A HIPPIE PREZ?
February 14, 2004 -- BOSTON - THESE days, Kerry criss-crosses the country as a war hero, a decorated Navy veteran of Vietnam. But 33 years ago, he was widely regarded as a hippie, in no small measure because of his anti-war activities with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Much has been made of the photograph of Kerry with Jane Fonda, and his involvement in the so-called Winter Soldier Investigation.
But there's another interesting aspect to what Kerry was up to back then. It's a book, "The New Soldier," about the VVAW demonstrations in Washington in April 1971. That was the week of Kerry's now-famous tossing of, depending on when the story was told, his own medals, someone else's decorations or just his own ribbons.
"The New Soldier" was John Kerry's first book, and it shows a side of him that you never see anymore as he campaigns surrounded by his "band of brothers" in their overseas caps.
Could the person who wrote the following epilogue to "The New Soldier" be the same John Kerry who now opens so many speeches with a salute?
"We will not quickly join those who march on Veterans' Day waving small flags . . . We will not readily join the American Legion and the Veterans of Foreign Wars - in fact, we will find it hard to join anything at all."
In recent weeks, the book's cover has become an Internet staple, featuring as it does a photograph of long-hairs in military uniforms recreating the famous Iwo Jima photograph with an upside-down American flag.
However, the book itself has become harder and harder to find.
Before his sudden rise in the polls last month, the used-book site Alibris.com had copies available for as little as $99. Now none remains at any price - the last was sold for $849.95. Bidding on an autographed first edition on eBay continues, with the price over $500 by last Wednesday night
There can be no disputing that "The New Soldier" is Kerry's book. His is the name, literally, above the title. One of the two editors was his then-brother-in-law, David Thorne, who proves himself the Douglas Brinkley of his day.
"John Kerry spoke eloquently," says Thorne, who later let Kerry stay at his home when he had nowhere to go after divorcing Thorne's heiress sister Julia. Kerry, it appears, has never lacked for hagiographers.
In the book, Kerry's photograph appears at least three times. On page 77, he's standing behind that perennial anti-American LBJ cabinet member, Ramsey Clark. On page 81, he's exactly where he's spent so much of the past 30 years - next to a TV camera. And on page 85, JFK mugs in front of two microphones.
The more things change . . .
Much of the book's text, such as it is, is oral history, from other members of the VVAW. It is a bleak cataloguing, utterly unchallenged, of alleged war crimes against the Vietnamese people. There are at least four references to cutting ears off the corpses of North Vietnamese soldiers. An old man's beard is set on fire, Americans watch as Korean marines gang-rape Vietnamese nurses and U.S. soldiers shoot civilians, cows, elephants and torch hootches.
Since it was the '70s, Kerry had to include some psychobabble. A Seminole Indian veteran decries "the money bag" in American society, and a black vet, Pfc. Bill Perry, describes the United States as "a rich man's game," in contrast to the emerging Stalinist regime in Vietnam, which he says is "nothing but love. It's a kind of love we really lack in this country and a kind of love that we have to build."
Tell it to the boat people, Private Perry.
Granted, the most incendiary quotes come not from Kerry, but from other members of the VVAW. But it seems obvious that this volume was cobbled together by Kerry and his brother-in-law as a sort of campaign document - much like Brinkley's obsequious current tome.
By including passages in a book that bears his by-line, one would think Kerry is assuming some responsibility, at the very least, for their accuracy.
Not all of "The New Soldier" is so grim. Some of the oral history reflects the marijuana-infused wackiness of the era. A former officer named Jack Mallory concludes his statement with a thought about the "revolution."
"[If] someone asked me who I'd blame for causing the revolution, I'd have to say Walt Disney. He is the one who taught all of us to believe in the things that the country and the soldier is supposed to stand for, the whole Davy Crockett, Daniel Boone, George Washington image."
No wonder someone seems so anxious to buy up all the remaining copies of "The New Soldier.
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