McCain Learned to Love Kerry, so Should You
WASHINGTON -- Among those who harbored a simmering distrust of Kerry was a fellow Vietnam veteran, Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona. McCain, tortured as a prisoner of war in Hanoi, had campaigned for Kerry's opponent in 1984, denouncing the Democrat for joining the veterans who tossed medals and ribbons over a barricade at the Capitol during a 1971 antiwar rally. The North Vietnamese had taunted the American POWs with accounts of that protest.
In the spring of 1991, McCain found himself seated across from Kerry inside a noisy military transport plane on a fact-finding mission to the Middle East. In the Senate, the two men had circled each other warily. But now, strapped into uncomfortable seats with an interminable flight before them and only a flimsy table between them, they had no place to go. They made small talk with Senator John Glenn, the Democrat from Ohio, until Glenn fell asleep.
From there, "it kind of segued into John and I talking about Vietnam," McCain remembers. Deep into the night, as the plane droned over the Atlantic, Kerry and McCain revisited the defining experience of their lives. Says Kerry, "I asked a lot of questions about him, and he of me, and we talked about how he felt about his war, and my war."
In the ensuing weeks and months, McCain and Kerry individually, and then together, concluded that the unresolved divisions of the Vietnam War were causing too much national anguish, and that it was time to put the war to rest.
Four years later, on a summer day in 1995, Kerry and McCain stood beside President Clinton in the East Room at the White House as he announced that the United States would normalize diplomatic relations with Vietnam. For a president who most famously had not served in their war, the two combat veterans served as wingmen.
In his work toward that day, Kerry earned the "unbounded respect and admiration" of McCain, who, like others in the Senate, originally viewed Kerry with suspicion. "You get to know people and you make decisions about them," says McCain. "I found him to be the genuine article." |
