The Bushies are getting worried about Kerry...They should be concerned. It will be tough for Bush to run on his track record and win in an honest election...
washingtonpost.com
Kerry Keeps Overcoming
By Richard Cohen
Thursday, January 29, 2004
MANCHESTER, N.H. -- John Kerry surrounds himself with what he -- borrowing from Shakespeare -- calls his "band of brothers," veterans from Vietnam and other wars. That's understandable given how Americans feel about military service and the importance of physical courage. But what brought Kerry his initial fame was not his battlefield exploits. It was his decision to turn against the war in Vietnam and ask a congressional committee questions that had no answers: "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 to die for a mistake?"
That was April 1971, and Kerry was a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He was already a genuine war hero, having received a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. The Vietnam vets had taken over the Mall in Washington -- an unforgettable sight for those of us who were there. Some of them were amputees, and one of them, missing an arm, took me up to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. We toured the wards together -- bed after bed of men missing limbs and other body parts. At one point I nearly fainted.
The war in Vietnam is suggestive of the one in Iraq. It's not that either was a totally crackpot venture -- it made as much sense to stop the march of communism as it did to rid the world of Saddam Hussein. It's rather that both were triggered by false information. In Vietnam, it was the murky Gulf of Tonkin incident; in Iraq it was Hussein's nonexistent program to develop weapons of mass destruction, not to mention his apparently fictional links to al Qaeda. David Kay's recent statements have substantiated what long has been clear: When the war started, Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction.
Kerry voted for the war. Twice now I have asked him about that and whether he thought he was "betrayed" by the Bush administration. Both times he said yes. A couple of days ago, on his campaign bus, I asked him what he thought of Kay's statements and whether he thought the U.S. intelligence community -- particularly the CIA -- needed to account for findings that supported the Bush administration's insistence that Iraq represented an imminent threat to world peace. With a startling intensity, he said yes. Among other things, he feels that CIA Director George Tenet has to go.
Contrast that with the business-as-usual pose of the Bush administration. Oh so grudgingly it has conceded that its primary reasons for rushing to war are evaporating under scrutiny. No WMD. No nuclear weapons program, in particular. No verifiable links to al Qaeda. Add it all up, and there was no reason to hurry to war. Sanctions and U.N. inspections were doing their job. Hussein not only could be contained, he was.
On the way back from New Hampshire this week, I ran into James Carville, and I borrow from him something he said about Kerry: He has faced three of the fears that haunt almost every man. The first is how we would conduct ourselves in combat. The second is how we would handle cancer. (Kerry recently underwent surgery for prostate cancer.) And the third is whether we would face ridicule for sticking with a losing effort. Kerry, who was 20 points down just a month ago, persisted -- and now has won the first two Democratic contests.
But I would add something else: moral courage, or indignation -- call it what you want. Kerry exhibited that as a leader of the Vietnam vets. To my mind, this was as important as his battlefield valor, including the rescue of an all-but-doomed colleague who had fallen out of Kerry's Swift boat. Turning on a war in which he had distinguished himself says something about Kerry, and suggests that one line of attack on him is off the mark. He may well personify the Washington establishment -- 19 years in the Senate testifies to that -- but he is capable of turning against it.
John Kerry may yet revert to being the remote figure he once was. But in a life of privilege, he has overcome challenges that most men have chosen not even to face. He is not the most affable of men, but somewhere in his gaunt frame is a rod of steely determination that enabled him to come off the mat and win the first two Democratic contests. He is not, like John Edwards, a natural, but in the end he asks, as he did back in the Vietnam War era, the right questions. "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" Another couple of victories, and George W. Bush had better have an answer. |
