The avenger
Love him or hate him, Sen. John Kerry has always been a man on a mission. His ardent involvement in the POW-MIA issue reveals a politician who covets the national stage - and may be poised to take it.
At the southernmost tip of Vietnam, the Ca Mau peninsula carves the Gulf of Thailand like a tiger's claw. It was there, on February 28, 1969, in a campaign known as Operation Sea Lords, that three US Navy swift boats -- similar to those featured in the film Apocalypse Now -- came under attack from communist forces. The commander of Patrol Craft Fast 94 and the two other boats that day was a 25-year-old Yale graduate who, craving combat glory, had sought and won a transfer from the safe confines of an offshore destroyer: Lt. (j.g.) John F. Kerry.
Kerry's flotilla was charged with cruising the rivers of An Xuyen province, shooting up huts and sampans to flush out the Viet Cong; on this particular day, they found the trouble they'd come looking for. The shoreline lit up with the flash of automatic-weapons fire. Kerry gave the order to attack, landing a detachment of South Vietnamese troops and moving to secure the beachhead by charging a second Viet Cong position, upstream. When Boat 94 was shaken by a VC rocket, he led his men directly into the guns, ramming his craft up on the beach at the center of the enemy stronghold. In the melee, a communist soldier, loaded rocket launcher in hand, jumped and ran. Without hesitation, Kerry leaped ashore and killed him with a burst from an M-16 rifle. After leading an assault party against the remaining Viet Cong, Kerry returned to his boat and guided his comrades through two more firefights. For his audacity on the waters of the Bay Hap River that day, he received the Silver Star.
This week, Kerry is scheduled to return to Southeast Asia -- as a US senator, the chairman of the Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs, and the object of much speculation and some criticism about his motives for leading this latest probe into the fate of missing American servicemen. He calls it his "second journey to Vietnam." (CORRECTION-DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1992: EDITOR'S NOTE: After today's Globe Magazine article on Sen. John Kerry
went to press, his trip to Southeast Asia as chairman of the Select Committee on POW-MIA Affairs was canceled. Kerry will instead travel to Moscow to meet with top Russian officials to discuss allegations that the KGB interrogated US prisoners during and after the Vietnam War.)
Kerry-haters, and there are more than a few, say the Democratic senator
from Massachusetts is engaged in his latest ego trip, that he is just one in a long line of charlatans who have trafficked in the hopes and pain of POW-MIA
families for personal or political gain. His supporters -- of which, for the time being, there are many -- say Kerry has shouldered the duty of ministering to a festering national wound because of deep-set feelings that linger from his Vietnam experience. There is truth to be culled from both extremes. The reasons behind Kerry's POW-MIA mission offer a revealing glimpse of an enigmatic politician who covets the national stage and, after enjoying one of the finer years in American politics in 1991, may be poised to take it.
There is no doubt that Kerry has a selfish, if risky, political agenda in tackling the fractious POW-MIA issue. Shuddering at the prospect of dealing with meddlesome right-wingers such as Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, Sen. Bob Smith, the committee vice chairman and a Republican
from New Hampshire, and Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican from Iowa, his liberal staff warned Kerry that the POW-MIA issue would be a "tar baby" that would consume him, and they argued unanimously against the campaign last summer. Kerry overruled them.
Where others see danger in braving the briar patch, Kerry sees opportunity. He has calculated the potential acclaim should he succeed where others have failed. If he can release the POW-MIA families from the pain of uncertainty, free the nation from this last, nagging psychic fetter of that dirty Asian war, and help open Southeast Asia to American trade and democratic reform, the political payload could be nuclear. "I see the multiplicity of things coming together there," Kerry says. Says someone who knows him well: ''Read his Silver Star citation. It is the essence of John Kerry: Attack, attack, attack."
But if the seduction of risk and the thirst for glory set Kerry on his latest campaign, so do other motives that can also be traced to his Vietnam experience. There is a reason that Kerry has carved a career as an avenger: against the war in 1971, against organized crime as a prosecutor, against government corruption and hypocrisy in the war on drugs, the Iran-contra affair, and his latest target -- the money-laundering activities of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, better known as BCCI. Vietnam left this son of privilege (St. Paul's prep, Yale, Skull and Bones) transformed.
"He has an idea of what he wants to be in the Senate, which is different
from his colleagues'. He has a broader view of things than just perpetual reelection. . . . He is willing to take risks," says former aide Jack Blum, who worked as the chief investigator for Kerry's crusades. "I had a sense of a man, looking at his personality -- how he was driven, totally, without a need to stop -- that a lot of that was a Vietnam veteran syndrome, a postcombat stress.
"It is a terribly conflicting kind of thing for him," says Blum. "You come home and discover that people who are running the war are just interested in covering their ass; meanwhile, real people are dying real deaths. For the intelligent people who wound up in the real stuff of combat, like Kerry, this was a very searing business." Blum says Kerry's involvement in the POW-MIA issue is a direct result of his wartime experiences "and the need he feels to resolve what he . . . couldn't resolve then, and is still driven by."
"I felt betrayed," Kerry says. The need to expose government duplicity snakes through his public life. And so Kerry was ready to be moved by the arguments of the relatives of missing men: that a heartless government abandoned its fighting men in the rush to shed the political liabilities of the war in 1973 and then covered up its cruelty for almost 20 years.
In the time since Vietnam, Kerry has had too many POW-MIA families beseech him, watched too many of the awful black flags hoisted at fire halls, and listened to too many POW-MIA roll calls at the start of Little League baseball seasons not to bend finally to the insistent call. A year ago, long before the latest round of phony POW-MIA photographs raised the media and political stakes, Kerry had set in motion a plan to bring some sort of closure to the American experience in Vietnam.
''As one of the soldiers of that particular period, I feel it more, sure," says Kerry. "There is an obligation owed to everybody who served in
Vietnam, everybody who was affected by Vietnam, and every American. And it pisses me off that they lie. It pisses me off that we are sitting here, 30 years later, struggling to get information to people. That is not what government, in my view, is meant to do. I'm angry about it."
Consider in this light another tale from the combat zone. On March 13, 1969, just two weeks after Kerry won his Silver Star, his little fleet ran into a minefield and was ambushed by the Viet Cong. Explosions rocked and disabled one craft, Kerry was wounded in the arm, and one of his men was thrown overboard. According to a US Navy history of the engagement: "All units began receiving small arms and automatic weapons fire from the river banks. When Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry discovered he had a man overboard, he returned upriver to assist. The man in the water was receiving sniper fire
from both banks. Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain and with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard." For his courage that day, Kerry won the Bronze Star with combat ''V" and one of three Purple Hearts he earned in the service of his country.
Kerry the warrior believes that a nation and its soldiers enter into a compact, a larger, grander version of the intense ties of loyalty that bind small military units together and lead young lieutenants to risk their lives on behalf of a buddy thrown overboard. Politicians choose the paths of their careers. Some become leaders of ideological causes. Some are savvy legislators. Kerry has chosen to spend much of his political life in a long- running series of scraps to ensure that government doesn't break such compacts with its people.
"He has a sensitivity to integrity, particularly when it comes to trusting government," says Bob Muller, director of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. "It comes from his Vietnam experience, in which questions of integrity are paramount. He's been given a lot of hot potatoes. A guy less steadfast would roll with the punches and let it slide."
Kerry has well-chronicled flaws: He can be self-indulgent, self-certain, and self-centered. But if the Silver Star shows Kerry as a man of zeal and ambition, his Bronze Star says the senator may be something rarer in Washington: for all his flaws, a man of honor. Such men don't leave buddies behind. Not on the Bay Hap River, not in the halls of Congress.
The 48-year-old senator is a prime subject for examination because of a matter of political kinetics: Kerry is on a roll. Few of his colleagues in the Senate or the House of Representatives had a year such as Kerry did in 1991. Like Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy before him, Kerry has spent his time in Washington wielding Senate investigatory powers to paint villainous caricatures of ignoble opponents, catching the public eye in the process. Kennedy's targets were Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters; Nixon's target was the specter of communist subversion as personified by Alger Hiss. In March 1987 Kerry inherited the chair of a new Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, its staff, and an agenda -- priceless assets for a freshman legislator, particularly when mixed with Kerry's knack for sensing a gestating issue.
Months before the Iran-contra scandal made headlines, Kerry was investigating Lt. Col. Oliver North. Long before the Justice Department indicted Manuel Noriega, Kerry's little subcommittee had begun its own investigation into the Panamanian strongman and other alleged drug-runners. A witness' comment in the Noriega hearings put Kerry and Blum on the case of money-laundering at BCCI -- at a moment when the Justice Department seemed happy to let the issue rest. Months before the POW-MIA issue was invigorated by last summer's media excess, Kerry had embarked on a lone pilgrimage to
Vietnam, prodding its leaders to track down missing servicemen and thus remove the last major obstacle to normalized relations. The media may have missed it, but Washington insiders took note when former assistant secretary of state Elliott Abrams and ex-CIA chieftain Alan Fiers were convicted of lying to Congress last year about their role in Iran-contra. Clair George, another former CIA operative, was indicted on the same charge. All three were prosecuted for the dissembling they did while squirming through a Senate hearing in 1987 under the questioning of that former Middlesex County prosecutor, John Kerry.
The totems of success have come his way: profiles in The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal; appearances on Nightline and on the morning network news shows. Coming at a time when Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has been dogged by personal and political troubles, the counterpoint of Kerry's success brings him further out from the senior senator's considerable shadow.
For all his triumphs, Kerry remains a loner in Washington. Conservative Digest calls him "the most peculiar man in the Senate." There's a certain reserve to Kerry, a kind of distant self-reliance found in some Army brats, which friends attribute to his childhood. As a son of an Army Air Force pilot turned diplomat, he bounced around the world with his family before being dispatched to prep school, a Catholic outsider (despite the Forbes family ties on his mother's side) among the WASPs at St. Paul's. Kerry says the experience of combat, the three wounds, the near misses, and the deaths of a half-dozen close friends have also given him an existential wariness about life. ''Vietnam taught me that every day is extra," he says. "The lesson was very hard and real that there but for the grace of God go you, and it could have been in a box or a body bag."
The historic knocks against him date back to the bad taste left in many mouths by his unsuccessful "district shopping" for a Massachusetts congressional seat in the mid-1970s. His image as an arrogant young man in a hurry, steered by no great philosophic convictions, may be Kerry's single greatest liability.
"I didn't know if he really is about anything," says one former associate, who resisted the opportunity to stay with the senator on a full- time basis. "He's one of a number of personality-driven candidates, rather than an ideological or vision-driven candidate. His brain trust recognizes that his biggest political weakness is his dislikability, his coldness, his ego."
Through a deliberate strategy of self-effacement, Kerry has been working hard to erase such perceptions. His ability to analyze his flaws, as much as the diligent route he has taken to address them, has won him admirers. "He is extraordinarily capable, and I would expect in time his party will consider him for president or vice president," says Sen. Hank Brown, a Republican from Colorado who has made his own mark since arriving in the Senate in 1990. Rep. Ed Markey, a Democrat from Malden, says, "There is a cumulative effect of all these issues he has worked on. He's patiently building. . . . People here admire and respect those who follow an issue all the way to its conclusion, and that's what he's done. Institutionally, a member who takes on a special Senate project and does well becomes a candidate for overseeing the next one, which could be as big as Iran-contra."
Michael Barone, author of The Almanac of American Politics, the 1,500- page tout sheet that doubles as a political bible in Washington, says that Kerry is now seen as something more than just "a slick package" and compliments him for resisting the lure of self-aggrandizement in favor of an investment in substance: "Some people thought, when he came to Washington, he was already running for president. It's an intelligent decision that he did not; it kind of chews up people. And now I think he's gotten almost apotheosized by the BCCI thing."
There are dissenting views. Friends say Kerry is quite aware that he's the only Senate Democrat from the class of 1984 not yet to have run for president -- if one can fairly categorize Sen. Jay Rockefeller's flirtation last year as a candidacy -- and may have been saved from his own ambition only by Mario Cuomo, Michael Dukakis, and Paul Tsongas, who filled up whatever demand exists for Northeastern liberals. And Kerry still slips, from time to time. Emerging from one session of the POW-MIA hearings this past fall, he hogged the microphone, taking every question posed by TV news crews as Sen. Bob Smith stood by, unable to breach Kerry's droning. During a breakfast with a group of senior reporters at the height of the BCCI investigation -- the kind of Washington "insider" session that molds lasting impressions -- Kerry blurted out his suspicion that the Bush administration was digging up dirt in order to harass him. At best, it showed lack of discipline, tainting what otherwise was a fine performance; at worst, the unproven charge made him look silly.
Last summer, when Kerry challenged Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell's get-tough bill on China, it took the Democratic leader just a few hours to puncture Kerry's position by revealing to the press that the Massachusetts senator had been an original cosponsor of the legislation. Petulantly, Kerry blamed his staff for the foul-up -- just as he had early in the year when a computer glitch sent outdated letters to his constituents, giving the misleading impression that he was taking both sides on the Desert Storm debate. By way of contrast, "Say what you will about him, you will never find Kennedy blaming his people. He takes the heat himself," says one Senate staffer.
When asked about the vice presidency, Kerry speaks highly of the job and the contributions he could make. But he is not the best at the most basic skills of politics. Unlike Kennedy, he finds it hard to schmooze in a crowd or with a colleague. "The bob-and-weave doesn't come natural to him," says longtime adviser Ron Rosenblith.
Kerry fits poorly among the Democratic establishment in Washington, the policy dweebs and process liberals whose entrenched satisfaction makes them scorn the rawer edges of Kerry's style: the high-speed adventures in his Chrysler convertible, the starlets and socialites he dates, his Triumph motorcycle, his weekend aerobatics in rented stunt planes, and his eclectic taste in staff. He has been a frequent target of The Washington Post, which pointed out that surgery on his jaw "coincidentally made him more attractive to the cameras." The newspaper also put him on its eligible-bachelor list, despite "his unabashed ego." He is criticized for self-indulgence, for not submitting to the kind of 24-hour control and programming that necessarily mark the top dogs in town.
"I'll tell you frankly, I bristle when I'm overly constricted," says Kerry. "I've spent plenty of time, from 6 in the morning until midnight, pursuing one goal and achieving it, but I also know it is not my preferred way of living." His aides admit Kerry's focus can drift. Blum says Kerry's work is marked by cycles: After periods of intense, round-the-clock pressure, he can suddenly "find it very hard to sustain the institutional battle that making any progress in the Senate requires." Says another aide, "When he's not a great candidate is when he's not being pressured." But, says Kerry, ''If I were running nationally, I know how to turn that energy into something."
Kerry's brother, Cameron, says, "Vietnam changed him -- some of it in ways that are hard to put a finger on -- in his willingness to take risks, to be on the outside, to be on the edge." Kerry seems both blessed and cursed by his character. His strength among the voters, says Rosenblith, lies in his image as a "risk taker . . . who stands up for what he believes . . . independent . . . outsiderish." When he attempts to bolster his ''insider" credentials, Kerry gets in trouble.
Kerry's good work on BCCI was tarnished by his one insider role in Washington, as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee in 1988. No quid pro quo was ever proven, but Kerry's relationship with a few Democratic fund-raisers proved embarrassing after it was disclosed that they had ties to the bank and its sleazy practices. "It was a role I played to pay dues, not a role I loved," says Kerry. The job had its usefulness, giving him contacts with Democratic money men who enabled him to stave off GOP candidate Jim Rappaport's well-funded challenge in 1990. Kerry was shocked to find that ''Massachusetts doesn't completely know who John Kerry is. . . . I thought I was much more defined."
Kerry says he was "liberated" by the close call and now feels freer to act from the gut. It's no surprise that he gets along well with such Republican iconoclasts as Helms; they share an attitude, if not an ideology. Kerry will soon need to capitalize on the relationship.
In the POW-MIA investigation, the Helms-Smith-Grassley faction represents one extreme. These men and their supporters believe there may yet be camps of American prisoners, abandoned by Pentagon bureaucrats as part of a conspiracy, perhaps to keep illegal intelligence activities or drug smuggling secret.
At the other extreme are those such as Rutgers University professor H. Bruce Franklin, who argues in a forthcoming book, M.I.A. or Mythmaking in America, that the POW-MIA story was contrived by Presidents Nixon and Reagan and then inflated into jingoistic myth by Hollywood in such films as The Deer Hunter and Rambo: First Blood Part II. "America's vision of the war was transformed," Franklin writes. "The actual photographs and TV footage of massacred villagers, napalmed children, Vietnamese prisoners being tortured and murdered, wounded GIs screaming in agony, and body bags being loaded for shipment back home were being replaced by simulated images of American POWs in the savage hands of Asian communists."
Kerry hopes the POW-MIA probe will "prove what I have known about myself but what maybe some people have doubted over time. I've done things effectively, though I don't think I'm always perceived for it. This gives me a chance to show I can work with a very broad range of ideological types and hopefully come up with some sound results." As for the risks, he says, "I'm sure my staff can define six scenarios for you that end in nightmares, to underscore why they said, 'Don't do it.' "
At first, Grassley and others resisted Kerry's leadership, suspecting he was only after more headline-grabbing hearings. But when Kerry's hearings produced a high-ranking Pentagon official who said there is hard evidence that at least 10 Americans may have been left behind, Grassley took to the Senate floor to admit he had been wrong and to praise Kerry's sincerity.
Says one Smith aide: "My boss can't say enough good things about the guy." Kerry's task now is to build on those good feelings, chasing down leads and rumors and prodding the Vietnamese to be more forthcoming, while steadily tugging the three conservatives toward a consensus, perhaps along the lines that: (1) A few men were indeed left behind, and (2) the Pentagon bureaucracy had a tragic mindset to debunk such reports, but (3) there are no POWs still alive and it's time to put the issue to rest.
Muller, of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation, says Kerry has chosen a noble but hopeless journey. "Kerry didn't do what is in his best interest in taking the chair of this committee," says Muller. Because of the extensive psychological, political, and financial investment that the true believers have made in the Rambo myth, "there is no way Kerry is going to end up a political winner. Somewhere down the way he is going to have to declare the guys dead, and there is no way he is going to get Jesse Helms and Bob Smith and Chuck Grassley and many other POW advocates to concur with a majority report that says they're dead."
When John Kerry appeared before the Senate as a Vietnam vet in 1971, he said, "How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?" He also threw away a set of medals at an antiwar rally. Immediately, he won national acclaim. Inside the Nixon White House, speechwriter Patrick Buchanan wrote a memo to chief of staff H. R. Haldeman, warning the administration to use restraint against the protesting veterans because, among other things, this new organization had "an articulate spokesman; they are being received in a far more sympathetic fashion than other demonstrators."
The sky seemed the limit; there were predictions that John Kerry would someday serve in the Senate or even the Oval Office. He was idealized as a '60s hero. He was 27 years old.
Now there are streaks of gray in the bushy hair, and Kerry and his fellow
Vietnam vets on the POW-MIA committee adjust their bifocals or reach for reading glasses whenever a document is distributed by the staff. Kerry has taken an erratic path to fulfill the promise of the days of rage. He married, had two children, divorced, and suffered his share of political defeats. Says old pal Thomas Vallely, "He's lost enough, he knows to go slow." Nor was Kerry's Vietnam experience ever so pure as was imagined. "If he had to live life over again, he would have been more careful about his early antiwar experience," says Vallely, a fellow Vietnam veteran. "John is a more conservative person than people recognize."
Like many old soldiers, Kerry talks warmly of the camaraderie of war and wistfully of the affirming clarity of battle. "I feel no guilt. Absolutely none," he says. "We were where we were at that period of time. We made our choices, they made theirs, and we were at war with them. That is the way it was. Their soldiers did what they were told, and we did what we were told, and afterwards you go on."
Bob Muller, wheelchair-bound, two decades in the veterans' movement, says, "One thing I've learned: Anything that touches Vietnam gets caught up in interminable controversy." So it is with Kerry. The medals he discarded were, as it turned out, not his own. Critics called him a phony, and hard feelings linger. A contingent of fellow Vietnam vets pointedly turned their backs on Kerry when he rose to give the keynote speech on Veterans Day at ''The Wall" in Washington. As much as he wanted to end the war, back in 1971 Kerry was too proud of his bits of bronze and silver, and what they represented, ever to give them up.
"The war was a defining moment. It was a huge moment in my life. And I feel badly about a lot of things that happened over there," Kerry says. "But I don't feel lost. I mean, I know where it fits. And I've cried tears, but, you know, a lot of good can come out of that. That is one of the things, with the POW committee, I'm trying to guarantee."
"Somebody is going to have to bite the bullet politically and walk this issue through and show some courage," says Muller. "And if anybody is going to carry on for the people of this country and the people of Indochina, it will be Kerry. He has enough conviction and caring."
