Learn a little truth about John Kerry:
"We did do some wild things together - flying planes, running with the bulls in Pamplona," Thorne recalls. "He was very gutsy, always pushing - let's do this, let's do that." Kerry's physical daring - as a skier, a windsurfer, a motorcycle rider, a stunt pilot - remains a source of wonder among his friends. He was, apparently, something of a cowboy in Vietnam as well. He served as the captain of a small "swift boat", ferrying troops up the rivers of the Mekong Delta. He was wounded three times in four months, and then sent home - the policy in Vietnam was three wounds and you're out.
His old crewmates remember that he played rock music over the boat's loudspeaker system-the Doors, the Stones, Jimi Hendrix - before they went on patrol. "He starred in that Marlon Brando movie, Apocalypse Now, long before they ever made it," Gene Thorson, a former crewmate, says.
To release the tension after a trip up the river, Kerry would often instigate chicken races between the swift boats, cutting over each other's wakes. He also organised water-balloon battles. Once, his three-boat squadron attacked an American supply ship at night with flares. "The brass was not too happy about that," Kerry recalled. "But what were they going to do to us, send us to Vietnam?"
Admiral Elmo Zumwalt later joked that he wasn't sure if he should give Kerry the Silver Star or court-martial him for his actions on February 28 1969. Kerry had ignored standard operating procedure as his squadron ferried troops up the river that day. "He had talked to me about trying something different," Mike Medeiros, a crew member from San Leandro, California, said. "He said he was tired of just going up the river and getting shot at. He asked me what I thought about turning to attack the enemy positions if we took fire and no one was hurt. I said it might not be a bad idea."
If he turned his boats toward the shore, Kerry believed, he would transform a long, horizontal target into a narrower, vertical one. "It would concentrate both of our machine guns directly on the point of fire and surprise the hell out of them," and it would keep the 20 soldiers each boat was carrying astern out of the line of fire, Kerry recalled. "When the firing began, I gave the order to turn and - phoom! - we just went in and beached and took them by complete surprise, and we routed them and we didn't take a wound."
As Kerry's boat crashed ashore, a lone Vietcong stood up holding a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "When he first stood up, he froze, because he didn't expect to see us staring him in the face, literally 10 yards away." The man was wounded by one of Kerry's crewmates and began to run; Kerry leaped off the boat and chased him. "I didn't want to let him get away. I didn't want him to run away and turn around with an active B-40 and take us out. There but for the grace of God The guy could have pulled the trigger and I wouldn't be here today."
It has been widely, and inaccurately, reported that Kerry filmed this and other actions with an 8mm movie camera. The films were in fact mostly travelogues and clowning-around shots on the boat. More than a few other vets recorded their adventures in Vietnam. "We did it for our families," Kerry told me. "We wanted to have a record of where we'd been. We wanted them to know what it had been like if we got killed."
As always, however, there was a sense that Kerry saw these home movies as part of a larger, more heroic film. "He was very much aware of the stage," Thorne says. "He knew that his actions in Vietnam might have some bearing on his future life. But none of us could anticipate the impact - the psychological trauma - the war would have on us. John's been able to live with the demons of combat, but they are there and they've given his life shape and meaning in a way that he never anticipated." Thorne went on, "In a way, it was harder coming back than being there. You know, we got home, and it was, 'What the fuck was that all about?' Vietnam Veterans Against the War [a group whose spokesman was Kerry and whose members staged a dramatic protest in Washington in April of 1971, tossing their medals and combat ribbons on to the Capitol steps] was one big T-group. People like Jane Fonda wanted to make it into a political movement, but all we wanted to do was hug each other."
The second reel of John Kerry's Heroic Life Story, the 20 years from 1972 to 1992, turned out to be somewhat less heroic than the protagonist might have hoped. His celebrity evaporated with his defeat in the 1972 congressional race in Massachusetts. By all accounts, the loss was devastating. It was the first deviation from the career trajectory he had imagined for himself in prep school. "He came to my home in New Hampshire that weekend," his friend George Butler, a documentary filmmaker who was then a freelance photographer, recalls. "He wouldn't say a word to anyone. He sat there Friday night and built an entire model ship from scratch. On Saturday, he and I climbed a mountain together. He still wasn't talking. At the top of the mountain, I took a picture of him - I must have taken 5,000 pictures of him over the years, but that was one of the best. He was the most despondent-looking human being I had ever seen."
The residue of the war remained - he had nightmares, at times so intense that he would wake up screaming, leap out of bed, and slam into walls - and there was now a life to be constructed. Kerry didn't abandon his political dream, but he revised it prosaically: he would pay his dues. He went to Boston College law school; he became an assistant district attorney in the district attorney's office of Middlesex County, Massachussetts. He built a reputation as a successful prosecutor, raised money for other Democrats, and waited for his moment.
In 1970, Kerry had married Thorne's twin sister, Julia; they had two daughters, born in 1973 and 1976. According to friends, Julia was not a typical political wife. "There were times at dinner parties when John would be very pompous, unable to control his impulse to make a speech," one acquaintance said. "It was all slightly laughable, and Julia was one of those who laughed. She'd say things like, 'What the fuck did you just say?'"
Kerry is understandably loath to talk about the details of the marriage; his reticence is compounded by the fact that Julia was suffering from severe depression. She eventually wrote a book about the illness, called You Are Not Alone. It began: "February 1980, five months after my 36th birthday, my mind ravaged by corroding voices, my body defeated by bone-rattling panics, I sat on the edge of my bed minutes from taking my life ... I could no longer pretend I was of use to my husband or my children ... I knew that, once I was gone, my family and friends would be relieved of the burden of my incompetency."
They separated in 1982, after Kerry decided to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Julia's mental condition was precarious, but Kerry chose to push ahead with the race. "When I get focussed and set out to do something, I'm pretty good at staying focussed," Kerry told me. "You don't want to let yourself down, you know what I'm saying? One loss is enough. You don't have to screw up everything else." He went on to say that there were days during the campaign when he and Julia would have wrenching morning discussions about their children and their future living arrangements, "and then, in the afternoon, I'd have to put on a smiling face and say, 'Hi, I'm John Kerry, I'd like you to vote for me,' and I'd feel empty inside doing it. It was not an easy process."
Thorne calls the separation "an extended psychodrama". There were, apparently, several attempts to reconcile, but the divorce became final in 1988. Julia is now living in Montana.
Kerry's first two statewide election campaigns, for lieutenant governor, in 1982, and, two years later, for US senator, were successful, but not exactly triumphant. He was a more personable campaigner than he'd been in 1972; he worked hard, debated well, raised money relentlessly (and he had to spend more time raising it than most, because he refused to take contributions from political-action committees), but he was accepted only grudgingly by the state's Democratic party establishment.
Kerry was so distressed by the newspaper coverage that he invited the Boston Globe's editor, Michael Janeway, to breakfast after the election. "He wanted to know why we were so rough on him," Janeway recalled. "I reminded him about Sam Rayburn's classic political categories. I said, 'John, there are workhorses and show horses, and I guess our staff considers you a show horse.'"
Ted Kennedy, who has now served as a senator from Massachusetts for 40 years, is both a workhorse and a show horse. When Kerry arrived in the Senate, in 1985, his first challenge was to figure out how to coexist with Kennedy. There were two possible strategies. One was to settle back and take a seat on the appropriations committee, a sure ticket to perpetuity in the Senate. The job of appropriators is to decide how to spend federal money; as politicians, the committee members tend to be as blowsy and lugubrious as the bills that stumble out of their committee. Obviously, this was not the sort of career Kerry had intended for himself, and so he chose the foreign relations committee, which, by the mid-80s, was not nearly as glamorous as it had been during the Vietnam era. The public was no longer very interested in foreign policy; and for a politician it held little practical allure - no taxing, no spending, no hardware to buy, no regulations to set. "But it was about war and peace," Kerry said. "We were entering an illegal war in Latin America. One of the lessons of Vietnam was about lying, about people who hide the truth from the American people, and there was a real parallel in Latin America."
Kerry started a series of investigations into the Reagan administration's involvement with the Nicaraguan Contras, a guerrilla group opposed to the leftwing Sandinista government. His subcommittee on narcotics and terrorism revealed that Oliver North, a junior marine officer assigned to the White House, was in charge of funnelling arms to the Contras; and suggested that some of the CIA operatives who supplied the Contras were flying narcotics back to the US (a fact that the CIA finally acknowledged almost a decade later); and then that Panama's dictator Manuel Noriega had been involved with the arms-running, the drug-running, and the CIA. From there, Kerry began to investigate Noriega's money-laundering operation, which was run through the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, in the Cayman Islands. The BCCI trail led to its partner, First American Bank, in Washington, DC, which was represented by Clark Clifford, who had served every Democratic president from Harry Truman to Jimmy Carter. "John wasn't a very popular guy when he called Clark Clifford to testify," David McKean, the committee's chief investigator at the time, said. "Most of the other members of the committee were uncomfortable with it. I remember that one senator cornered Kerry in the elevator and said, 'What are you doing to my old friend Clark Clifford?' But those hearings were the first real look at how terrorists, drug dealers, and international criminals conducted their business."
Indeed, Kerry was soon about as popular in Washington's political community as he'd been in Massachusetts. "He was a very driven, very relentless guy, and that could be off-putting to his colleagues," Timothy E Wirth, who was a senator from Colorado at the time and later became Kerry's friend, recalls. "He was an outsider. In fact, you never saw him around much, with good reason - he was up in Boston with his girls. My sense is that Julia wasn't always reliable during those years, and John took a lot of responsibility for raising the kids. He would rush up there for every school play and soccer match. You had the sense that he was a very lonely guy. He was being hacked to death by the Globe, and others, and he never had anyone to share it with." |
