A Lighter Side of John Kerry
Tuesday, August 27, 2002 By: Jonathan Miles
Men's Journal
For years, he'd ridden foreign motorcycles a Triumph Bonneville back during his Navy days; later a Ducati; and then his most recent bike, a two-year-old BMW R1200 but now John Kerry was going American, and going whole hog. On a cool Saturday morning this past April, wearing a leather flight jacket festooned with Navy patches, the junior senator from Massachusetts walked through the glass doors of Harley-Davidson/Buell of Boston and wove his way through a chrome-capped sea of bikes, past Electra Glides and V-Rods, and past the new Dyna Wide Glides, perhaps the most unsubtle entry in the Harley-Davidson line and the senator's next bike. He didn't have to say who he was; with his long, aristocratic face and lantern jaw, and that famous head of salt-and-pepper hair, he was unmistakable. "They're bringing it out front," he was told, and he smiled. After years of shopping performance, John Kerry was opting for style; he was here to claim a Harley.
With its Fat Bob fuel tank, chopper seat and ape-hanger handlebars, the Wide Glide looks like a Harley; badass, low-slung, and garishly chromey. Teresa wouldn't like it, that was for sure, but then, his wife wouldn't like anything he brought home with two wheels hooked to a motor. She'd ridden with him only once, for ten minutes on a shingle-straight road, but that had been enough for her no way she'd be climbing on the back of this one. But, really, it wasn't like he was reckless out there. I don't ride the train, he was always telling her, I don't ride fast. True, he suffered a mild fall years ago, but that was just a few scrapes and scratches he'd endured far worse in the hockey rink.
Out front, atop the bike, he hit the starter button and clunked the bike into first gear, and with the same long wave of his arm he'd perfected at dozens of Boston Saint Patrick's Day parades, Kerry pulled the Wide Glide out onto Revere Beach Parkway, toeing his way through the gears, his grin squeezed by his helmet padding, rumbling his way back home.
"It's just the kink of ride I wanted," Kerry told me later. "It's a straight-up, easygoing, watch-the-country-side-go-by kind of ride. Really, I just got tired of those crotch rockets. All the time feeling like" at this point he leaned forward, extending his fists as if riding, crunching up his face "you're racing. I just got tired of that, being in the racing position."
Metaphors for our own lives are difficult to spot, so it's doubtful John Kerry recognized the faint irony buried in that statement. Astride a motorcycle, Kerry may be weary of the racing position, content these days to lean back and watch the nation roll by him, waves of grain and all. Off that motorcycle, however, the fifty-eight-year-old senator is gearing up for what could prove to be the race of his life with the White House, and the handlebars of the nation, waiting at the finish line.
John Kerry scans the headlines of the morning's Washington Post as a driver rushes him toward a meeting on the Hill. It's just after nine, and Kerry has already done a call-in to Imus and then a call-in to Boston's WBUR, publicizing the attack he's leading against a proposed provision to allow drilling in Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As on most days, Kerry is dressed in a black suit, a baby-blue shirt with double-buttoned cuffs, an orange tie, and slightly scuffed black lace-ups; it's a look of preppy imperfection, even down to his right hand, which today is bandaged. Over the weekend, at the state Democratic convention in Florida, a constituent's fingernail had gouged his hand during a handshake, right where he'd had a sun spot removed. Hundreds of handshakes later, his hand had swelled to the size of a grapefruit. Like motorcycling, politicking is not without its dangers.
Kerry reads the morning papers as quickly as he does everything else, meaning very quickly, muttering as he flips the pages ("Well, that's not good"), but this morning's grim headlines are stalling him: Colin Powell's Mideast peace mission appears to be floundering, the Boston priest scandal is unraveling, and, worst of all, the Post is reporting that U.S. forces somehow allowed Osama bin Laden to escape during the Tora Bora offensive in Afghanistan, something Kerry had been fearing. Kerry grabs his cell phone, dialing as he reads. "Did you see my story in the Post?" he says to a press aide on the other end. "Top of the fold, page one right." He reads bits of it aloud, sentence after sentence seeming to further stoke his anger; this was the worst-case scenario of a military strategy that Kerry had been quietly criticizing for months. "They let him go," he says. "It's disgraceful."
Swearing softly as we slow through a construction zone, Kerry tells me, by way of explanation, "I've been saying this privately for months now, and my staff at times has had to restrain me. They [the Bush administration] talk tough, but it's a risk-averse strategy. Bush gets daily briefings, for God's sake. He should be saying, 'Do we need more troops there, here, where? Do we need more firepower?' " He gazes out the car window as the Capitol comes into view. "Osama bin Laden got away," he says glumly. Pause. "You'd think they've learned some lessons in Vietnam."
This is where he often returns, to Vietnam, and to understand John Kerry his politics, his passions, maybe even his motorcycling you must begin there. As with so many of the men who returned from that war, there is a before and an after in John Kerry's life, and neither quite jibes with the other. The before goes like this: The son of a diplomat father and a mother of undiluted Brahmin lineage, John Forbes Kerry was born in 1943 in Denver, where his father, then an Army Air Forces pilot, was recovering from tuberculosis. His youth followed a typical upper-crust template: Swiss boarding school, New Hampshire's elite St. Paul's School, and then Yale, where Kerry was an avid athlete if a distracted student. Two events during those years would affect his life's heading. First, en route to the dentist at the age of seventeen, Kerry happened upon John F. Kennedy speaking at Boston's North Station; he was transfixed, even obsessed, and rumor has it was soon signing letters with the initials "JFK" (which while technically accurate, struck some classmates as too bald an affection). Second, Kerry enlisted in the Navy after his graduation from Yale in 1966, volunteering for action in Vietnam.
Duty called, Kerry maintains it was as simple as that. "It wasn't as if John went there gung-ho," his younger brother, Cameron, told me. "He wasn't burning to go fight in that war." After Officer Candidate School, the twenty-four-year-old lieutenant, junior grade, offered himself up for Operation Sea Lords, an effort to control the rivers of the Mekong Delta via constant and often improvised "swift boat" patrols gunning up and down the Mekong River and its tributaries. As a skipper, "John Kerry always went for the throat," recalls former crewmate Del Sandusky. "He wanted to be in the middle of the war, wherever it was." In February 1969, a Viet Cong on the shore of the Bay Hap River ambushed Kerry's boat with a B-40 rocket, blowing out the windows. Kerry turned the gunboat toward the fire and thumped it into the bank. Ten feet from shore, the VC popped up with the rocket launcher aimed at the boat; rather than firing, though, he turned and fled into the mangroves. Kerry leapt from the gunboat's bow, chased him behind a hooch, and killed him. Two weeks later, on the same river, an underwater mine exploded beside Kerry's boat, wounding his arm and catapulting one of his crewmen into the water. The riverbanks exploded with machine-gun fire, and snipers took potshots at the man splashing in the river. Kerry turned the boat back upriver, straight into enemy fire, and with a bleeding arm he pulled his man back aboard. "It didn't matter to us that he wanted to get into the shit," Sandusky says. "We knew that he would always get us out of it."
Several weeks later, Lieutenant (j.g.) John Kerry boarded a civilian flight home. His four months in-country had yielded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts (two arm wounds and a bullet in the leg), but something else, too; dead friends, disillusionments, and uneasy doubts about the war from which he was returning. On the long flight across the Pacific, Kerry was jolted from sleep by a nightmare one of a thousand such dreams that would place him back in his gunboat on a jungle river at night, diving to the deck during an ambush, screaming, "Down, down, get down, move," nightmares that even decades later would send him bolting from his bed and crashing into furniture. On that plane home, passengers shifted gingerly away from the uniformed officer, averting their eyes from his. Something is wrong with me, Kerry thought. But is wasn't just him.
And then comes the after. It's never far from him, the war. At one point, I ask him if it's like Checkov's old playwriting adage: If there's a gun onstage in the first act, it must go off in the third. "No, not like that," he says quietly, but the gun always seems to appear, as unpredictably as the nightmares that still dog his sleep (though less frequently now, he says). In Boston, Kerry and I are discussing his poetry, a longtime and private avocation. He begins buoyantly. "I don't claim to be a poet at all; I just like the expression, the form of it," he tells me. "I like Pablo Neruda, who's a great romantic. I like all the Romantics: Percy Shelley and Byron and Keats. I like Kipling; I like to mimic some of that doggerelish stuff. Oh, gosh, obviously Yeats. I used to read poetry on airplanes to get the images, you know? When I was in high school, we formed a poetry group. I don't even know if we had a name, though it was not the Dead Poets Society." It's a joke, but then Kerry slows, and for a moment he seems to amble away somewhere inside his mind, to a place friends and family say he often returns. "One of them," he says, "was a buddy who was killed in Vietnam, Peter Johnson," and the buoyancy is gone. It wasn't a joke after all.
Peter Johnson, Dickie Pershing, Don Droz, Robert Worthington...it was with those ghosts in mind that a twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry, in April 1971, wearing his Navy fatigues, took a seat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Behind him, in the gallery, a longer-haired and scragglier contingent of fellow veterans jostled for space, craning their necks for a better view. In the preceding days, more than three thousand such veterans organized under the banner of Vietnam Veterans Against the War and with Kerry as their spokesman had marched on the Capitol, many in wheelchairs, many on crutches, clamoring for an end to the war from which they'd returned. Kerry, a telegenic speaker with unimpeachable war-hero credentials, had been tapped to give public voice to those nightmares.
"The country doesn't realize it yet," Kerry told the committee, speaking smoothly but with a palpable simmer, "but it has created a monster in the form of thousands of men who have been taught to deal and trade in violence and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history men who have returned with a sense of anger and betrayal that no one so far has been able to grasp."
Most famously, he said: "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?"
These were questions that fanned out across the republic like ripples in a tidal pool, stunning the folks on Main Street and chilling the senators to whom they were posed. And Main Street was stunned anew the next day, when roughly eight hundred vets many openly wweeping others bellowing in rage flung their combat medals, grenadelike, over a six-foot-high fence at the foot of the Capital steps. For Kerry, who was already laying the groundwork for a political career, the decision whether to scatter his medals on the Capital steps was an agonizing one; in the end, he tossed his ribbons over the fence, along with some medals entrusted to him by two other vets who couldn't be there but kept his medals. Since 1984, when The Wall Street Journal first reported his ribbons-not-medals hedge, critics have painted Kerry's compromise as evidence of an opportunistic streak scheming, calculated, and wishy-washy during a time that was none of those things. Kerry has been bristling at the charge for eighteen years now. "I mean, I led that march, I stood up at the goddamn thing, and I took my ribbons off my chest and I threw them over the fence," he said in 1996. "I was the last person there, the leader of the event."
Historians agree that the event marked a turning point in public opinion; it was a larger turning point for Kerry, who rocketed to stardom as a darling of both the counter-culture and the culture-culture a bridge, as Morley Safer anointed him in a ppost-protest60 Minutes profile, "between the Abbie Hoffmans of the world and Mr. Agnew's so-called silent majority."
During that same 60 Minutes profile, Safer leaned in to Kerry and asked him, apropos of nothing, "Do you want to be president?"
"Of the United States? No," Kerry replied, obviously startled. "I..." The grin flashed might be likened to the grin of a young man whose secret crush has just been exposed. "That's such a crazy question at a time like this," he said.
Three decades later, he is still fielding the question. Near Boston, just before Kerry is awarded a hand-painted PRE-PRESIDENT robe by the South Shore Chamber of Commerce, a local reporter puts it to him directly, as they all do, and Kerry's answer is the same one he's been dispensing everywhere for the last few months (Florida, South Carolina, New Hampshire, Iowa): that he's considering a run for the White House in 2004, weighing it, evaluating it. "Well, another question then," the reporter shoots back, his tape recorder held to the senator's long Yankee jaw. "Why would you want to be President?"
"That's what I'm evaluating," Kerry replies, with a laugh. But Kerry is being coy on both counts, out of political necessity (his opposition may be token, but Kerry is up for re-election in Massachusetts this year). Barring some unimaginable planetary tilt, Kerry will announce his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination by the beginning of next year; privately, his staffers have abandoned even the winks of coyness. Moreover, John Kerry has known why he'd want to be president since he happened upon Kennedy speaking forty-two years ago. "If you want to make the largest impact on the issues and choices, that's where you have to be," he says. So the question of if and when can be dispensed with. A better question and this is the one Kerry is mulling is this: Can he win?
A key to that may lie, at least symbolically, in the brand-new Harley-Davidson Dyna Wide Glide now sitting in Kerry's garage which is to say, in whether Kerry can chip some of the crust off his upper-crust image. Like the scent of clubroom leather, an old-world, old-money aura hangs about Kerry, manifesting itself in his formal erudition, his effortless parlor eloquence, his ability to quote great reams of T.S. Eliot from memory. George. W. Bush, who was two years behind Kerry in Skull and Bones at Yale and raised in a similar milieu, rose through politics by disavowing his mandarin roots; he levels in his willful ignorance, his grits-and-guns demeanor, his embrace of common-sense-bbumpkinryas a means of endearing himself to common-sense bumpkins who vote. In appealing to those same voters, Kerry's likely opponents in the primary will play up their plebeian credentials: Jon Edwards, the North Carolina senator, will note that his father worked in a textile mill; Joe Lieberman will speak of his father driving a bakery truck; Dick Gephardt will talk of himself as the middle-class son of a union father. John Kerry can do none of that, and though he's improved his backslapping skills since a bruising '96 Senate race against governor Bill Weld, he's still less liked than respected in Massachusetts.
Kerry is fond of quoting Andre Gide's maxim, "Do not understand me shopping. "I came with a seriousness of purpose about some issues, particularly the war," he tells me in Boston. "I made some mistakes, inherited some baggage, and realized, whoops, there's more to this." Glad-handing, har-doin' bonhomie, buttonholing voters while they're trying to eat their lunch at a diner this is called retail politics, and it's never been Kerry's forte. "Being reserved doesn't mean you're arrogant or rude," says Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz, whom he married in 1995. "It means you're being reserved. He likes to be alone he likes to windsurf, likes to be on his motorbike." And it's true; Kerry's sporting endeavors, except for hockey, do lean toward the solo variety: rollerblading, windsurfing at Nantucket, and snowboarding and skiing in Sun Valley, Idaho. Sports in which the only competition is with himself and, some would say, with the pricey, exclusive swaths of nature they're set in.
"Look, he's never going to be a regular guy," says Paul Sullivan, the political columnist of the Lowell (Mass.) Sun. "It's like trying to teach a fish how to yodel. But he'll stand up and say, 'Okay, I may not be the one you want to go bowling with, but I know the issues, and I fight for the issues.'" Which brings up a seemingly valid point: Do we really want to recruit our presidents at bowling alleys? Kerry is hoping the answer is no, but in the meantime, as he revisits those primary states, he'll be playing up his regular-guy street cred, talking about his new Hog, for instance, or the hockey games he sometimes plays at the Fort Dupont rink, in Anacostia, Maryland, or his fondness for "unorthodox" sports, like NASCAR. But an analysis of what Kerry can't do obscures what he can do: tout the level of experience he's gleaned from three terms in the Senate, tout the broad intellect that occasionally weights his speeches but shined in his prescient 1997 book, The New War, which dealt with terrorism. ("It will take only one mega-terrorist event in any of the great cities of the world to change the world in a single day," he wrote.) But most of all, Kerry can wield his status as a war hero like a giant hegemonic club, whacking at opponents left and right. When Republicans pounced on Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle for questioning Bush's war tactics, Daschle backed down, but Kerry all but spat back a response: "Let me clear tonight to Senator Lott and to Tom DeLay. One of the lessons that I learned in Vietnam a war they did not have to endure and one of the basic vows of commitment that I made to myself was that if I ever reached a position of responsibility, I would never stop asking questions that make a democracy strong."
That commitment, along with Kerry's disdain for what he calls "goo-gooey liberalism," has garnered him at least one pal across the aisle: John McCain. Aboard a C-135 military transport flight to Kuwait after the Gulf War, Kerry found himself trading war stories with former Ohio Senator John Glenn, and McCain, who still harbored resentments about Kerry's antiwar activities (McCain was in a Viet Cong prison at the time, and heard about the medal tossing there from his guards), and then, while everyone slept, trading stories with just McCain. And though they've never quite seen eye to eye on Vietnam and the battle against it at home, on that flight was born one of the most unlikely and close friendships in American politics. Since first joining together on a 1992 Senate Select Committee to investigate the contentious Vietnam POW/MIA issue, the two have partnered on enough legislation to insure that a segment of the populace believes "Kerry McCain" is one tireless individual. McCain is not shy about his admiration for Kerry, singling out his friend's maverick streak for particular praise. "His efforts on behalf of raising CAFÉ [fuel-efficiency] standards alienated the labor unions, and for a guy running for president, that's not a bloc you want to alienate," he told me.
The partnership is so tight, in fact, that insiders in both camps are speculating about the pair teaming for a 2004 presidential ticket, according to a source close to the buzz even without McCain switching parties, as Beltway rumors have previously hinted. As one well-place Democratic strategist says, "Kerry and McCain together would form an almost nonpartisan 'unity ticket' that would keep the attention on Vietnam heroics, something sorely lacking in both Bush and Cheney." Mind you, the move wouldn't be wholly unprecedented; at the height of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, tapped Democrat Andrew Johnson for his running mate. When I ask Kerry about the prospect, he doesn't nix it. "I've seen enough in my life to know that tomorrow can be a totally different world from today, and I think John McCain would tell you the same thing," he says. "I wouldn't rule out or rule in most anything, other than you learn to do what feels right in your gut." And although a McCain advisor dismisses the idea as "summertime chatter," McCain recently shouted, "Kerry for President" as he was leaving a Washington luncheon in their honor perhaps a clue, or perhaps a glib wisecrack.
Back in Washington, in the passenger seat of his car, a 1985 Dodge ES convertible (Kelley Blue Book value: $925, and, as the driver moans, "the only convertible in history that looks worse with the top down"), Kerry clicks off his cell phone and takes a deep breath. The driver, Marvin, whom Kerry discovered in a windsurfing shop, swings left past the Washington Monument while Kerry's young communications director, David Wade, reads off another phone number for his boss to call, that of a reporter at The New Republic. Kerry gets the reporter's voice mail. "Hi, this is John Kerry," he says. "I had a message you called. Um, happy to help you out with, uh, whatever you need." He hangs up, then spins around with the phone in his hand. "What the hell was I calling this guy about?" He says. "Sorry," Wade says, shuffling through papers in the backseat. "I gave you the wrong guy." (Later, The New Republic will cite that mistaken voice-mail message as evidence of Kerry's 2004-minded courtship of the media: "When a TNR colleague left a message with Kerry's press office recently, the senator personally called him back a few minutes later although the reporter hadn't even asked for an interview.") Noting my physical discomfort beside him in the backseat, Wade asks Kerry, "Sir, have you ever considered getting a bigger car?" Kerry shoots back, "No, but I have thought about cutting all your fucking legs off at the knees." Then he waves a hand at the green world outside. "Look at this weather," he exclaims.. "If I could, I'd go roll around on the grass somewhere ideally a spot where a dog hadn't been."
It's been a good week for the senator. For starters, Kerry is coming off a well-regarded showing at the Florida Democratic convention, where, amid hand-painted signs urging RUN KERRY RUN, he'd given a rousing speech and dropped a few pungent one-liners, including one about Florida secretary of state and Democrats bete noire Katherine Harris taking a new job with Arthur Andersen. ("Everyone loved that one, except for Imus," Kerry confided to me. "I think he was jealous.") And then there's the bill to sanction oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Despite ardent Republican appeals to drill, including Alaska Senator Ted Stevens's Senate floor claim that the refuge was "not a pristine area this is hell in the winter." ("Did Stevens just say ANWR was 'hell'?" a Kerry aide bubbled in disbelief), Kerry's filibuster looks to be dooming the bill. Kerry described the refuge's oil reserves as "a blip. You ruin the Arctic Wildlife Refuge for a blip."
Environmental issues will stand front and center in any Kerry presidential platform; they're also at the root of his marriage. It was during the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, that Kerry was reacquainted with delegate Teresa Heinz, the widow of Pennsylvania Republican Senator H. John Heinz III and heiress to the Heinz ketchup fortune. (Recent estimates value it near $600 million.) Two years later, after sharing some homemade risotto, they decided to wed. "There was a familiarity there," said Heinz, a Republican who still refers to the late Senator Heinz as "my husband" and her current husband as "John Kerry." "We had similar backgrounds, we'd both been to school abroad, spoke other languages there were a lot of little pieces that fit." Kerry's nastiest critics, again citing opportunism, allege that his courtship was aimed more at the Heinz fortune that at the Heinz widow: "If you add up the ages of all the women he dated before her," a Massachusetts political consultant said, "the number wouldn't equal Teresa Heinz's age." (She's sixty-three, five years Kerry's elder.) To bat down such talk, Kerry has pledged not to use the Heinz fortune for a presidential run, though he is leaving a curious loophole by saying he'll consider dipping into their checking account if he's ever subjected to campaign "character assassination." Heinz concurs on this, though ruefully: "I can think of better things to do with the money than give it to television stations," she recently told The Boston Globe.
But if Kerry won't have to fret about "Where his next sandwich is coming from on the campaign trail," in the words of Washington pollster John Zogby, he will have other worries. In the primary, there's the Al Gore question that is, whether or not Gore will make another go at it in 2004. (Insiders are dubious about both his intentions and his chances.) "Take Gore out of the picture," Zogby said, "and it's a level playing field, and you've got to see John Kerry in the upper tier of candidates." If you use a crystal ball to catapult Kerry from that tier in the general election (crystal balls are easy to come by in Washington), the perils are obvious: The label "Massachusetts liberal" bears the sour, deadening whiff of Michael Dukakis's old locker. (The fact that Kerry was once Dukakis's lieutenant governor doesn't get much play in his bio.) And then there's Kerry's reputation for preening showmanship, which, juxtaposed with Bush's folksy self-deprecation, might come across as, well, preening. Even his new Harley might be subpoenaed as evidence of hyper-political calculation. "I would think he's the Bush administration's dream opponent," a Republican strategist told me, and indeed, White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card has said he's "elated" at the prospect of a Kerry candidacy. (Throw McCain in there, though, and that elation would pop like a soap bubble.) But then, 2004 is a long way away, as Kerry is always quick to note. Plenty of pavement still to ride.
As he leaves a Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee dinner in a Washington hotel ballroom, Kerry leaps onto the banister of a gold staircase in the lobby and slides straight down, much to the startlement of nearby diners, who glance up from their plates to see a presidential contender whizzing by on his ass. He's jaunty, feisty; at the DCCC dinner he'd joined his old friend and occasional guitar partner, Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame, onstage for a singalong of "Puff (the Magic Dragon)." Sometimes Yarrow stays with Kerry in Washington, the senator whispers to me during an earlier song, and they noodle around together on the guitar a bit. The senator has jammed with pal James Taylor, too. "At least he nodded approval," Kerry tells me. "I mean, there you are playing something for James Taylor and you feel like a total nit. Is he being polite, or am I being crazy? Probably a combination of both."
When Kerry is halfway through the lobby, on his way out, Pennsylvania Congressman Bob Brady bursts from the hotel lounge and waves for Kerry to come inside. "You've got to see this," Brady bursts, ushering Kerry into the dark-wood lounge with a hand to the senator's back.
Inside, a towheaded toddler stands on a stool beside one of those hotel-lounge pianos ringed with spectator seats, while a woman with steely-blond hair plays "God Bless America," singing into a microphone perched on the piano. The toddler is mesmerized, his eyes lasered on the singer, and a crowd has gathered to watch him. "He's from Russia," Brady whispers to Kerry. "That's his family over there at that table. They just immigrated."
Kerry bends down to talk to the toddler just as his mother delivers the boy a brown teddy bear, and the crowd is charmed anew when the boy grips the bear's paws to make it dance on the piano top. Kerry throws his head back and laughs loudly. As he tries to leave, the boy grabs Kerry's suit lapels and plants a flagrant hug on the startled senator. "He's a Democrat!" someone shouts, to a roar from the crowd, and as "God Bless America" comes thundering from the piano, Kerry dances about the lounge with the toddler pressed to his chest a quick-footed, clownish dance, like an embarrassingly giddy uncle at a wedding, before depositing the boy back with his mother.
Just then, a big, thick-faced guy steps forward, gripping a beer. "That's not the John Kerry I know," he booms. "He must be running for president." I wanted to ask the guy what he meant, if it was just bluster and bullshit, the stuff a big guy with a beer says to a public figure in a bar, or if he really did know Kerry, and, if he did know Kerry, what the difference was between the Kerry he knew and the Kerry who'd just danced with a toddler in a dark hotel lounge. But by then Kerry was already out the door, the strains of "God Bless America" fading behind him, walking through the lobby with that long swift, gangly stride of his out into the cool Washington night, walking so fast that he was almost running. |
