the American people, I never want to see that happen
again to the young people of this nation."
This is the other side of Kerry's Vietnam persona: A passionate opponent
to war, captured in his now-famous protest of April 1971. A 27-year-old
in camouflage fatigues and an overgrown boy's regular haircut, he made a
short, galvanizing speech to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and
joined other veterans in ritually discarding some military ribbons and
medals on the steps of the Capitol.
Kerry kept his own medals at home, it turned out, tossing away only his
ribbons and somebody else's medals. The episode has long inspired Kerry
skeptics to sense something phony about him, or at least a weakness for
playing all things to all people.
Presidential candidates are doomed, of course, to reprise every answer
to every question ever raised about them. Once again, therefore, Kerry
faces the question -- on Vietnam three decades ago, on Iraq today, on
any number of issues between then and now -- of whether he likes to have
things both ways.
So far, Kerry is responding with the good cheer of a man who is on a
roll. Or a man, to borrow the ecclesiastical term that finds its way
into so many Kerry speeches these days, who is blessed.
He spoke at length about his career and candidacy during a March 11
interview in his Capitol "hideaway," a private office decorated with
patriotic posters from World War II and concert posters of Bruce
Springsteen and the Grateful Dead.
Twenty-six days after surgery to remove a cancerous prostate, Kerry was
back on the campaign trail with a clean bill of health. He looked hale
and moved without obvious pain, but still kept one leg elevated as he
sat for long periods in a gold wing chair.
"I see no inconsistency," Kerry said of protesting the Vietnam War while
cherishing the decorations he took home from it. "Look, I'm proud of the
medals I won," said Kerry. "Throwing back the ribbons and medals was a
symbolic gesture to display show to people anger and frustration" about
a war he came to oppose.
Maybe Sen. Claiborne Pell was the only person in that jammed Senate
hearing room who could have imagined Kerry, 22 years later, in a run for
the White House. Pell, who had also turned from supporter to foe of the
Vietnam War, practically invited the Yale graduate to run for the Senate.
Kerry has some patrician bloodlines in common with Pell, along with the
cultured accent. But Kerry salts his speech with New Age politicisms
like "holistic" and "vetting the issues" that were surely not encouraged
by the grammarians at St. Paul's, the boarding school he attended in
Concord, N.H.
Kerry sprang on his mother's side from prominent old-line Yankees, the
Forbeses. Kerry's grandfather was Frederick A. Kerry, born Fritz Kohn, a
Jewish immigrant, in 1905, from a corner of the old Austro-Hungarian
empire, who fatally shot himself in 1921.
Early in his career, Kerry seemed to encourage the idea that he was part
Irish on his father's side -- not an unhelpful pedigree in political
Massachusetts. That myth was buried this winter when the Boston Globe
published a thorough genealogy.
Kerry has said he has always made clear that he has no Irish blood, but
the Boston press has painted a cloudier picture: Yes, Kerry's office has
repeatedly corrected the record on Kerry's non-Irishness. But sometimes
Kerry has embroidered on the legend of Irish John.
("He is, he will admit, half-WASP in addition to being Irish on his
father's side," The Providence Journal said in a 1985 story that Kerry
never corrected.)
In any event, Kerry exorcised his Hibernian ghosts last week in South
Boston with his surprise cameo at an annual St. Patrick's Day breakfast
for Massachusetts pols. "So who said I don't have the matzoh balls to be
here?" the senator said. To laughter and cheers, Kerry declared himself
"Scottish, Scots-Irish, English, Jewish, Austrian, Hungarian, Czech."
His family kept him largely in the dark, evidently, on large and
powerful chapters of its story -- including his grandfather's Jewishness
and his suicide.
Kerry's father, whose World War II service in the Army Air Corps he
often invokes in speeches, was a diplomat, so the future senator, born
in 1943, did much of his growing up and his schooling (including studies
in French, Italian and Spainish) in post-war Europe. That environment
opened his eyes early, as he has often said, to the human stakes in war
and peace.
Young Kerry's seriousness extended beyond wordly things. "I was very
religious," he said, and steeped in Roman Catholic rituals as an altar
before the Vatican reforms of the 1960s.
To prove it, Kerry rattles off the Lord's Prayer in Latin: "Pater
noster, qui est in coeli . . . " He even pronounces the Catholic-style
soft-C sound as "ch" in the word for "heaven," rather than the hard-C
preferred in prep-school Latin.
While Kerry wore his gold St. Christopher medal to Vietnam, he did not
escape a crisis of faith over his encounters with the dark side of
humanity's dark side. He came in time, he said, to find solace in
spiritual inquiries, especially St. Paul's writings on how "losses and
pain in life" are reconciled by "the good and loving God."
Kerry said he is a church-going Catholic today. He will not say whether
he obtained an annulment of his first marriage, to Julia Thorne, which
ended after 12 years in 1988. Kerry did say, however, that his "current
marriage is in good graces with the church." He was married in 1995 to
Teresa Heinz, an outspoken -- sometimes very outspoken -- liberal
activist who was the widow of Sen. John Heinz, a Pennsylvania Republican
and heir to the ketchup fortune.
During his school years, Kerry played lacrosse and hockey and still
skates in a Washington no-check league occasionally -- and "very well,
for a guy of almost 60," according to league director Bill Wellington.
You can even see a picture of Kerry with his Windsurfing board in the
latest issue of Vogue.
As a teenager, Kerry also played bass guitar in a band that specialized
in what he called "the worst stuff." (Consumer Warning: The man who
wants to be your next president thinks the wan folk tune,
"Greensleeves," was rock 'n' roll. He simultaneously cringed and
giggled, moreover, as he owned up to the name of his band, which may
have sounded cool in the pre-Beatles era: The Electras.)
As a Yale undergraduate, Kerry said he answered President Kennedy's call
to serve his country, working briefly in Mississippi as a voter
registration volunteer, leading the debating society and signing up for
the Navy's Officer Candidate School in Newport.
Kerry said he sought out the dangerous duty on the light Navy patrol
craft known as swift boats for two reasons. First, he said, he had spent
"every summer of my life, from the age of 3" around boats, family
retreats on the Massachusetts islands and shore.
Second, he said, "I wanted a command," something available to junior
offices on swift boats.
In Vietnam, Kerry was meticulous about the scut work that helped to keep
the crew alive on missions as many as 30 miles up rivers into enemy-held
jungle. He inspected guns for cleanliness, checked fuel and ammunition
supplies, dogged his sailors to keep the engine in good working order.
But Kerry was also capable of instant, even audacious decisions in
combat. The best-known was the order to turn his swift directly into
enemy fire during one attack and drive it onto the riverbank. The crew
routed the small enemy force during that fight, and Kerry chased down
and killed a man armed with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher.
That action, a sharp departure from standard procedure on patrol, won
Kerry the Silver Star. Kerry said emphatically that it was not a "burst
of adrenaline" but a carefully planned tactical decision.
BACK HOME, Kerry's Senate appearance was a milestone of the antiwar
movement.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" he demanded
of the Foreign Relations Committee. "How do you ask a man to be the last
man to die for a mistake?" Pell said in later years that he saw the
makings of a great politician in Kerry.
For Kerry, it defined the next, heady stage of a political career that,
briefly, seemed to have no limits.
But he had a load of mistakes yet to make -- and a good few enemies --
during the 14 years before his election to the Senate. First, and most
humbling to the garlanded hero of the spring protests of '71, was his
run for the House a year later.
Merrimack Valley mill towns that rivaled Fall River and New Bedford for
economic bleakness.
Kerry transformed victory in a crowded Democratic primary into Election
Day repudiation at the hands of a now-forgotten Republican who held the
seat for just one term. Kerry did not just lose votes from job-hungry
French and Italians of the Merrimack Valley, he also managed to leave a
lasting impression with some anti-war allies that the cause, like his
combat record, was just a rung on the Kerry career ladder.
Watching sympathetically was Charlie Lyons, then an 18-year-old
political neophyte, now a veteran Arlington, Mass., selectman.
"John Kerry was a real inspiration to a lot of us. Back in '71 where I
come from, you were considered a communist if you didn't stand up for
our boys in Vietnam." But Kerry's views on the war carried great weight
because he was a son of privilege who had volunteered for combat and
acquitted himself honorably.
"But John wasn't as approachable when he was younger. He was always so
erudite and he let you know it," Lyons said.
Lyons said Kerry came late to the understanding that the average Joe
thinks of politics: "Hey, I want my pothole fixed" or "My kids aren't
going to a quality school if the roof is leaking in the school.' "
Kerry told friends, presciently, that it would take him a decade to
recover from a congressional run that he says today, half-jokingly, "I
maybe should never have made."
He went to Boston College Law School, became a prosecutor, started a
family (he and Julia Thorne have two grown daughters), and waited his
political turn.
It came in 1982with a comparatively painless campaign for lieutenant
governor as ticket-mate of Michael S. Dukakis. He still draws on his
experience in that thankless office, if only to prove that John Kerry
can sell a punch line. When Virginia's lieutenant governor happened to
be on hand at a Democratic meeting in Richmond last month, Kerry told
about the man who was once seated at dinner beside the future president,
Calvin Coolidge:
"What do you do?" asked the man.
"Lieutenant governor of Massachusetts," said Coolidge.
"Well, tell me all about the job," said the man.
"I just did," said Coolidge.
In 1984, when Sen. Paul E. Tsongas cut short his Senate career for
health reasons, Kerry jumped in. This time he was ready, despite some
early enthusiasm among the professional pols for James M. Shannon, a
bright young congressman who was the fair-haired boy of Speaker Thomas
P. O'Neill Jr.
Kerry had statewide organizing and fundraising experience, and he had a
wicked counterpunch. Hours after Shannon made the mistake of criticizing
Kerry on Vietnam, "We had every vet in the state screaming for Jimmy's
blood," recalled Thomas J. Vallely, a Vietnam veteran and former state
rep from Boston who worked on the Kerry campaign.
Shannon never recovered and Kerry won his Senate seat that fall.
KERRY WAS fated to labor in the great shadow of Kennedy, the leader,
with Tip O'Neill, of one of the nation's most skilled and senior
congressional delegations. So not only did gravitate to the issue haven
of the Foreign Relations Committee, his services were not much in demand
from the cities and towns and interest groups of a state so well served
by the rest of the delegation.
Kerry plunged into his party's signature world issues in the Reagan era:
the short-lived movement to "freeze" production of nuclear weapons;
opposition to the "Contra War" against Nicaragua's Sandinista rebels;
the effort to replace the dictatorship in the Philippines that the U.S.
had long supported.
Kerry also become an expert on the international networks that fuel
terrorism -- an issue of great saliency today. And he won lasting
respect from many colleagues, including his fellow Vietnam veteran,
Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, for what appeared at first to be
a thankless task: Getting to the bottom of the never-proven reports that
Americans prisoners of war and missing in action were still alive in
Vietnam.
Kerry's committee delivered a unanimous finding that quelled the
emotional POW-MIA issue, proably making possible President Bill
Clinton's diplomatic recognition of Vietnam -- which, in turn,
symbolically closed the book on the nation's most divisive war.
On domestic issues, Kerry used a seat on the Commerce Committee, for
example, to help the Coast Guard, Amtrak and other regionally important
issues. Along the way he amassed a voting record that independent
scorekeepers rank among the Senate's most liberal.
That has obviously worked in Massachusetts. But as presidential
candidate Dukakis learned painfully in 1988, pleasing Bay State voters
is not a sure ticket to the White House. All the same, Kerry can point
to some positions that separate him from Kennedy-style liberalism. He
was an early backer of federal budget-balancing mandates responsibility.
Like Clinton and most Republicans, Kerry has broken with labor on key
free-trade votes.
And Kerry was part of the large, bipartisan majority that passed
Clinton's bill to scale back welfare in 1996. That is perhaps the best
example of how Democrats have neutralized issues that the Republicans
had used to bash "welfare state" liberal candidates from Hubert Humphrey
in 1968 to Dukakis in 1988.
But for all his crafting of a Democratic pragmatism for the new century,
Kerry could not shuck a Dukakis-like knack for irritating the people who
-- on paper, at least -- should have loved him best: home-state
Democratic colleagues.
"There used to be a time," said Medford Mayor Michael J. McGlynn, "when
you'd call the senator's office and you'd get a form letter back.
"Six years ago when he was running for reelection a number of us --
Democratic mayors and politicians -- chose to do the minimal amount of
work for him," McGlynn recalled.
Kerry beat Weld anyway, in a battle of heavyweights that featured a
series of sharp, issue-oriented debates available nationwide on cable TV.
McGlynn recalled what happened next. "It was the day after the election,
Senator Kerry called in six of us who were mayors at the time and asked
if we could sit down and talk issues with him -- even though we'd been
trying to get our issues to him the previous two elections."
"Well, the senator heard us and since that time, for every minor project
or major national issue for cities, he's been our champion."
The mayors cite all kinds of examples of Kerry's sudden adherence to
O'Neill's dictum that all politics is local. But McGlynn most cherishes
a more intimate gesture that told him that Kerry had more heart that he
often appeared to have.
"I had a buddy, Fred Miraglia, an old Navy guy, who was dying of Lou
Gehrig's disease and Kerry heard about it and when the Tall Ships came
to Boston last July, he gave me his ticket for Freddie."
For practical pols like these, it's not much of an issue whether Kerry's
conversion to the doctrine of local politics was conveniently timed for
a national campaign -- and therefore suspect. They like the results.
Kerry admits today, "I must have been doing something wrong" to alienate
some natural allies. "I didn't come to the job steeped in the background
of it," he explained. "I didn't have a mentor."
The major leaguers -- and Kerry certainly qualifies -- tend to have a
capacity to learn from blunders, as Kerry seems to have done through his
career. He was 53 years old when the Weld scare drove him to mend fences
in his own back yard.
"He's not a dancer anymore. Sure, he's got some liberal ideas, but he's
also got some middle-of-the-road ideas and he puts them out there," said
Mayor John Barrett III of North Adams.
AT THE FANCY brick house in Columbia last month, Kerry's bond with his
old crewmate David Alston distinguished the rest of the prosperous crowd
-- half of them decked, it seemed, in Kerry's professional-casual
uniform of the day: open-necked Oxford shirt; tan trousers with sharp
pleats; soft-leather loafers; blue blazer, gold buttons optional.
The moment showed how Kerry's personal testimony of war seems to be the
one topic for which he can trade his tendency to windy self-absorption
for a simple, concrete eloquence that he does not often muster for
affairs of state.
"This is a guy who was above my head in a gun turret -- a quarter-inch
of aluminum -- and he had a twin 50-caliber machine gun," said Kerry,
hoarse from a cold and too much road.
"These were the big horses on my boat, and he stood up in that turret,
half of him exposed -- completely clear and exposed to the mangrove on
the riverbank of the enemy. And those guns blasted above my head," said
Kerry, gratitude still in his voice for the protective fire all those
years ago.
"We fought under the same flag, we prayed to the same God, and we shared
the same fears, the same exhilerations," Kerry said of the crew of the
94 boat.
They were all "blessed" to live through the war, Kerry said. "And I'll
tell you what we said to each other: 'Every day is extra.' "
John E. Mulligan is the Washington Bureau Chief of The Providence
Journal. He can be reached by e-mail at
jmulligan@belo-dc.com.
