'We are out there as a team'

As they wait expectantly for their marquee speaker, the roomful of Harvard students watches a videotape in which John Kerry the Vietnam hero morphs into John Kerry the presidential candidate. The film ends, and then the keynote speaker arrives, out of breath, a little late, an apologetic smile dawning on that familiar, angular face. The students listen in reverential silence as the gospel is spread.

"There's a lot on the line in this election. We are the only ones dealing with the environmental mess, with the tax cuts for the wealthy."

"George Bush has thrown out 40 years of diplomacy in one fell swoop."

"We need to talk about how to keep jobs from going overseas, and how to reduce the foreign debt."

"AIDS is the biggest health care and humanitarian crisis in the world, and the drug companies are getting away with murder right now."

"About the Patriot Act: You can't have an attorney general named John Ashcroft."

After the speech, students crowd around, jockeying for just one last question. It's not John but Vanessa Kerry who has just finished speaking. A third-year student at Harvard Medical School, she is back in classes and on hospital rotations after taking a leave last fall to campaign for her father. On the opposite coast, her big sister, Alexandra, is fitting campaign stops between acting and directing classes at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles.

The candidate's daughters, his only children, are effective speakers and, of course, true believers. Their task: to connect with college students and young voters -- to get them registered to vote, engaged in the issues, and headed to the polls next fall. They call their mission "dorm storms" and "rock the vote."

"Some young people have the attitude that it's dorky to be involved in the political process or issues," says Alex, as she is called. "We try to make them feel that the issues are incredibly important and to see how they relate to people's lives on a day-to-day basis."

Besides making great photo-ops -- the loving father with his pretty daughters -- what role do they play on the trail? "First and foremost, supportive daughter," says Alex, who is 30. "I think it's very grounding for him to come off the stage and have us around him."

"You could not ask for two more different sisters," says Vanessa, who's 27. She's blonde, looks like her father, and is the scientist. Alex, the brunette, looks like her mother and is the artist. Then there are the personality differences:

Vanessa is "the cheerleader type, very enthusiastic and energetic," says her sister, who describes herself as "very media shy." Vanessa, she says, has the ability to "let things roll off her back," while Alex says she "feels the tensions of the campaign more keenly."

But it was Vanessa who, at a forum of candidates' offspring last fall, responded strongly to a question about rumors that her father had an affair, an allegation that proved groundless. "It's absolute crap," she said, "crap from start to finish." At one point, according to New York's Daily News, Alexandra shook her head disapprovingly at Vanessa. Later, Alex says: "I'm sure I have my moments of older sister condescension, but, for the most part, we are out there as a team."

Still, there are differences. Vanessa doesn't hesitate to criticize President Bush. She invokes his name often, saying such things as, "Every candidate has an Achilles' heel, but George Bush is a walking Achilles' body." Ask Alex about the president, and she replies: "No comment."

'Support mechanism'

Perhaps the most important role the sisters play in their father's campaign is to humanize a candidate long held to be aloof and emotionless. When he sees his daughters, his eyes light up and he embraces them. Although their father has been involved in seven political campaigns, this is the first time his daughters have joined in.

"On one level, they are like many other surrogates and campaign volunteers -- people trying to do anything they can to get John Kerry elected," says Chris Heinz, the youngest son of Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry. "On another level, they are part of a support mechanism -- loving, familiar faces to their dad who can let him be himself in their company. That's very valuable on the campaign trail."

Heinz, who has campaigned with them, says both daughters are engaging speakers. "And they are very independent and successful in their own right. I think audiences . . . recognize that and are drawn to it." Heinz, 30, who is with the campaign full time, acknowledges that he and the Kerry daughters are newcomers to the trail. "We are all regular, normal people -- and I think this process has been intimidating to each one of us at different points."

Vanessa is more blunt. "I didn't have a clue," she says, as she sips coffee at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where she is on an infectious diseases rotation. There's a stethoscope around her neck and a pencil tucked in her ponytail. "But I'm driven by the fact that I found myself almost despondent about what has happened in this [Bush] administration."

Last summer, Vanessa was prepared to go back to medical school in the fall and graduate on time. But her first hospital rotation changed her mind. She spoke to students about it recently at an event at Adams House on the Harvard campus. "I heard about people's lives and difficulties. It's true that there are people choosing between paying rent and buying prescription drugs. There are people coming to the emergency room with no health insurance. There are nurses leaving after 20 years because there's not enough staff; they're overwhelmed. I realized I was in a unique position to help out."

So during one of their Sunday night dinners together she told her father she was taking a leave from medical school to join his campaign. "His fork dropped, and there was dead silence," she says. "He has always encouraged me and my sister to follow our own paths, and I think he was stunned that I was willing to take a year and be part of it."

Actually, she took last semester off and is back in school now, doing periodic campaign appearances. Now, it's Alex's turn. While Vanessa was on the trail, Alex remained in classes on the West Coast -- "my school doesn't allow leaves," she says. But she recently finished her thesis film ("It's about a little girl whose father dies in the Vietnam War, sort of a love story between a girl and her father") and has more flexibility this semester. When she graduates in June with a master's degree in directing, she'll increase her role in the campaign.

Each daughter flew to Washington on separate occasions for a crash course on their dad: where he stood on the issues and how to respond to questions. "It was worse than medical school," Vanessa says of the daylong session with campaign staffers. She later sat with her father's book of position papers and vetted them -- and him -- carefully, she says.

She seems well-versed when she talks to the Harvard students about her father's positions on the issues: the economy, health care, the war in Iraq, public service, education. A student asks her why her father voted for the Patriot Act. "Yes, he voted for it in the chaos of 9/11," she replies. "But he wouldn't vote for it again, and he's been greatly concerned about Bush's abuse of it."

Another student says her brother may have to go to Iraq, and questions John Kerry's vote in favor of the war. "That vote was the hardest I've ever seen my father make," she responds. "He doesn't believe in war. But he also thought it was important for the president to have the threat of war, because that's the language Saddam Hussein speaks. And he was disappointed when the [Bush] administration went to war." She adds, softly: "I hope your brother doesn't have to go."

But things don't always go smoothly, and Vanessa concedes that she often gets flustered. "I've done my best to know his policies, but I'm not the candidate," she says. Indeed, when a student asks her about North Korea, she starts to respond and then stops. "You know what?" she says. "I don't want to bungle this. Can I get your e-mail and get back to you?"

Alex also tells people when she doesn't have an answer. "But I always say, `There are several staff members here who can answer your question.' " She feels most comfortable talking about issues close to her heart: the environment and public service. Then she's off on a riff about her father's plan to encourage public service by paying college tuition for young people who agree to work for two years in their communities.

But the daughters aren't in lock step with their dad on all the issues. Gay marriage, for instance. Both women support it, while their father is against gay marriage but for civil unions. "He's for full rights under the law, and that matters to me enormously," Vanessa says.

Duty calls

Despite living 3,000 miles apart, the Kerry daughters are close. In separate interviews they say the same thing, word for word: "I can't imagine life without my sister." They also say they are close to both parents, who separated when the girls were 6 and 9 years old and divorced five years later. Julia Thorne, who lives in Montana, is remarried and has written books on depression and divorce. She and John Kerry remain friendly.

It couldn't have been easy with a mother who suffered bouts of depression and a father who was in Washington much of the time. Living in Brookline with their mother, the girls saw their father on weekends and at some of their field hockey and lacrosse games. "He made an effort to come up twice a week, and he called every single night," says Alex, who graduated from Milton Academy and Brown. Vanessa boarded at Andover, then went to Yale, and now Harvard. ("The same schools as George Bush," she says, wrinkling her nose.)

When Alex graduated from college, where she had edited a weekly campus newspaper, she moved to New York in hopes of becoming a journalist. While freelancing she quickly became disillusioned with the field. She had studied film in college and had done some acting. "But coming from my family, acting is not the first thing you think about doing. I thought of it as recreation." Regardless, she took acting classes and that was it. "It kind of took over," she says. She studied at the Williamstown Theatre Company and has done some Shakespeare on stage, produced a TV pilot with friends, and has small parts in two David Mamet films -- the 2000 comedy "State and Main" and the thriller "Spartan," which opens tomorrow.

She likens her father's political campaign to a movie or play. Of his surprise comeback from the political dead, she says: "People always forget about the theater of politics. In a campaign, there's always an arc to the story, a beginning, a middle, and an end." She quickly switches metaphors. "You know, my father is a fighter. It serves him well to feel he has to come back in the last inning."

Both women say Vietnam was a large presence in the Kerry household. There were the war photos on the desk and the visits to the veterans' memorial in Washington, where they would run their fingers over the etched names of their father's comrades. In 1991, John Kerry took them to Vietnam to show them where he served.

Three years ago, she returned, rented a boat, and went into the Mekong Delta, where her father was wounded three times, earning a Silver Star, a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. "I wanted a sense of the space and where he was," she says. "The canals were tiny, and those boats were made of tin." Thinking of her father and his buddies under enemy fire, she says, "makes me nauseous."

Alexandra is due in Chicago today to host a campaign event with Chris Heinz. She was 21 when her father married Teresa Heinz. It took everyone a while to adjust to the new, blended family, both Kerry daughters say. "We've all made a real effort to get to know each other over the years, and I think everyone is very familiar and close," Alex says. Adds Vanessa: "We worked at it. I'm grateful for it. It's nice to have brothers."

What is their father really like, away from the microphones and cameras? Contrary to his image as an uptight Yankee, his daughters use words like "silly" and "goofball" to describe him. But ask for examples and they pause. "It's the fast quip, the dinnertime conversation," says Vanessa, who makes a point of adding: "We don't need a president who makes us laugh. We need one who's right on the issues." Then she tells about the Pac-Man video game tournament her father challenged her college friend to. "I think they went through some serious quarters," she says.

"Did my sister tell you the hamster story?" Alex asks. When the girls were young and at the shore, their "incredibly overzealous golden retriever" knocked their hamster cage off the dock. Down into the depths went the cage, with Licorice the hamster inside. Their father jumped into a rowboat and fished the cage out of the water with an oar. "I have a very distinctive image of my father trying to resuscitate the hamster," Alex says, laughing. "He put his finger on its [chest] and revived him. Licorice came back to life, but he didn't function the same way as before the swim."

These days, it's more difficult to get in touch with their father. "There are moments when I want to talk to him privately and there are 20 Secret Servicemen surrounding him," Alex says. "He's harder to get on the phone, certainly." Vanessa relies a lot on e-mail, and says her dad can easily step out of the campaign and become Kerry the father instead of Kerry the candidate.

"Sometimes it all feels surreal," says Alex. "But it becomes part of your life." She adds: "I am amazed at how normal it is feeling, to tell you the truth."