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Politics : Don't Blame Me, I Voted For Kerry -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Glenn Petersen who wrote (14050)	4/11/2004 11:51:39 PM
From: American Spirit	Respond to of 81568

Kerry reads the morning papers as quickly as he does everything else, meaning very quickly, muttering as he flips the pages ("Well, that's not good"), but this morning's grim headlines are stalling him: Colin Powell's Mideast peace mission appears to be floundering, the Boston priest scandal is unraveling, and, worst of all, the Post is reporting that U.S. forces somehow allowed Osama bin Laden to escape during the Tora Bora offensive in Afghanistan, something Kerry had been fearing. He reads bits of it aloud, sentence after sentence seeming to further stoke his anger; this was the worst-case scenario of a military strategy that Kerry had been quietly criticizing for months. "They let him go," he says. "It's disgraceful." Swearing softly as we slow through a construction zone, Kerry tells me, by way of explanation, "I've been saying this privately for months now, and my staff at times has had to restrain me. They [the Bush administration] talk tough, but it's a risk-averse strategy. Bush gets daily briefings, for God's sake. He should be saying, ‘Do we need more troops there, here, where? Do we need more firepower?’ " He gazes out the car window as the Capitol comes into view, "Osama bin Laden got away," he says, glumly. Pause. "You'd think they'd have learned some lessons in Vietnam." This is where he often returns, to Vietnam, and to understand John Kerry - his politics, his passions, maybe even his motorcycling - you must begin there. As with so many of the men who returned from that war, there is a before and an after in John Kerry's life, and neither quite jibes with the other. The before goes like this: The son of a diplomat father and a mother of undiluted Brahmin lineage, John Forbes Kerry was born in 1943 in Denver, where his father, then an Army Air Forces pilot, was recovering from tuberculosis. His youth followed a typical upper-crust template: Swiss boarding school, New Hampshire's elite St. Paul's School, and then Yale, where Kerry was an avid athlete if a distracted student. Two events during those years would affect his life's heading. First, en route to the dentist at the age of seventeen, Kerry happened upon John F. Kennedy speaking at Boston's North Station; he was transfixed, even obsessed, and rumor has it was soon signing letters with the initial "JFK" (which while technically accurate, struck some classmates as too bold an affectation). Second, Kerry enlisted in the Navy after his graduation from Yale in 1966, volunteering for action in Vietnam.