Very educational article on John Kerry. Please read it.
John Kerry ready for his close-up (Rolling Stone)
by Paul Alexander
I'm not afraid to take the gloves off, John Kerry says as he stands in a car of the senators only subway on his way from the Capitol to his office in the Russell Senate Office Building. There is no point in being here if we're not prepared to fight for what we think is right. Otherwise, we should go home. Kerry, a three-term Democrat from Massachusetts, is talking about his willingness to criticize openly the actions of George W. Bush, at a time when Bush is enjoying approval ratings consistently charting in the eighties. Today's ratings are almost meaningless, Kerry says, because Bush has had the soapbox all to himself. In a period when Democrats have been reluctant to take on Bush directly, Kerry has regularly assailed the president's actions on the economy and on the environment and, recently, he has even begun to question the president's handling of the war in Afghanistan.
I've been uncomfortable with the way the president says it's not up to him to make some of the choices about the war, Kerry says in his office. I do know there are reasons to be concerned about some of the choices they've made, and I disagree with some of them. I would have made some different choices than this president did with respect to how you prosecute this war, because of my experience in Vietnam, because of my experience in the military. If you have been a grunt in the field quote marks around that, since I was in the Navy you just have a different outlook. Kerry stops, then adds, I mean, al Qaeda is still alive. Al Qaeda is still around. And they were the principal target. One specific criticism Kerry has concerns Bush's decision to manage the war from a base in Florida, as opposed to a site closer to the military action in central Asia. I would not have done that, no, Kerry says flatly. But I think that's only one issue of a whole number that have made the next steps much more complicated than they necessarily have to be.
While he is a man in constant motion taking meetings, giving speeches and lining up support from dawn to midnight he always keeps President Bush squarely in his sights. On September 10th, this guy was politically dead meat here in Washington, Kerry tells a group of state legislators in the Lyndon B. Johnson Room, just off the Senate Chamber, at a February meeting. Bush was coming back to a Congress that was prepared to defeat him on a patient's bill of rights, education, prescription drugs, and he couldn't get out of the box he had put himself in with his tax cut vs. raiding Social Security. The war liberated him from the Social Security box. The next day, he addresses a group of Democratic lieutenant governors.
We are trapped in a time warp, Kerry says, where President Bush, notwithstanding what's happening in Afghanistan, is taking us literally back to the early 1980s and the years of Ronald Reagan, both in the playbook they're using, the policies they're producing and their impact on the economy. Calling Bush's plan trickle-down economics, Kerry adds, We have taken a $5.6 trillion mythical surplus that many of us voted against even tampering with back last March, and it's now a deficit as far as we can see. As for education funding in Bush's budget, Kerry concludes, It's a disgrace when the president uses the words 'Leave no child behind,' when every part of his budget does just that.
Kerry's critics charge that he's just another Michael Dukakis-style, let's-help-the-little-people left-winger. Perhaps anticipating these attacks, Kerry has carefully retooled himself for the post-Clinton era, never going too far right or left. On social issues, he's pro-choice and progressive, but on fiscal issues, he leans right. He voted for the Gramm-Rudman balanced-budget amendment, and he supports what he calls sensible tax cuts and tough but smart defense. He's a leader on environmental issues. In the area of defense and security, he's become a leader on arms control and the dangerous use of space in wartime.
On paper, John Forbes Kerry's background doesn't seem all that different from that of George W. Bush. Like Bush, Kerry is a son of the Eastern establishment, with deep roots in the exclusive institutions that have traditionally produced those who wield power in America. Kerry's mother, Rosemary, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family, whose wealth is drawn primarily from massive land holdings on Cape Cod. His father, Richard, came from a well-off Boston family. John was born on December 11th, 1943, in Denver, where his father, an Air Force pilot who had contracted tuberculosis, was hospitalized. His family then took him home to Massachusetts. Following the war, while his father served as a diplomat in European cities such as Oslo, Paris and Berlin, Kerry attended boarding school in Switzerland. At thirteen, he entered St. Paul's, an exclusive prep school outside Concord, New Hampshire, graduating in 1962. Two years ahead of George W. Bush, he attended Yale University, where he became a debate champion, compiled an average academic record and as a junior was chosen to join Skull and Bones, Yale's most selective and powerful secret society. (Two years later, Bush would become a Bonesman.)
Today, Kerry himself possesses such a drawing room in a six-floor brownstone on Louisburg Square, one of the most exclusive streets on Beacon Hill in Boston. Kerry owns the building with his wife, Teresa Heinz, the beautiful, charming, slightly exotic widow of Sen. John Heinz III of Pennsylvania. Born in Mozambique, Teresa was educated at the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva and speaks five languages. Upon his death in a plane crash in 1991, John Heinz left her as the principal heir to the H.J. Heinz food fortune. Forbes once placed her personal wealth at $860 million; she also heads the billion-dollar Heinz family foundation.
When Kerry and Heinz married on Heinz's Nantucket estate in May 1995, it was a merger not only of power and money but of political parties. Heinz was and plans to remain a Republican. As Kerry likes to say, If you want b ipartisanship, this is quintessential bipartisanship. It's November, and Kerry and Heinz are sitting in their drawing room, remembering what brought them together. It was the environment, Kerry says. We always kept meeting around the environment, Heinz concurs, her speech colored by a faint East African accent. During the late 1980s, Heinz and Kerry were acquainted, since Kerry and John Heinz had been colleagues in the Senate, but the first meaningful meeting they had following Heinz's death occurred at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Kerry had gone as a member of the Senate delegation, Heinz as a delegate appointed by President Bush. Two years later, they met again at a Washington dinner and ended up taking a midnight stroll that took them by the Vietnam Memorial on the Washington Mall.
Soon Heinz discovered that, for Kerry, Vietnam is a subject that is never far away. Even in his sleep, Kerry is haunted by Vietnam in nightmares. The first nightmare I heard, I was actually not with him, Heinz says. Before we got married, I was sleeping with one of his daughters in this little shed, a little barn, it was. He was in this little room next door. Then, all of a sudden, I heard this tremendous banging on the wall. I said, 'Oh!' And Alex said, 'It's just Dad.' Kerry laughs an uneasy laugh. So I went back to bed, Heinz continues, and he hit the walls again, and I said, 'Holy mackerel!' The next morning, I said, 'What did you dream about?' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'Because you broke down the house, almost.' He said, 'Vietnam.'
One sharp distinction between Kerry and Bush is the way they chose to deal with military service during the Vietnam War. Bush would decide to avoid active service by allowing his father to pull strings to get him into the National Guard in Texas, while Kerry volunteered for the Navy and asked to be sent to Vietnam. So, in May 1966, with his degree in political science from Yale in hand, Kerry set off for a four-month stint at the Officers Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. In the winter of 1968, he went to Vietnam. On his first tour, his ship performed guard duty in the Gulf of Tonkin, which meant, Kerry says, we were chasing around with aircraft carriers, working with the John McCains who were flying the planes. Eventually, Kerry's ship returned to California. In San Diego, Kerry was trained to take command of a fifty-foot gunboat, and when he returned to Vietnam he went in country. During this tour, Lt. Kerry took his boat on raid expeditions. It was a very aggressive, very risky, take-the-pipe-to-the-enemy strategy, Kerry says about an operation named Sea Lords. In one raid, Kerry left his boat to go ashore and kill a Viet Cong who was about to fire a rocket at his crew. For this, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. On another outing, to quote from a presidential citation he later received, Kerry discovered he had a man overboard [and] returned up the river to assist [where he] directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. This action earned Kerry a Bronze Star with Combat V. During the same tour, Kerry also earned three Purple Hearts and the Navy Unit Commendation.
At the time, however, Kerry also concluded that America was not trying to win the war or, even worse, that the war was not winnable. Eventually, he was reassigned to New York to work as an admiral's aide. By the end of 1969, even more disillusioned about the war, Kerry asked for early release. Soon he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a loose-knit but influential group. I was angry, Kerry says. I came back with a knowledge of how wrong the war was, how screwed up I thought it was and how imperative it was for me to speak out. In 1970, Kerry married Julia Thorne, a writer, and in April 1971 he made national headlines as he, representing some 5,000 veterans who had assembled in Washington for a five-day protest, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? he asked. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? After Kerry's speech, Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island all but anointed Kerry as a political talent. As the witness knows, he said, I have a very high personal regard for him and hope, before his life ends, he will be a colleague of ours in this body.
The next day was one of the most emotional, and controversial, days of Kerry's life and if Kerry's candidacy takes off, Republicans may use the incident against him ad nauseam. He joined a large throng of veterans assembled in front of the Capitol to return their medals, and other war-related belongings, to the government by throwing them over a fence onto a lawn. People threw their medals or berets or release papers or dog tags or ribbons over the fence into a pile, Kerry remembers. And I similarly did that. I threw my ribbons back, not my medals. Afterward, not immediately at the same time, I went up and threw back medals a couple of veterans had given me and asked me to throw a Bronze Star, specifically, and a Purple Heart. Years later, Kerry would be criticized for pretending to throw back his own medals when they belonged to other veterans. Complete fabrication, Kerry says. The bottom line is that I threw back my ribbons with everybody else and never thought twice about it. Several months later, Kerry left Vietnam Veterans Against the War when the organization became too radical for him, and helped to found the more mainstream Vietnam Veterans of America.
Then, in 1972, Kerry ran for the House of Representatives with the Kennedys campaigning by his side. He lost that race, in what was to be the only defeat of his career. Between the births of his two daughters (Alexandra, who was born in 1973, and Vanessa, born in 1976), Kerry attended Boston College Law School and then became an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. In 1982, he ran for lieutenant governor on the same ballot with Michael Dukakis, and won. In 1984, Kerry tried for the Senate seat made available when Paul Tsongas retired and won with fifty-five percent of the vote. Six years later, following the dissolution of his marriage a protracted legal separation (during which Kerry dated a number of women) that ended in divorce
Kerry won his second term with fifty-seven percent of the vote. Between 1990 and 1992, Kerry made a name for himself by heading up a committee that broke the news of the scandal involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, inciting the wrath of his fellow Democrats in the process, since one of the key BCCI players was an adored Democratic stalwart, Clark Clifford. But Kerry ignored the threats of his party and brought down what he saw as a corrupt financial institution. In 1991, Kerry disregarded the advice of both his party and his staff and used the chairmanship of a special Senate subcommittee to address one of the most highly charged subjects Congress could have pursued at the time: the presumed existence in North Vietnam of American prisoners of war and men counted as missing in action. In 1993, following months of exhaustive, often gut-wrenching testimony, the committee released a groundbreaking report concluding that there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.
At the time these hearings began, says Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who served on the special committee with Kerry, we had a cover of Newsweek showing three men who were purported to be American POWs alive. Fact is, we found out later on, these pictures were manufactured. At the time, there was a widespread belief we had left many Americans alive and were still alive in Southeast Asia. Kerry's hearings were vital in getting all of the information out before the American people. The committee unanimously signed a report that said there was no compelling evidence and I use those words very carefully, 'compelling evidence' that Americans were alive in Southeast Asia. Those words were carefully crafted by John Kerry. In the end, we would not have had the normalization of relations with Vietnam [which occurred in 1994] and a free-trade agreement had it not been for the work that John Kerry did.
In 1996, in his Senate re-election bid against William Weld, a popular sitting governor, Kerry ended up in an old-fashioned dogfight. Kerry called Weld the ideological soul mate of Newt Gingrich; Weld supporters questioned the loyalty of Kerry's new wife Pittsburgher Teresa Heinz, a Republican to Massachusetts. Heinz was also suspect because she was rich, which Kerry addressed with humor. How do you like Massachusetts? Kerry jokingly asked Heinz at a St. Patrick's Day event staged for reporters. I love Massachusetts, Heinz responded. How much is it? Though the polls sometimes showed the race in a dead heat or with Kerry even trailing, Kerry eventually won by a seven-point margin, with fifty-two percent of the vote. On the night of the election, Kerry left his celebration early to have a quiet dinner in the dining room of his and Heinz's brownstone with six men who had been members of his crew on the boat he commanded in the Mekong Delta in 1969.
If Kerry does run, there's one charge that will be leveled against him: that his wife is trying to buy the election for him. While that may or may not even be possible, this much is true: Few people understand the campaign process as well as Teresa Heinz. Because of this, Kerry and Heinz have forged an almost unique political partnership that they maintain, when they're not together, by talking on the phone several times a day. It is not unusual for both Kerry and Heinz to speak at political outings. This is in character for Heinz, who could have been a senator herself. After her first husband died in 1991, she was pressured by the Republican Party to take her husband's Senate seat, but she refused to be appointed by the governor to fill out Heinz's unfinished term. Two years later, at a 1993 press conference, she declined to run in the regular election. The best ideas for change unfortunately no longer come from political campaigns, she said then. Today, political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises. A nice line and certainly a theme around which she could fashion stump speeches designed to promote John Kerry as a new type of political visionary.
Today, Heinz is a more willing player in her husband's ambitions. Would she like to be first lady? From a personal point of view, it's scary, she says. It's a great honor, obviously, and a great opportunity. Also, you get to a point in life when you don't have very much longer to go, potentially, and, yes, it's one way of serving. With her connections and her savvy, not to mention her vast fortune, Heinz could be Kerry's greatest asset should he run. Certainly, Teresa has been around the block, and she understands the political game as well as anybody, says political consultant Ed Rollins. Plus, she could also deliver a very important state: Pennsylvania.
It almost seems as if Kerry's life has been invented by Aaron Sorkin or some other Hollywood type. Character description: Well-born hero (with the initials JFK!) enjoys Ivy League education and dates half sister of wife of future president; volunteers for dangerous war duty he could have easily avoided, only to discover the bad faith of his country's military and political leadership; becomes a noted leader himself and steadily marches toward the nation's highest office. Romantic subplot: a troubled first marriage followed by true love with a wealthy, politically sophisticated wife, who wants to help her husband become president. But big Hollywood-style themes are only part of what makes a candidate viable. What most people agree on now is that the 2004 election will turn on the current president's popularity. Kerry is clearly betting the farm on the fact that Bush's popularity is as artificially inflated as Enron stock was just months ago. And if you hang around long enough in the circles that Kerry travels in, you begin to pick up on some of the reasons he feels this way: that, maybe, the economy is in for a long hibernation; that there may be many other major American corporations whose assets are hyperinflated; that maybe the people making the decisions about the war in Afghanistan were too cautious and let the bad guys get away. You might even hear powerful people say in closed-door meetings that Bush fucked up Afghanistan. Of course, you hear a lot of things in Washington, but if you're John Kerry and you hear these things, you decide that you've actually got agood chance of winning.
-Paul Alexander is working on a biography of Sen. John McCain.
How Left-Wing Is Kerry, Really?
Is John Kerry just another Massachusetts liberal? On social issues, yes, but on fiscal and military issues he's a McCain-like hardass. His patchwork political philosophy makes him tough to pin down and less predictable than his opponents would prefer.
ABORTION
Vocally pro-choice; his first speech as a senator in 1985 was a defense of Roe vs. Wade.
THE MILITARY
An overall hawk, he favors significant increases in the military budget; he's also a strong supporter of veterans' issues.
CRIME
A former prosecutor, he offered the original legislation to put 100,000 cops on the street nationwide and introduced two strikes and you're out legislation to put sexual predators behind bars for life without parole.
DEATH PENALTY
He opposes it, saying in 1996, I know something about killing, and I don't think the state honors life by turning and taking a life.
EDUCATION
He breaks with his party by supporting teacher-tenure reform and public-school choice. TAXES He favors lowering payroll, alternative-minimum, estate and business taxes. He fought successfully for a reduction of the capital-gains tax for small businesses.
WOMEN'S ISSUES
An original sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act and the Women's Health Equity Act, he marched for the Equal Rights Amendment in New York in 1971.
GAY RIGHTS
He voted against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and sponsored both the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
ENVIRONMENT
As green as they come, he has threatened to filibuster any bill that permits drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and he called the Bush administration's efforts to use September 11th to help open up the refuge false patriotism.
P.A. |
