Excerpt from Kerry's great new book which just came out:
Twelve years ago, late one night, I found myself on a C-135 transport plane that was taking me and two senatorial colleagues on the long flight across Europe and the Middle East to Kuwait. The Persian Gulf War had only recently ended, and we were headed for a postwar inspection tour of the region.
John Glenn, John McCain, and I had been discussing our shared love of flying until John Glenn fell asleep. And now John McCain and I sat in uncomfortable silence for a few moments until, inevitably, we started talking not about the Gulf War but about our war—Vietnam.
Though we had served together in the U.S. Senate for nearly five years at that point, we had never yet shared our common and separate experiences in Vietnam. We were aware of each other’s public stories, of course. I knew that John—the son of a distinguished admiral—had been a Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam, where he was held, beaten, and tortured for five and a half years, much of that time served after he refused to accept freedom on terms that violated the POW code of honor governing the order of prisoner releases.
And John knew I had also been a Navy officer, commanding a “swift boat”— a small, fast patrol boat used for counterinsurgency missions—in the Mekong Delta for two tours of duty. Unlike him, I had been able to come back after I received my third Purple Heart. Upon my return, however, based on my strong feelings that our fighting men were being sacrificed for a mission in which our leaders no longer believed, I got involved in the effort of veterans to stop the war.
Not surprisingly John, who was still imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton at that time, took a dim view of my antiwar activities and, in fact, campaigned for my Republican opponent when I first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1984. But he didn’t - really know the story of my personal experiences in Vietnam, just as I didn’t really know his.
The gulf between us on that issue was typical. In those difficult years of the Vietnam War there were too many on both the left and right in this country, along with the Communists in Vietnam, who had tried to pit those who had worn the uniform and now opposed the war against those who still supported it and who, whether on the battlefields or in prison cells in Hanoi, continued to serve with the greatest of valor. John McCain and I were caught up in that crossfire, started by those who wanted differences over the war to become fundamental differences between two soldiers.
I don’t know exactly how long we talked about Vietnam in that dark C-135 cabin, but by daybreak we shared a new understanding—and a new friendship. And we built upon that friendship over the next few years to bring our war, finally, to an end.
Later that year, I was asked by the Senate majority leader to chair a special committee on POW/MIA affairs, in part because of continuing media reports— and family hopes that they raised—that a significant number of Americans were still being secretly held in Vietnam. This issue, moreover, had led to the continuation of our economic boycott against Vietnam and our refusal to resume normal diplomatic relations with that country even though the hostilities had ended nearly two decades earlier. John McCain also agreed to serve on this committee.
Both of us had signed up for what was generally regarded as one of the most thankless tasks in Washington. We had to review a thousand old documents, struggle to achieve some level of cooperation from a Vietnamese government that had hundreds of thousands of its own MIAs, and deal with a POW/MIA advocacy network that fed every wild rumor or conspiracy theory, preying on the grief of families of Americans who had not come home. We had to fight against the Rambo psychology of reopening all the contentious issues of the war all over again, and—for John McCain and me, at any rate—we had to come to grips with our own memories.
I certainly remembered how close I had come to being killed by rifle fire and rocket launchers from the shore in our forays deep into Viet Cong territory. I remembered crew members and close friends who didn’t come back. I knew I could have wound up, like John McCain and the sons and husbands of those who anxiously followed our hearings, a POW or MIA.
We made a total of eight trips to Vietnam during and immediately after our hearings. These visits were filled with unforgettable experiences, and one of the most deeply moving of them was accompanying John to the site of the Hanoi Hilton and seeing the tiny room—really almost a cage—where he sacrificed a good part of his young adulthood for his country, in pain and fear and isolation.
I have had no greater privilege in all my life than finding, then standing on, common ground with John McCain, with whom I formed a close personal and political alliance during these hearings. We insisted on examining all the evidence, demanded that witnesses be held accountable for the reliability of their testimony, and, in the end, convinced the entire committee to agree on a report that concluded that there were likely no Americans still alive in Vietnam.
And our alliance continued to the next steps our country needed to take to honorably put the war behind us—abandonment of the economic boycott against Vietnam and normalization of diplomatic relations. President Clinton had the courage to put these policies into action, and he still says that he couldn’t have done it without the constant presence and united support of two Vietnam vets named John—one a Democrat, one a Republican; one a famous POW, the other a famous war protester. As for me, I’m most proud of the fact that when we say the word “Vietnam” today we mean not just a war but a country—at long last, a place where, as I hoped thirty years ago, “America turned and veterans helped in the turning.”
My friendship with John McCain has continued and even strengthened after our last Vietnam mission, and neither of us has much use for those in either party who complain that we should keep to our own partisan interests. In fact, we have discovered that we share something far more precious than party: a common call to service.
I learned several important lessons during our effort to put the war behind us for ourselves, our generation, and our country.
I learned how to reach across partisan and ideological divides to find common ground in the rich soil of American values and experiences.
I learned how to overcome the passionate convictions of narrow interest groups to build a consensus based on facts rather than prejudice.
I learned how to make my personal experiences a platform for broader lessons about American ideals and their special place in the world’s struggle for peace and justice.
And perhaps most important, I learned that the call to service did not end with a discharge from the Navy or election to the United States Senate.
I’m pretty sure that our mutual experience in transcending the Vietnam trauma was one important factor that led John McCain to run for president in 2000 as a serious reformer, a “straight talker,” and a patriot who believes our willingness to meet domestic challenges is as important a test of national will as our willingness to engage in warfare. He did his best to summon his party to rise to such values, and had he succeeded, the country would be in much better hands today.
I don’t believe there’s much left in the Republican Party of the spirit of true civic service or the courage to defy powerful interests and seriously address the most pressing national issues. And too many people in my own Democratic Party are focused on narrow interests and as a result have too little vision of the vast potential for achievement, at home and abroad, for the United States under the kind of leadership we deserve.
It’s time for a new call to service. It’s time to rally Democrats, Republicans, and inde- pendents alike to face the common challenges of this generation. In the course of my career, from the Mekong Delta to the Senate, I’ve tried to muster the right combination of the toughness to govern and the compassion to care—along with a deep commitment to justice and to America’s progressive values. But my experiences have taught me that a leader succeeds only to the extent that he is able to communicate his values, his goals, his ideas, and much of who he is in direct communication, one on one. I began that kind of conversation with John McCain on a C-135 late one night, and it’s continued ever since. I want to begin that conversation with my fellow citizens in this book and during this presidential campaign, and continue it while we work together to meet the challenges of our age.
Why I Am Running for President
I am a child of the greatest generation of Americans and therefore a member of the most fortunate generation of Americans. Like my parents, I have always hoped and often assumed that my own children will have more opportunities in life than I had and will live in a country and in a world where such opportunities are more widely shared and more deeply rooted than at any time in the past.
I am running for president in no small part to redeem that promise for the America to come. While we are living today in the most extraordinary and powerful nation on earth, I believe not only that America’s best days are still to come but that our best work is yet to be done. We have the capacity to lift the life of our own land as well as lead the world to a safer and more hopeful future. But doing so will require equal measures of strength, vision, and resolve, embodied in a leadership that grasps both the breadth of our potential and the great legacy of our past.
As Americans, we inherit with our birthright of freedom a sacred chain of responsibility that stretches back to the Founders and to the sacrifices of the immigrants who built this country before and after them and extends to the present day. Our task is not just to guarantee material progress: along with a better life we must pass on to our children that unique sense of optimism and that God-given belief in the universal appeal of our ideals that have always marked our national character.
I look ahead with confidence, because all around us I see evidence that the children of the baby-boom generation have the right stuff. The skill and courage of the young men and women who went into harm’s way in Afghanistan and Iraq—and for that matter, at ground zero in New York—match the best of my generation during the cold war and my parents’ generation during the Second World War.
In that conflict my father flew DC-3s in the Army Air Corps. Afterward, he entered the diplomatic service and was privileged to be an active participant during the historic period when this nation forged a “grand and global alliance” against tyranny with measures that ranged from the Marshall Plan through NATO to a host of multilateral institutions. His was the greatest generation not just because it defeated Fascism but because it was determined after the war to create a nation worthy of all the effort and sacrifice that had been made and a world worthy of the cause for which they had fought.
My parents raised me with a belief in patriotism and service. After I joined the Navy during the Vietnam War, I commanded a naval gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta. Then when I came home after two tours of duty, I decided that the same sense of service demanded something more of me. This led me to protest the very war in which I had fought, while always honoring those who fought before me, with me, and after me.
It may be hard to understand three decades later, but for all the conflict and contention over Vietnam here at home, this period was also a time when the - people of our country were drawn into a great civic discourse. Critical national issues had come to the center of people’s everyday lives. We had both the burden and the honor of facing in a short span of time a long list of topics that would fundamentally change our lives—civil rights, women’s rights, the environment, economic opportunity, and reclaiming democracy itself from elected leaders who lied to us and broke the laws they were sworn to uphold. We Americans took our country back and moved our country forward. That was the real America for which I had fought in the Vietnam War and in the antiwar movement, and I am still convinced—and can cite witnesses across the former Soviet empire who will confirm my belief—that it was the power of our values as much as the power of weapons that finally won the cold war.
In world war and in cold war, our people never lost the determination to make sure that our country was truly the best it could be. They knew there were things worth fighting for, both at home and abroad. It is that determination I hope to bring to the election of 2004, to the presidency of the United States, and to the common challenges Americans face.
There’s a famous old saying that all leaders tend to be either hedgehogs or foxes. A hedgehog knows one thing very well, and a fox knows a little about everything. I suspect I would qualify as a hedgehog who’s been around the field a few times. In the course of my public career, I’ve had the chance to master a range of issues—veterans issues after the war, crime as a prosecutor, economic development as a lieutenant governor, and then foreign policy, health care, intelligence, national defense, drug trafficking, technology, and education during nineteen years as a U.S. senator.
I don’t consider myself a policy wonk, but I was brought up to care about the big issues and to think for myself, not hire others to do the thinking for me.
While my father, Richard Kerry, was serving as a diplomat, my mother, Rosemary, became a serious civic activist and an environmentalist before the word “ecology” was widely used. And I first got to know my wife, Teresa, at a policy conference in South America. It’s no surprise that I’m accustomed to talking about ideas and world events around the dinner table and that my family is a central part of my political life. We’ve kept up the tradition with my daughters, Alex and Vanessa, and my stepsons, John, Andre, and Chris. They’ve all been nurtured on a steady diet of civic obligation.
I’ve also benefited from a pretty remarkable extended family of people who have influenced my thinking and helped keep me humble and hungry for knowledge.
First and foremost have been my brothers-in-arms from Vietnam, my crewmates from PCF 94 and PCF 44. We came from different states and backgrounds, but all that really mattered was that we were all from America. My real growing up came with them on a fragile boat under enemy fire halfway across the world. Thirty-five years later, they still help me keep my bearings. We share a precious, unshakable bond that veterans understand and others respect.
While I was an antiwar activist and veterans advocate after Vietnam, my extended family grew to include thousands who had always passionately loved their country and often passionately disagreed with one another about how to fight for their country’s values. After I testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, I felt as if I had heard from every one of them, whether happy, angry, approving, or damning, along with their parents, their wives and girlfriends, and their children. And I quickly learned to listen to the veterans of World War II and Korea who shared our sacrifices but didn’t like our long hair, our music, or our challenges to authority.
All these experiences helped me deal with the ultimate extended family of constituents I have represented in elected office. I will never forget meeting crime victims as an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Crime too often is reduced to a statistic, but from each of them, I learned that - every act of violence gives rise to an individual human tragedy. Since then, as lieutenant governor and as a senator, I’ve talked with countless citizens, often in happy moments but often, too, at some of the hardest times in their lives—men and women displaced from their homes by natural disasters or from their jobs by technological change; families overwhelmed by health-care costs or frustrated by bad schools; citizens struggling to obtain medical benefits for their parents or get questions answered by bureaucrats. I can’t say I’ve heard it all, but I have heard a lot, and I’ve tried to learn something from every encounter with a person, a problem, or an idea that crosses my path.
I don’t think it’s an exaggeration at all to say that the 2004 election represents a real crossroads for our country.
During the 1990s we were actually beginning to make real progress on a range of national problems that people had pretty much come to regard as immutable parts of the landscape. Violent crime fell sharply after nearly twenty-five years of steady increases. Welfare dependency was down by more than half. Teen pregnancy and abortion rates decreased. We adopted tough measures to reduce acid rain and raise water quality. Inner cities were being reborn all across the country. Real incomes rose for the middle class for the first time in two decades. Health-care costs stabilized. Technological innovations exploded, and productivity increased dramatically. Millions of working families—for the first time ever, a majority in this nation or any nation—joined the investor class, and America created the first mass upper-middle class in human history. Nearly thirty years of federal budget deficits were replaced by budget surpluses so large as to defy the imagination. From a statistical point of view, nearly everything good went up and nearly everything bad went down. And all this progress occurred despite partisan warfare and gridlock in Congress, and an administration under Bill Clinton that became more and more distracted and embattled by endless allegations and the investigations that grew out of them.
While we can’t go back to the exact policies of the Clinton years—as a progressive, I believe we should always be looking forward and embracing change—it is hard to believe that most people wouldn’t want to go back to the kind of results they helped achieve. Instead, in the name of ideology and on behalf of selfish interests, the Bush administration has been systematically dismantling just about everything government accomplished during the 1990s: environmen- tal protection, international diplomacy, substantial investments in basic scientific and technological research, fiscal discipline, and the commitment to a fairer society of opportunity for all. Not surprisingly, its policies have begun to have seriously alarming consequences: a sluggish economy, rising crime, the largest budget deficits in history, and the weakening of our alliances and standing around the world. Another four years of the Bush agenda, especially if there is a Republican Congress, will take this country so far off track that it could take a generation to put things right again.
But if we put the country back on a progressive course in 2004, I believe we can rebuild the prosperity of the 1990s, reverse a long series of bad decisions and evasions of responsibility, restore America’s world leadership in the eyes of our friends and our enemies alike, and protect the liberties that make this country a beacon to the hopeful and a reproach to tyrants everywhere. We have the chance to truly protect Americans from terrorism at home and abroad while calling on all Americans to join in the fulfillment of our freedom and democracy.
The time has come to renew our best hopes, take up the great unfinished business of our society, and take on the big challenges that many people have come to consider as hopeless, challenges like achieving energy independence, providing universal access to health care, creating high-quality schools for all students, using technology to drastically reform how government works, and turning the rhetoric of worker-controlled lifelong learning into a reality. And if I have anything to say about it, we will also make a commitment to political and civic reform, turning the tide of cynicism and indifference about politics and government and making our democracy both far more participatory and truly representative.
My fellow Democrats don’t agree on all of these issues or how exactly to resolve them, and that’s as it should be. I want my party to be an open door for lively debate, not a mirror image of the narrow ideological sect that the Republicans are becoming. Most of us, however, do agree that George W. Bush is leading America in a very dangerous direction. While we all admired the way he rallied the nation after 9/11, we also believe that he is, by ideology, inclination, and experience, incapable of keeping America strong enough at home or abroad to sustain us in peace or in war over the long haul. The question we now face is how to make that case to the widest span of the American people—Democrats, independents, and moderate Republicans alike—and offer a clear alternative agenda.
I, like so many of my fellow Democrats, am still angry about the painful and protracted events that followed the 2000 election and that perhaps altered its outcome. We should channel this anger into positive grassroots energy and into a determination never to let voters be disenfranchised again.
President Bush has enough bad policies on which to focus our energies; there is no need to ascribe to him a weak intellect or bad intentions as a political strategy. We should not deny him his few successes or refuse to acknowledge the affection his plainspokenness and quiet self-confidence inspire in many. For my part, I intend to run a presidential campaign organized around a contest of ideas, values, and policies, rather than a clash of personalities or a war between political tribes.
To those who think that sounds naïve, I would point to my last contested senatorial reelection campaign, in 1996, when I was challenged by William Weld, a very popular incumbent governor. There’s no question that that campaign could have degenerated into a mud bath if we had let it. It was a close race between two longtime statewide elected officials with nearly universal name recognition, the kind of race that is often decided by turnout. We both had advisers who urged us to focus on “energizing” our supporters with emotional appeals and attack ads and forget about persuading the relatively small group of undecided voters. But Governor Weld and I chose another path for our campaigns—a long series of debates rigorously focused on issues rather than personalities, a process that let voters reach their own judgments about our differences, our characters, and our capacity for leadership. By the end of that campaign, we all sincerely felt we were part of something unique and valuable, which had not only raised the level of civic discourse in Massachusetts but had actually boosted voter turnout through positive rather than negative means.
That’s precisely the kind of contest I would like to have with George W. Bush, and it’s one that I believe will serve the nation well.
President Bill Clinton once said that running for the presidency against an incumbent is like an extended job interview with the American people: You have to convince voters to fire the chief executive, then hire you as the replacement. I would add to that sentiment that you don’t have any business running for the presidency if you don’t know and can’t explain exactly how you would do a better job.
My case for sending George W. Bush back to his ranch in Crawford, Texas, is based on three big promises he made when he was in my position in the year 2000, then subsequently abandoned.
First, he pledged over and over again to “change the tone” in Washington—to reach out to Democrats and all Americans and overcome the partisan bitterness of the late 1990s. That promise became much more important when he took office after having lost the popular vote, becoming president only by virtue of an eternally controversial ruling by the narrowest possible majority of the U.S. Supreme Court. But since then the president has done the very opposite of what he promised, presiding over the most partisan administration I have experienced in my nearly twenty years in the Senate. He reaches out to Democrats only occasionally, primarily to invite surrender to his political and legislative demands. The tone in Washington, despite the longing for unity inspired by 9/ 11, is so poisonously partisan that a growing majority of Americans—who have become either nonvoters or independents—are no longer allied with either side. The president and his closest colleagues have personally contributed to this toxic atmosphere by denouncing any thoughtful differences of opinion as unpatriotic, cynically invoking loyalty in the service of party obedience.
Second, George W. Bush pledged frequently to temper the harsh ideology of his party with a “compassionate conservatism” that would harness our nation’s civic energy in the pursuit of justice and opportunity for the poor and forgotten. There is no question that the president has broken this promise as well. His one exercise in compassion was the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001, an education reform effort that I supported. The stated purpose of that legislation was to offer a new bargain to states and school districts, under which they would accept greater accountability for results in exchange for the resources and the flexibility to get the job done. The Bush administration began welshing on its side of the bargain almost before the ink was dry on the bill, undermining education funding as part of a larger strategy of directing every available dollar toward tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. This has been sadly typical of the administration’s approach to government: a rhetoric of compassion and concern accompanied by policies that are compassionate primarily toward the most comfortable members of our society.
And that leads me to the third big promise the president has broken. He pledged many times to usher in a “responsibility era,” to exercise brave leadership whatever the political costs, and, in the words he used in the 2003 State of the Union Address, not to “pass along our problems to other Congresses, other presidents, and other generations.” By reneging on this promise the president has betrayed his claim to represent the mature and responsible face of the baby-boom generation. Among the many dangers the administration is refusing to deal with are global climate change, the impending crisis in retirement programs, the culture of corporate corruption, the need for a genuine homeland security system, our vulnerability to energy blackmail, the “loose nukes” problem in the former Soviet Union, and the threat of worldwide economic deflation. This is the first administration since Calvin Coolidge’s that believes that the national government can’t do anything about the economy other than giving more to those who already have the most. And this is the same administration that has managed to pass along trillions of dollars in new debt, along with neglect of big national challenges, to future generations.
In my campaign I intend to hold the president accountable for breaking all three of his big promises, applying the very standards he set for himself. And there’s an even more fundamental issue upon which I intend to pose the choice between another term for George W. Bush and a Kerry administration. It is a question central to all the challenges our country faces in the new world created by the end of the cold war with communism and the beginning of a war with terrorist networks and other globalized threats to our security. I believe what America needs is a president determined to restore our sense of common national purpose.
No matter what issue, foreign or domestic, I address—no matter where in the country I’m speaking, no matter the audience—my underlying message will be the same: It’s time to renew a sense of common purpose. It is a quality our nation has been losing for several decades—indeed, for much of my lifetime—and it is a quality I firmly believe we must restore. My presidential campaign will be built around the ideas of shared endeavor, national service, intergenerational obligation, and activism aimed at overcoming partisan and personal rivalries to meet the demands of a decisive, even fateful, era. That’s why I’ve titled this book A Call to Service. I hear that call, and I believe most Americans are ready to hear it as well and to respond to it. But it’s not a call they will hear from George W. Bush, who in the days after 9/11 so memorably asked Americans to shop and travel as their contribution to the fight against terrorism.
From that moment on there’s been a striking contrast between the president’s willingness to use stirring patriotic rhetoric and his unwillingness to apply the true spirit of patriotism to any aspect of national policy beyond actual military operations. As only one example, he broke a promise in the 2002 State of the Union Address to provide more opportunities for national service by passively accepting congressional Republican efforts to gut the AmeriCorps program that offers precisely such opportunities.
There are literally hundreds of issues on which I strongly disagree with the Bush administration and a Republicanism that’s drifted far from its roots as the party of Lincoln and is obsessed with dividing the Union that Lincoln saved. The one policy that bothers me most is their deliberate and consistent effort to undermine the ideal of shared sacrifice and purpose, devotion to the common good, and responsibility to future generations.
Instead this administration has made its top wartime priority the easing of the tax burden on its wealthiest citizens—the citizens least likely to face sacrifices at home or abroad in a time of war. This president has all but endorsed the most invidious conservative policy of our time: that cutting taxes for the people who least need help, turning budget surpluses into deficits, and piling debts on our children are all useful strategies because they will effectively paralyze our own government—the instrument of our democracy—by denying it the revenues to pay for progress. Using tax dollars paid by all Americans to comfort the comfortable while starving the commonwealth has become an item of orthodoxy for a Republican Party that has left behind not only millions of children, not only its promises, but its own honorable traditions of moderation and national stewardship.
Whether it’s an energy policy that perpetuates dependence on Middle - Eastern oil, an environmental policy that denies global climate change, a health- care policy that proposes to dismantle Medicare and Medicaid, a civil rights policy that pretends to be color-blind while denying educational opportunity to all Americans, or a judicial philosophy that would appoint activist judges determined to validate discrimination or repudiate a woman’s right to choose, this is not an administration focused on our long-term interests as a nation. This is an administration that is exploiting our national security challenges as a rationale for dismantling the achievements of a progressive era that lasted from Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton, and taking America back to a system of go-it-alone economics and politics. |
