Nevertheless, it was a major step on the way to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments, enacted when Kerry was in the Senate and George H. W. Bush occupied the White House.
It was also one of Kerry's last significant acts as lieutenant governor. He would serve until the end of 1984, but Kerry and many of his staff by this time were already running, virtually full time, in pursuit of the next prize, the Tsongas Senate seat.
'The liberal twins'
Kerry entered the Senate race with the advantage of a statewide presence and organization. Within a few months of announcing his candidacy, however, he was in danger of losing strategic ground to US Representative James M. Shannon of Lawrence, his chief rival in the bruising Democratic primary.
Kerry had been outscored by Shannon in the endorsement questionnaire of a nuclear disarmament group that vehemently opposed the military buildup under President Reagan.
The nuclear freeze was a defining issue across the country for liberal Democrats, who were about to be flattened a second time at the polls by the steamroller of Reagan's conservatism. In Massachusetts, the activists were a key bloc, ardently courted by Kerry and Shannon, "the liberal twins," as the other two Democrats in the primary field called them.
Shannon had outscored Kerry, 100 to 94, on the questionnaire of the group, known as Freeze Voter `84, which favored canceling funds for a slew of major weapons systems.
Then a strange thing happened. Paul F. Walker, Shannon's most prominent backer on the group's executive committee, graded the answers and laid out for Kerry campaign manager Paul L. Rosenberg both the flaws in Kerry's responses and what the "correct" answers should be.
"Walker was confused about your answer" on funding the Trident submarine, Rosenberg wrote in an internal memo to Kerry, who had originally hedged in his opposition to funding new subs.
"It is critically important that we get a 100 percent rating," Rosenberg wrote, in a memo that has not previously been made public. "You should explain how your position was misinterpreted so that he will correct the rating before it is distributed to the board tomorrow evening."
Walker "is favorably disposed to change the grading because `he knows of your strong support for the freeze and knows this is what you must have meant,' " Rosenberg concluded.
Kerry revised his answers, tied Shannon with a perfect score, and at the activists' meeting in late June denied Shannon the 60 percent majority he needed to secure the endorsement for himself. Instead, Shannon and Kerry shared the group's stamp of approval in the primary field that also included then-secretary of state Michael J. Connolly and former House speaker David M. Bartley.
Kerry today says he does not recall the amendments to his Freeze Voter `84 questionnaire, which were publicized at the time, and says his initial responses may have been an error or misinterpreted.
"I wasn't trying to be on both sides of it," Kerry said.
Walker, who said he later served as an informal adviser to Kerry, asserted that fairness, not politics, was behind his role. "We wanted to provide Kerry, and all candidates for that matter, an opportunity to clarify their positions," wrote Walker, now an administrator with the Washington-based environmental advocacy group, Global Green USA, in an e-mail response to Globe questions.
Shannon, however, was stunned to learn of his erstwhile ally's back-channel role.
"I can guarantee you this is all news to me. I never knew that," Shannon said recently.
The stalemate for the Freeze Voter `84 endorsement was an important tactical victory for Kerry. But it could be a handicap as Kerry campaigns for president nearly two decades later.
In his zeal to keep pace with Shannon's leftward drift on disarmament, Kerry supported cancellation of a host of weapons systems that have become the basis of US military might -- the high-tech munitions and delivery systems on display to the world as they leveled the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks.
These weapons became conversation topics at American dinner tables during the Iraq war, but candidate Kerry in 1984 said he would have voted to cancel many of them -- the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, AH-64 Apache helicopter, Patriot missile, the F-15, F-14A and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile system.
He also advocated reductions in many other systems, such as the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the F-16 jet.
In retrospect, Kerry said some of his positions in those days were "ill-advised, and I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find ourselves in right now and the things that I've learned since then."
But he defended his opposition at the time to the MX missile, the "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative, and some other programs.
"Some of this stuff was ahead of its time. Some was not as well thought out as it might be," Kerry said of his campaign posture then. "I'm not ashamed of that. I was [40] years old, running for the United States Senate for the first time . . . and I'm sure that some of it was driven at the time by the nature of the beast I was fighting politically.
"I mean, you learn as you go in life," said Kerry. He characterized as "pretty responsible" his subsequent Senate voting record on defense.
The `84 primary was a four-man race, but it quickly narrowed into a Kerry-Shannon showdown.
At the state Democratic convention in June, Shannon spent a bundle and edged Kerry for the endorsement of the party activists. The Lawrence politician got no bump in the polls, however, and limped through the summer, short of cash. Snubbed again by the state party faithful, Kerry nevertheless turned defeat into an asset, painting himself as the "outsider" to Shannon the "insider."
The race ground on, through a mind-numbing 38 candidate forums before various advocacy groups. Ideologically, the "liberal twins" were aptly named.
"We were vying for the same pool of votes," said Shannon. "We kept outbidding each other . . . appealing to the margins."
"War and Peace" was Kerry's campaign theme, but the emphasis was mostly on peace. War, however, specifically the Vietnam War, may have saved his candidacy in the primary.
In the campaign's closing days, Shannon had surged slightly ahead in tracking polls. Unwittingly he helped blow his own lead.
Shannon was smarting from Kerry's taunts that the congressman had reversed himself, voting first for and later against the MX missile system. A week before the primary, Shannon tried to turn the table, contrasting his own U-turn on the MX to Kerry's change of heart on the Vietnam War.
"If you felt that strongly about the war, you would not have gone," Shannon said during a televised debate. "I was very proud that you changed your mind."
But two nights later, in another debate, Kerry jacked up the issue to another level.
"You impugn the service of veterans in that war by saying they are somehow dopes or wrong for going," he said.
Shannon refused to yield.
"John, you know that dog won't hunt," he said. "I don't owe anybody an apology."
A band of Vietnam vets, all Kerry men, then wheeled into action. "There was a kind of raw, gut instinct, and the campaign acted on it the way you wouldn't today," said longtime Kerry strategist John Marttila, meaning there was no polling data as a guide.
Vietnam veterans began shadowing Shannon in the primary campaign's final days, traveling around the state, "looking for ways to pick fights," Marttila said.
"But this was not fake stuff. John's bona fides had been called into question, and these guys had gone to Vietnam. It was powerful material," Marttila recalled.
With help from the vets, who called themselves "the dog hunters," Kerry stopped Shannon cold. His athletic stamina and what one campaign staffer called "laser-like focus" became major assets in the frenzied final days as he outworked the field.
The finish was memorable. Kerry's field organization pulled him over the top. He lost Lowell and Middlesex County by big margins, but beat Shannon in Boston and most other major cities. Kerry's statewide margin was paper thin, only 24,529 votes, or 3.1 percent, out of 790,000 cast.
In the final election, Kerry's camp expected light opposition from Raymond Shamie, a self-made millionaire who in the GOP primary had upset Elliot L. Richardson, the resume-rich icon of the flagging Brahmin wing of the Massachusetts Republican Party.
Kerry's campaign softened up Shamie by demonizing the avuncular entrepreneur as a right-wing extremist who had flirted with the ultra-rightist John Birch Society years earlier.
Kerry basically did to Shamie what Kerry's tormentors had done to him in the 1972 congressional race, when they painted the upstart as a way-out liberal. Kerry's campaign was more subtle, however, in turning the rhetoric against radicalism on its head.
Along the way Kerry puffed up his Democratic credentials -- his campaign work for John F. Kennedy in high school, and the extent of his involvement as a Yale student in the Freedom Summer of 1964, when white volunteers headed to the South to help blacks push for voting rights.
A campaign flier, titled "A Message from John Kerry," began: "Ever since I worked as a young volunteer in John Kennedy's presidential campaign, I have been deeply committed to participation in politics and political issues . . . Back then, I joined the struggle for voting rights in the South."
But Kerry's involvement with the JFK campaign of 1960 was minimal. Today, he acknowledges he may only have participated in a single literature drop in Concord, N.H., while boarding at St. Paul's School.
Moreover, his role in the struggle to register black voters in Mississippi was confined to the Yale campus in New Haven, Conn. Kerry's accounts over the years of his involvement have sometimes left the impression -- and resulted in press reports -- that the young Yalie was actually down South, with the freedom riders. He wasn't.
"I remember we saw the buses off and helped raise money for the buses and were supportive of it, but I did not personally go down there on a freedom ride," Kerry said. Not long thereafter, he did visit the South, he said, "to see what was going on, which was an eye-opener for me. I had never seen a sign that said, `No colored, whites only.' "
The thrust of Kerry's candidacy, however, was an attack on Reagan's economic, foreign, and military policies.
Kerry was scornful, for instance, of the Grenada invasion, launched by Reagan the previous October to evacuate US medical students after a Marxist-backed military coup on the Caribbean island.
At one point he likened it to "Boston College playing football against the Sisters of Mercy." Earlier, Kerry told The Cape Codder newspaper:
"The invasion of Grenada represents the Reagan policy of substituting public relations for diplomatic relations . . . no substantial threat to US interests existed and American lives were not endangered . . . The invasion represented a bully's show of force against a weak Third World nation. The invasion only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle US/Soviet and North/South relations."
Campaigning now for president, however, Kerry is rewriting that history. As he accuses President George W. Bush of hamhanded diplomacy before the invasion of Iraq, Kerry often lists Grenada among the US military incursions he says he has supported.
"I was dismissive of the majesty of the invasion of Grenada," Kerry says now. "But I basically was supportive. I never publicly opposed it."
He draws a parallel to his recent stance on Iraq. "I mean, I supported disarming Saddam Hussein, but I was critical of the administration and how it did its diplomacy and so forth," he explained of a position critics say is a telling example of Kerry's straddling.
Ultimately, "war and peace" helped Kerry carry the day. Even as Massachusetts joined Reagan's 49-state rout of Walter F. Mondale, Kerry held the Democratic base, winning all but one of the state's cities to thump Shamie by 256,000 votes, a 10-percent margin.
More than 13 years after he rocketed onto the national stage with his antiwar speech, Kerry was returning to the Senate. Now, he would be a member of the club.
boston.com |
