<font size=4>Who He Is
The one thing John Kerry hasn't flip-flopped on is his view of America's place in the world.
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by Matthew Continetti
Matthew Continetti is a reporter at The Weekly Standard.
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IN 1965, John Kerry, a junior at Yale and the newly appointed head of the Yale Political Union, was invited to give a speech at Choate, the tony Connecticut prep school known mainly for its most famous alumnus, John F. Kennedy.<font size=3> Like Yale, Choate is in Connecticut, so Kerry didn't have to travel far. He went with his best friend, David Thorne, whose sister, Julia, would one day be Kerry's first wife. When they arrived at Choate, Kerry and Thorne, accompanied by the school's administrators, were led on a VIP tour of the facilities. Kerry's name was announced on the loudspeaker. <font size=4>A reporter from a Hartford radio station was there, too, for an interview with Kerry, who was all of 21-years-old.
The head of the Yale Political Union is a high-profile position, having launched careers both literary--William F. Buckley Jr., for example--and political (think Joseph Lieberman). Yet it was unusual, Douglas Brinkley tells us in Tour of Duty, his biography of Kerry, for a junior in college to be treated as a special guest speaker at a place like Choate. Word of Kerry's debating skills, it seems, had spread. Kerry, dressed in his <font color=blue>"handsomest suit,"<font color=black> his rhetoric polished, his hand gestures rehearsed, spoke to about 30 high school students for nearly an hour. The topic was the war in Vietnam. Kerry was against it.
And he was nervous. <font color=blue>"I hadn't any time to go over my speech at length before I gave it, and I was afraid that I would be too glued to my notes,"<font color=black> Kerry wrote to Julia Thorne afterward. <font color=blue>"But when I got up there, I felt sharper and more confident than I have ever felt before."<font color=black> A feeling of confidence enveloped him. He looked at his notes only rarely. He was pleased with how the question and answer session went as well. In fact, he wrote, <font color=blue>"I really was pleased to pieces and very encouraged by the whole visit."<font color=black>
The speech--the snippets of it that have come down to us, anyway--remains interesting, if only as a historical artifact. Over the last two weeks, of course, a group of anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans have run ads questioning John Kerry's service record and antiwar activities. The ad criticizing Kerry's antiwar stance focuses on his testimony, as a leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. But there is a problem with this narrative. It is incomplete. <font color=blue>Kerry was against the war before he went to Vietnam, too.<font color=black>
Look at the speech he gave at Choate that winter day in 1965. Kerry <font color=blue>"declined to offer any proposals for ending the conflict,"<font color=black> writes Douglas Brinkley. Instead, he waxed historical. The talk <font color=blue>"outlined the history of Vietnam, covering everything from French colonialism to the rise of Ho Chi Minh to the lessons of the 1954 Geneva Conference, which had partitioned the country into two uneasy nations,"<font color=black> Brinkley continues. Kerry's position on the conflict was--you guessed it--nuanced. He told the high school students that <font color=blue>"he had originally supported a complete U.S. withdrawal on the grounds that the South Vietnamese government had fallen into disarray, anti-Americanism pervaded Southeast Asia, the Johnson administration's policies were failing, and the domino theory was a myth."<font color=black> But there were no easy answers. Kerry also understood <font color=blue>"how important it remained for the United States not to lose face."<font color=black> Hence, Brinkley says, Kerry felt the Johnson administration had two options in Indochina: <font color=blue>"Score a military victory" or "negotiate a peace."
"In the future,"<font color=black> the Yale junior intoned, <font color=blue>"the U.S. must fix goals which are tenable."<font color=black> The war in Vietnam wasn't such. What's more, <font color=blue>"these goals should recognize priorities,"<font color=black> and those priorities should <font color=blue>"correspond minutely with our best national interests."<font color=black> The Cold War's Manichean worldview--<font color=blue>"Us"<font color=black> (the free world) against <font color=blue>"Them"<font color=black> (the Communists)--was a troubling dichotomy. <font color=blue>"We should concern ourselves less with other ideologies and attempt to apply a policy which is both sensitive and compatible with the expressed desires and cultures of the people involved,"<font color=black> Kerry said. The lesson, in other words, was that American involvement in Vietnam was a mistake. And it should not be repeated.
Over the next year, as Kerry matured intellectually, and as the United States continued to entangle itself in Vietnam, the future senator's positions grew more strident. For Kerry, we are told, these were difficult conclusions to reach. According to the Boston Globe biography John F. Kerry, <font color=blue>"as a student and later a senator, Kerry often internally debated an issue before making up his mind in a process that could take weeks."<font color=black> In 1996, in one of his last interviews, Kerry's father Richard told the Globe that, while he always <font color=blue>"thought [Vietnam] a serious policy mistake,"<font color=black> his son's attitude early on was <font color=blue>"gung ho: had to show the flag."<font color=black> Richard Kerry scoffed and said, <font color=blue>"He was quite immature in that direction."<font color=black> But things changed; military service loomed; soldiers continued to die in the rice paddies and dark jungles. <font color=blue>"As a senior," Richard Kerry said, John <font color=blue>"matured considerably."<font color=black>
As John Kerry's antiwar stance developed, so did his profile at Yale. In March 1965, he won the Ten Eyck Speech Prize, which came with a $125 award. This was for another speech on Vietnam. Kerry had expanded his thematic palette: <font color=blue>"The theme of his competitive address,"<font color=black> Brinkley writes, <font color=blue>"billed as a search for a modern-day Prometheus--was the inherent danger of America's stretching itself too thin in its international commitments."<font color=black> Wars like Vietnam were <font color=blue>"self-defeating,"<font color=black> Kerry said. Indeed, he continued, <font color=blue>"'It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism."<font color=black> And self-defeating conflicts led inexorably to imperial hubris. Kerry said the United States was <font color=blue>"grossly overextended"<font color=black> in <font color=blue>"areas where we have no vital primary interest."<font color=black>
KERRY DIDN'T LIMIT his thoughts on the war to debate matches and public speeches. He talked often about the war's shortcomings with his friends, who, when drinking, were not inclined to debate geopolitics. Often his impromptu talks were with other <font color=blue>"Bonesmen,"<font color=black> members of the secret society Skull & Bones. One Bonesman, a man named Alan Cross, tells an interesting story in John F. Kerry: <font color=blue>"When Johnson had greatly increased the troops being sent into Vietnam,"<font color=black> Cross said, <font color=blue>"Kerry sort of made a spontaneous speech to the others of us in the audience decrying the implications of this political event and what this meant in terms of our engagement in Vietnam."<font color=black> For Cross, Kerry's words expressed not so much outright opposition as concern: <font color=blue>"I think he was alarmed by what we were doing,"<font color=black> he told the Globe. <font color=blue>"That doesn't mean we were opposed to what we were doing. He saw this growing quagmire we were heading into with good intention and certain results,"<font color=black> Cross went on. <font color=blue>"My recollection of that talk is that it was not so much a statement of opposition but was really a clarion"<font color=black> for action. It was a clarion call that Kerry sounded repeatedly.
Kerry's most famous college speech was on June 12, 1966, when he delivered the Yale class oration. This was--and is--quite an honor. Kerry was 22. He was told he would give the address sometime in the spring, and by a week before graduation he'd cobbled together a treacly address on <font color=blue>"life after graduation."<font color=black> This first draft of the speech, Kerry said later, was <font color=blue>"sophomoric."<font color=black> One night in June, on an island in the St. Lawrence river in upstate New York where he was vacationing with friends, Kerry had a revelation. <font color=blue>"I decided that I couldn't give"<font color=black> the speech he wrote as a first draft, he later told Joe Klein in the New Yorker. So instead Kerry stayed up all night, writing and writing, <font color=blue>"with a candle"<font color=black> providing the only light in the room, and then, as the night drew on, <font color=blue>"rewriting and rewriting,"<font color=black> until he had completed a new draft, which, he said, was the best expression of <font color=blue>"what we were all thinking about"<font color=black>: Vietnam.
Kerry's class oration is notable for many reasons. It is notable for its rhetoric, which echoes, somewhat amateurishly, that of the Kennedys, and which Kerry would echo in all his subsequent political speeches. <font color=blue>"Where we should have instructed,"<font color=black> Kerry said, <font color=blue>"it seems we did not; where we should have been patient, it seems we were not; where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not." <font color=black>
The oration is notable for its rejection of American exceptionalism. <font color=blue>"It is misleading to mention right and wrong in this issue,"<font color=black> Kerry said, <font color=blue>"for to every thinking man, the semantics of this contest often find the United States right in its wrongness and wrong in its rightness."<font color=black> On American power, Kerry continued, <font color=blue>"the United States must . . . bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention"<font color=black>--meaning, intervention against Communism--<font color=blue>"that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world."<font color=black> And again:
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What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism . . . And this Vietnam War has found our policymakers forcing Americans into a strange corner . . . that if victory escapes us, it would not be the fault of those who led, but of the doubters who stabbed them in the back--notions all too typical of an America that had to find Americans to blame for the takeover in China by the Communists, and then for the takeover in Cuba.
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And the speech is notable for its echoes of Kerry's contemporary critique of the Bush administration: <font color=blue>"Never in the last 20 years,"<font color=black> Kerry said, <font color=blue>"has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today."<font color=green>
Read it closely, however, and what strikes you most about the speech isn't its pretension. Or its Ted Sorenson-like flourishes. You are struck by the way in which it summarizes, so neatly and so early in his career, John Kerry's central critique of American foreign policy--the way in which the speech enumerated the ideas Kerry used when he talked about foreign policy until the 1990s. The John Kerry who spoke on June 12, 1966, was the same John Kerry who, the war long behind him, spoke to the Fulbright Committee on April 22, 1971; the same Kerry who spoke out against Reagan's funding of the anti-Communist contras in the 1980s; the same Kerry who spoke out against the first Gulf War. John Kerry's skepticism toward American intervention in foreign crises isn't a battle scar left from Vietnam. It is who he is. |
