Bob Kerr’s peculiar June 8 column, “One POW worries about another POW,” is a contrived piece, intended to paint Sen. John McCain as possibly suffering from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). In characteristic Kerr fashion, he uses one person’s diagnosis as the basis for his attempt to raise concerns about McCain.

His sole point of reference was a former POW who experienced episodes of anger. He was also previously married, and is a white male. This is enough for the ever-partisan Kerr to proclaim equivalence and for Kerr to pontificate that Senator McCain may suffer from PTSD. Further, Kerr virtuously pronounces that this is a legitimate question.

If Kerr were able to moderate his partisanship, he could recount a few of McCain’s POW experiences. He could tell his readers how McCain served as a POW chaplain, providing a modicum of spiritual comfort to his fellow captives. He could devote a paragraph to McCain’s role in setting and saving a fellow POW’s deliberately broken and mutilated arm. He could write of McCain’s providing urgently needed surgery to a Bangladeshi orphan, now his teenage daughter. He could write of how McCain quietly covered the hospital costs of another Bangladeshi orphan, who was adopted by one of his aides.

But Kerr would rather attempt to raise doubts. He and others would rather comment on McCain’s halting delivery in his speeches. There is no fool-proof formula to use to determine qualifications for the office of president. However, the one attribute each candidate possesses is his character. For me, if not for Kerr, a prime measure of character is doing the right thing when no one is looking. McCain demonstrates that characteristic. This is far more important than some columnist’s splenetic innuendo.

JOSEPH A. MATAIS

Portsmouth