Storied Past, Golden Résumé, but Mixed Reviews for Kerry
nytimes.com
November 30, 2003
By TODD S. PURDUM
In 1971, when most of his rivals for the presidency were in college, in graduate school or just beginning ambitious but still anonymous careers, John Forbes Kerry was already a decorated combat veteran of two tours in Vietnam and such a prominent leader of the antiwar movement that "60 Minutes" profiled him and the correspondent Morley Safer asked, "Do you want to be president?"
"Of the United States?" Mr. Kerry replied. "No."
But then his face broke into a broad grin that suggested the idea had crossed his mind more than once, and he added, "That's such a crazy question at a time like this, when there are so many things that have to be done, and so many changes that have to be made, that I'm not sure you can set out and do those things and at the same time, you know, keep people as happy as you have to."
Now, after an odyssey — as a prosecutor, lieutenant governor and, for nearly 20 years, junior senator from Massachusetts — Mr. Kerry is running for president at last, and he is having trouble keeping people as happy as he has to. In an unsettled time, he has become a prisoner of the golden biography that was built to propel him. As he turns 60, he is struggling to explain the relevance of his lifetime experience, both to party insiders who have long had mixed feelings about him and to a new generation of antiwar activists for whom Vietnam is distant history.
Mr. Kerry wants it to be simple. "Gary Hart endorsed me the other day by saying, `I subscribe to the quaint notion that when somebody runs for the president of the United States, they ought to be qualified for the job,' " he told an audience in New Hampshire last month. It was a bit of nominal understatement he often uses — one that does nothing to mask a patrician undertone of disdain for both President Bush and his Democratic rivals.
But it is not simple. Having spent much of his career as a loner and an outsider, he finds himself fighting the impression that he is a quintessential Washington insider, yesterday's news.
In fact, there have always been two parallel, conflicting interpretations of John Kerry's life and career. More than most politicians, he has battled an enduring gap in perceptions: there is the circle of longtime friends and family who know and love him, and then there is a more skeptical collection of colleagues, contemporaries and critics who seem more or less persuaded that he does not add up.
Is Mr. Kerry the idealistic teenager who worshiped John F. Kennedy and the New Frontier's notion of public service? Or is he a careerist who aped the young president with the same initials, volunteering for service on a Navy patrol boat that was the Vietnam equivalent of PT-109?
Is he an indifferent legislator who used the Senate as a launching pad for high-profile investigations, or a born leader with a natural executive temperament who chafed at routines, took on thankless tasks and yearned to break free?
Is he a perpetual equivocator, who voted for the resolution authorizing war with Iraq but against the money to pay for rebuilding? Or is he attuned to the complexity of most issues and unwilling to reduce his answers to sound bites? Is he arrogant and aloof or shy and private, a thoughtful man who writes poetry and has taken up classical guitar as a way to relax?
Depending on who is doing the telling, John Kerry is all of those things.
"It takes longer than 30 seconds to explain him," said his friend Bob Kerrey, the Nebraska Democrat who spent years alongside Mr. Kerry in the Senate and is a fellow Vietnam veteran. "He's a very smart, well-read, balanced human being. You can't squeeze that into a 30-second description, and it's harder for him."
Comparing Senator Kerry's recently published letters home from Vietnam with his own, Mr. Kerrey marveled: "I'm writing home asking for food, for money. He's mapping out a world geopolitical strategy. It's phenomenal how deep his thinking goes at that stage of life. He's a man of considerable stature."
`An Aura He Created'
Mr. Kerry's 6-foot-4-inch frame has radiated stature for decades. As a gangly teenager at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., he struck teachers and fellow students as a president in training. He was one of the founders of a political club and excelled at speech and debate and at hockey and lacrosse, which he played on teams captained by Robert S. Mueller III, a classmate who went on to become director of the F.B.I.
By the time he won the presidency of the Yale political union — as a Democrat on a largely Republican campus — the impression that he was heading places had hardened. "I took 6,000 pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger and 6,000 pictures of John Kerry," said George Butler, a Yale classmate, who directed "Pumping Iron" with Mr. Schwarzenegger and is making a film about Mr. Kerry. "I was convinced from the outset that they both had destinies."
Harvey Bundy, a Chicago money manager who roomed with Mr. Kerry at Yale, explained: "It was an aura he created. We sat around the room, talking about `what are our positions going to be in John's cabinet?' I wish I could forecast the market as well."
Yet even then, something about him rankled. "Keep the Puck Kerry" they called him at St. Paul's, an elite Episcopalian boarding school where he was among a handful of Catholic students, a Kennedy supporter in a sea of junior Nixonites, and not nearly as rich as most of his classmates.
"I was always aware that John was maybe a little too serious for the average college guy, and therefore was misunderstood," said David Thorne, another Yale friend, whose twin sister, Julia, became Mr. Kerry's first wife. He added, "They couldn't see that the idealistic candle burned just as bright as the ambitious one."
Mr. Kerry professes never to have heard the nasty nicknames at the time. "I think that's after the fact," he said.
But he added: "I do know that, you know, being determined and being clear about things early in life is counter to lots of people's place, as I've learned as I get older. If I'd had, you know, a better sense of all that then, I would probably have tried to be a little more thoughtful about it all. But I have no regrets about it. I mean, I'm comfortable with it. So what if nobody loved you? I don't look backwards."
Mr. Kerry's never-complain, never-explain roots run deep. His mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, was descended from John Winthrop, who helped settle Boston in 1630 and proclaimed the vision of a "city upon a hill," and from the Brahmin Forbes family. She grew up mostly in France, the daughter of an international businessman, and Mr. Kerry's extended family still has a home on a bluff in Brittany, rebuilt on the site where the homestead was destroyed by the Germans in World War II.
His paternal ancestry is much more complicated. His grandfather, a Czech-Austrian Jew, was born Fritz Kohn; he changed his name to Frederick Kerry and converted to Catholicism before emigrating to the United States. Mr. Kerry had known for some time that his grandfather, a shoe merchant, committed suicide, but learned only this year, after an investigation by The Boston Globe, that the act, accomplished with a gun, occurred in the men's room of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston in 1921, apparently after business reversals. Mr. Kerry's father, Richard, an American diplomat who served in Europe and died in 2000, had never spoken of the details.
"It raised as many questions as it answered, because there was nobody around to answer the questions," Mr. Kerry said, describing his father as "bitter about the loss of his father, and then later the loss of his sister to cancer and polio," and "very sort of disconnected to roots and those kinds of discussions; he was more into theory and policy."
John Kerry grew up one of four children, partly in Europe, and at 11 was sent to boarding school, first in Switzerland and eventually at St. Paul's. His parents posted to the American Embassy in Oslo, where his father was chief political officer.
At Yale, Mr. Kerry briefly dated Janet Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister, and sailed with President Kennedy at the helm off Rhode Island. By graduation in 1966, he had fallen in love with Julia Thorne and enlisted in the Navy, headed for Vietnam despite doubts about the war.
Harvey Bundy recalls visits from his uncle Bill, a Pentagon and State Department official and an architect of the American involvement in Southeast Asia, in the winter of 1965. There were talks lasting hours, in which John took part.
"Bill made the point very strongly that we need people like you to lead, we can't afford not to have people like you go," recalled Mr. Bundy, who himself got a student deferment for business school. "We weren't the generation that went to Canada."
For Mr. Kerry, Vietnam became a transforming experience. He earned three Purple Hearts, a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for battle, but returned so shocked and embittered by all he had seen as commander of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta that he became one of the leaders of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. In the spring of 1971 he organized a huge protest march on Washington, puzzling some of his old crewmates and eventually earning a place on President Richard M. Nixon's enemies list.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Mr. Kerry asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in an impassioned speech that effectively began his public career. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
The protest was controversial at the time, and it still provokes debate. Describing the march on the campaign trail today, Mr. Kerry says, "We camped right below the Congress," but detractors have long claimed that Mr. Kerry himself slept comfortably in Georgetown. He wrote his eloquent speech, the critics say, with help from Adam Walinsky, who had been Robert F. Kennedy's speechwriter.
Mr. Butler confirms that Mr. Kerry spent part of the time at his house in Georgetown, working the phones and lining up support. Mr. Walinsky said he helped some on the speech, but that it was Mr. Kerry's. Both criticisms ignore a larger reality: that as leader of the march, Mr. Kerry doubtless needed a base of operations that he could not find outdoors in the pre-cellphone era, and that at 27 he was media savvy enough to seek out one of the reigning wordsmiths of the Democratic Party.
"By the time he was done with that appearance before the committee, those guys were all drooling over him to be a candidate," Mr. Walinsky recalled. "The moment he finished talking, there wasn't the slightest doubt about it. It was a real star turn, one of those deals that used to happen more then than now — we're so much more jaded.
"But even now, there can be times when somebody just gets something in a particular way, and you can really grab the attention of virtually the entire country. He did."
Vietnam's Lingering Legacy
Much of Mr. Kerry's public life since then can be seen as comparatively anticlimactic: a failed campaign for Congress on an antiwar platform in 1972, after an embarrassing public search for a suburban Boston district in which he might have the best chance of winning; law school, then service as assistant district attorney in Middlesex County; election as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts on a ticket with Michael S. Dukakis in 1982; and to the Senate in 1984; re-election three times since, once in a hard-fought race against a popular Republican governor, William F. Weld, in 1996.
In the Senate, he has been a sometimes awkward younger brother to Edward M. Kennedy, his boyhood idol's own younger brother. He has been better known for his investigations into the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, drug dealing by Gen. Manuel Noriega of Panama and the early stages of the Iran-contra affair than for legislation bearing his name.
Perhaps his proudest achievement was his dogged work in the 1990's with Senator John McCain of Arizona to account for Americans missing in Vietnam and pave the way for President Bill Clinton to grant diplomatic recognition. It was a thankless task, requiring Mr. Kerry to face and defuse conspiracy theories propounded by some veterans groups that believed prisoners of war might still be in captivity. But he plunged into it.
To this day, Vietnam is the subject on which Mr. Kerry's own feelings lie closest to the surface. In Exeter, N.H., this fall, he spoke of his Yale friend Richard Pershing, who had gone to boarding school in town.
"I regret to say, we lost him in Vietnam," Mr. Kerry said, suddenly choking up and struggling to compose himself before quietly muttering, "Still hurts."
In 1999, one of Mr. Kerry's Vietnam crewmates, Del Sandusky, depressed and drinking heavily after the death of another crewmate, called to say he was suicidal. Mr. Kerry immediately sent help.
"He saved my life," Mr. Sandusky said. "He had his staff come out and put me in a hospital, and got me into treatment. I was ready to do it. I was ready to go downhill. He saved me."
Mr. Kerry, too, has known personal pain. He and Julia Thorne separated in 1983, after 13 years of marriage during which, she has since written, she suffered severe depression. Mr. Kerry commuted weekly to Boston from Washington to be with their daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, then teenagers.
"I found getting divorced a superpainful process," Mr. Kerry said, adding that dating was no fun. "Everybody thinks it's terrific, but it can be absolutely quite lonely."
In the early 1990's, Mr. Kerry began dating Teresa Heinz, the widow of Senator H. John Heinz III of Pennsylvania and one of the richest women in America, with a fortune estimated to exceed $500 million. They married in 1995.
A former United Nations interpreter who was born in Mozambique, Ms. Heinz Kerry is as outspoken and spontaneous as her husband is reserved. She sat for a recent interview with not one but two handlers, their presence intended to keep her from saying anything impolitic. After all, she had long opposed the idea of either of her husbands' running for president, and she only recently switched her registration from Republican and began using the Kerry name.
"When you live with someone, you adapt," Ms. Heinz Kerry said. "With my late husband, we were both kids, young, so you grow up together. With John, there were two adults. I had my baggage, my wounds, my hurts; he had his. The only difference is I came from having been married a long time, 25 years successfully married, and John had been 12 years alone. He had to learn how to share some things which he probably never thought he had to share."
Mr. Kerry's friends say his remarriage has softened and warmed him, sanded down his sharper edges. Asked how he had changed, Mr. Kerry responded a bit like the first President Bush, in sentence fragments, with few personal pronouns: "Just much more relaxed, and comfortable and calm about life and much broader vision of all the choices of life, if you will. Don't define myself by politics. Very comfortable doing lots of different things. Learned a lot about opening up. Being more accessible."
Ms. Heinz Kerry said of her husband: "He's not aloof. He's just so goddamned, excuse me, busy. He's so busy that he's off here, he's off there, doing something. That might seem to some people aloof. As I've said, that's something that I had to get used to as well and try to say, `Hey! Hey! Hey! I'm here.' But it's not aloof. It's busy."
Where He Comes From
Mr. Kerry has all the hallmarks — and the political vulnerabilities — of his privileged life. He still speaks with a trace of the upper-crust lockjaw accent that news footage suggests was once more pronounced. Like Thurston Howell III, the millionaire on "Gilligan's Island," he calls his wife "Lovey." At a recent house party in New Hampshire, he stunned a Swedish exchange student who asked about visa policy by addressing him in a few words of Swedish.
On the campaign trail he is uneven.
Sometimes he connects intensely with his audience. In a single day in New Hampshire, he parried a hostile question about gun control from a fellow hunter; made an elliptical Viagra joke with an older woman who rattled off the number of prescription medicines her husband took; and assured an Exeter scholarship student who wanted to know how the candidate could possibly understand people less privileged than himself, "Where you come from and where I come from are absolutely irrelevant; it's where we're going together that counts."
At other times he seems bored and distant, repeating chunks of campaign slogans, including his latest, summed up in an interview as "leadership, real leadership that is prepared to offer America a real deal, not a raw deal, like George Bush is."
In the top-floor study of his elegant town house on Beacon Hill, surrounded by the untidy clutter of books, a guitar and a ship's compass he bought in New Zealand on the way home from his first tour in Vietnam, he acknowledged his recent troubles. He dismissed his campaign manager, lost two other staffers and joined Howard Dean in opting out of the public campaign finance system so he would not be bound by spending limits in Iowa and New Hampshire, where he is struggling in the polls.
But he has been in far worse jams, and prevailed.
On Feb. 28, 1969, while Mr. Kerry was on patrol in Vietnam, his boat came under hostile fire. With his crew's support, he ordered the boat straight toward the shore, transforming it from a wide horizontal target into a skinny vertical battering ram that hit the beach, where a solitary Vietcong held a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Mr. Kerry chased and killed him.
Adm. Elmo Zumwalt would later say jokingly that it was not clear whether Mr. Kerry should be court-martialed or awarded the Silver Star. He got the Silver Star.
Has he turned his boat toward the shore once more? "That's maybe a month away or so," Mr. Kerry said with a small smile. "But we're going up the river. We're certainly moving up the river." |
