Creativity, single-minded ambition buoyed Kerry through tough times
August 17, 2003
Des Moines Register
By THOMAS BEAUMONT
Boston, Mass. -
John Kerry doesn't like to talk about the day in 1969 when he chased a wounded Vietnamese teenager down a riverbank and shot him dead.
It was a life-or-death moment for the prep-schooled son of an American diplomat who had graduated from Yale University two years earlier.
"I'm kind of tired of talking about that period of time," the U.S. senator from Massachusetts said in a recent interview. "It was an important period, and very formative.
"But there's a lot more. To me that was one period of my life. It's not my life."
But had Kerry not jumped off the boat he commanded in the Mekong River delta that day and killed the Vietnamese guerrilla, there would be no Silver Star to give credibility to the seminal moment in his public life, testifying to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee two years later that the war was "a mistake."
The characteristic that sustained Kerry most in the Mekong delta - a creative and single-minded ambition that has sometimes been interpreted as a cool personal detachment - served him as an antiwar leader, prosecutor and lieutenant governor, through divorce, political defeat and cancer.
It accompanies him now as he campaigns for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.
"This guy, elegant and fancy as he may seem and as he may be, he can also take a punch," said former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, Kerry's 1996 Republican opponent.
Loose geographic roots
John Forbes Kerry was born Dec. 11, 1943, in Denver, Colo., to Rosemary Forbes of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family and Richard Kerry, a test pilot in the U.S. Army Air Corps. Kerry was raised Catholic, but learned 15 years ago that his paternal grandfather was a Czech Jewish immigrant.
Kerry's family moved to Massachusetts when he was an infant. By 1950, Kerry had three siblings - older sister Peggy, younger sister Diana and baby brother Cameron - and the family had moved to Washington, D.C., where Kerry's father had gone to work for the U.S. State Department.
U.S. Sen. John F. Kennedy's rise from Massachusetts to the presidency ignited Kerry's simmering interest in politics, which first surfaced in 1952, when the 9-year-old canvassed his neighborhood with a tin cup seeking contributions for Democratic presidential nominee Adlai Stevenson.
Kerry's physical stature - he's 6-foot-4 - didn't arrive until adolescence, but his then-average build didn't keep him from asserting himself among his peers, recalled Cameron Kerry, who is seven years younger.
"He was this sort of large figure, always active, always the quarterback in touch football games and the captain in capture the flag," said Cameron Kerry, a lawyer in Boston.
John Kerry's stay at a Swiss boarding school and his four years at the prestigious St. Paul's college preparatory school in New Hampshire paved the way for his natural friendship with David Thorne during their freshman year at Yale University in 1962.
Thorne, who grew up overseas, and Kerry were members of Yale's elite Skull and Bones society. They unknowingly vied for the same girl - the half-sister of Jacqueline Kennedy - enlisted in the Navy together and served in Vietnam. Kerry would go on to marry Thorne's twin sister, Julia, in 1970.
Kerry - an active pilot, hockey player and student of classical guitar - approaches nothing halfheartedly, said Thorne, a Boston publisher and financial broker.
"I've witnessed this from the same cockpit. It's part of his wiring," said Thorne, who remains Kerry's closest friend. "He doesn't want to mess around. He wants to be the best."
Kerry's aggressiveness and quest for superiority would be tested in Vietnam, for which he volunteered, despite misgivings.
An excerpt from the speech he gave at his 1966 graduation from Yale reveals the conflicting feelings about the war which would define him after his return.
"We have not really lost the desire to serve," he told his classmates. "We question the very roots of what we are serving."
"Let's go, tigers!"
The background of the New Englander with the initials JFK preceded his arrival aboard swift boat No. 94.
It was Kerry's second tour in Vietnam. After serving six months on a frigate in the Gulf of Tonkin, he returned six months later as the commander of a swift boat, a 50-foot vessel common in the Mekong delta. The five-man crew accepted their new skipper, who had a way of rallying them, said Eugene Thorson of Ames, No. 94's mechanic.
"He'd say, "Let's go, tigers," " said Thorson, now a cement mason. "He had that much leadership that he could boost you to that extra. He could get the best out of you."
On Feb. 28, 1969, Kerry's boat was en route to assist another swift boat that had been ambushed when No. 94 was attacked from the bank by a rocket fired by a young Vietnamese guerrilla. Kerry ordered the boat into the bank.
"Risk-wise, this was a pretty smart move because, in my judgment, I could take them by surprise and provide a lower profile and overwhelm them," Kerry said. "When you're broadside to the bank, you're a pretty big target."
Two crew members ran ashore and fired at the guerrilla, wounding him as Thorson sprung to his post at the boat's rear gun.
Kerry said he ran off the boat when the guerrilla got back up and started running away. Kerry chased him for about 20 yards before killing him.
"I just know that he had a B-40 rocket and we were at war and he was the enemy," he said.
Kerry, who was wounded three times in Vietnam, was awarded the Silver Star for killing the youth. By the spring of 1969, he had also earned the Bronze Star, three Purple Hearts and a trip home.
A public life begins
Kerry returned from war disillusioned with the government. His political ambition prompted him to help organize Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
In 1971, the 27-year-old Kerry appeared in a packed committee room in the U.S. Capitol wearing fatigues and ribbons symbolizing his medals as he testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" asked Kerry, an Ivy League face in a typically long-haired movement.
Kerry's work with the veterans group made him a national figure with his Senate testimony and appearances on television news programs. But it failed to translate into political popularity at home. In 1972, he lost his first campaign, a U.S. House race in northern Massachusetts where he moved specifically to run for Congress.
"That was a pretty crushing defeat," recalls Thorne, who helped run the campaign. "It was the beginning of his time in the wilderness."
Kerry returned to Boston and entered law school at Boston College. During his three years in school, his daughters Vanessa and Alexandra were born.
In 1976, he went to work for the Middlesex County district attorney's office, the state's largest. By 1978, Kerry was the first assistant district attorney and the office's most visible spokesman.
By 1981, he had re-entered politics and won a five-way Democratic primary for lieutenant governor, tantamount to winning the general election in heavily Democratic Massachusetts.
Elected as the running mate to Gov. Michael Dukakis, Kerry's stillborn political career came to life.
Personal changes
When U.S. Sen. Paul Tsongas of Massachusetts announced that he would step down in 1984, Kerry jumped into the race.
The primary pitted Kerry against U.S. Rep. James Shannon, a popular U.S. House member from the district where Kerry had lost 12 years earlier.
"There's a doggedness about him. You can characterize it as ambition," Shannon said. "I'm sure some of that came from moments when he felt it had nearly passed him by after 1972."
Kerry won the high-profile primary en route to becoming the junior senator from Massachusetts that he remains 19 years later.
As he campaigns, Kerry stresses his work on the Senate Foreign Relations committee more than domestic policy. Investigations into the Iran-Contra affair, international banking and drug scandals, and the search for Vietnam War prisoners earned him a reputation as being a media-savvy prosecutor.
"My impression from the beginning was he was an able member of the Senate with above-average ability and above-average media awareness," said former Sen. Paul Simon of Illinois, who also was elected in 1984.
Kerry, who was divorced in 1988, said he consciously began to shed his reputation as aloof as a result of the divorce.
"Moving that fast, you don't always slow down to connect," Cameron Kerry said. "Over the years as he matured and mellowed, he has connected."
In 1995, John Kerry married Teresa Heinz, the former wife of the late Republican U.S. Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania.
The lanky Kerry, with deep-set eyes and trademark thatch of silvery hair, still breezes past slower-moving people. But he is given to clasping a shoulder or draping a long arm around the people he meets.
"He's much more tactile, a little more easygoing with people" than before 1988, said Mary Ann Marsh, a longtime Democratic political consultant in Boston and former Kerry campaign official.
Two battles
Kerry said he first seriously considered running for president in 2000, although he never strayed from the course that began with his tin-can drive for Stevenson. In 1996, after he defeated Weld, political allies said Kerry was up to the test of a national campaign.
Weld and Kerry were contemporaries in age and background. Both enjoyed high visibility in Massachusetts and were seen as having national potential. Kerry led in the polls that summer, but Weld was making strides and started running ads attacking Kerry.
"It was a pretty good punch, and he took the punch very well," Weld recalled recently. "He drew himself up to his full height, took it and gave it right back."
Kerry won a third term in 1996 and faced nominal opposition for a fourth term in 2002. He was among the finalists for the vice presidential nomination in 2000.
Though many of Kerry's battles have been public, his latest, most personal test was kept quiet until this year.
Family and friends described his diagnosis of prostate cancer last year as sobering for him.
His father, Richard, died from the disease in 2000 at the age of 85, after choosing treatment over surgery.
Kerry said his father's sickness had "a profound impact" on his decision to have his cancerous prostate removed in February, but was not a startling brush with mortality.
"For me, it was a more gentle confrontation with death," he said.
"My mortality wake-up call took place when I was 25 years old." |
