Kerry ready to do battle

WASHINGTON -- It was snowing gently on Capitol Hill early yesterday afternoon, fat flakes that left cabdrivers momentarily fretting over the evening commute.

Everywhere, people were shaking their heads at Dick Cheney's angry performance on CNN the night before. A key Senate committee had endorsed a resolution condemning the president's troop "surge." A war protest was planned for the weekend on the National Mall. Washington felt as if it rested on the edge of a freshly sharpened knife.

And in the comfortable confines of his stately Senate office, a worn-looking John Kerry took a chair by his fireplace and told a story.

"When Chris Dodd and I were in Iraq, we were in Loading Zone Washington waiting to get out," Kerry said, referring to his December trip and the helicopter pad in Baghdad.

"This young, good-looking soldier came up to us and introduced himself. Brian Freeman. He said, 'I've got to talk to you.'

"He talked about the war and how screwed up it all was. He was wonderfully articulate, smart -- a West Pointer. When he left, Dodd and I looked at each other and said, 'This guy has it all going for him.'

"I saw him at the Baghdad Airport 30 minutes later in a men's room, and we kept talking. He was going home for leave."

Kerry's voice softened as he added, "He went home to his wife, went back to Iraq, and he was killed last week."

And there he paused. In Kerry's mind, it was eerily similar to a situation some four decades earlier when one of his best friends from Vietnam returned from a leave spent with his wife and was killed.

"What I'm saying is that the motivation is pretty deep here," Kerry said. "We have to grapple with the president and get it right on Iraq."

Kerry woke up yesterday for probably the first time in his adult life not strategizing, analyzing, and plotting his route to the White House. And as he sat in his office, he seemed to be trying to embrace the good and dispel the bad about the failure to fulfill his most enduring ambition.

He can concentrate on his Senate work now, he said. His every utterance won't be read through a political prism. He can be more effective on Iraq.

"I'm very much at peace with this," he said. "It's the right thing to do. I'm privileged to have this job."

Still, ambition isn't so easily dissolved. Kerry knows that. A month ago, he could rattle off myriad reasons to run: that past presidents like Nixon, Reagan, and George H.W. Bush had failed in prior bids, that he had received eight million more votes than any Democratic candidate before, that he was at this best when he was running from behind.

"I wasn't thinking this was insurmountable, I promise you," Kerry said. "I've been in worse places. But I had to make the decision based on my gut."

His gut told him he couldn't overcome that botched joke from October. His gut told him that the likes of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and John Edwards had left little room in the race.

Kerry is, among many other things, a fairly fascinating guy. He can be as engaging one minute as he is infuriating the next. He is alternately solicitous and self-obsessed. He is undeniably smart, but his ambition often morphs into opportunism.

One thing is indisputable: He left the 2004 campaign a better politician and a man than he entered it. He was down for the count in Iowa, a whipping boy for the Washington elite, until he doggedly fought back.

Then he came, as he's prone to say, within a few victorious precincts in Ohio of unseating a wartime president overseeing a healthy economy. There is no shame in that.

"Trust me, I'm not complaining," Kerry said yesterday. "It's life. It's where we are."

It's not the White House, but where he is, the US Senate, fighting for change in Iraq, isn't such a bad place to be.

Brian McGrory is a Globe columnist. He can be reached at mcgrory@globe.com.