After 34 years, Kerry supporter remains steadfast

When John Kerry delivers the most important speech of his career tonight, Tommy Vallely will be there, as he has been for many of the memorable moments of his friend's rise toward the pinnacle of American politics.

Vallely was in the room, clad in fatigues, for Kerry's famous address to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee 33 years ago, one of the many steps he has taken with Kerry on the long march to the presidency.

The Marine combat veteran was there in 1971, on the National Mall for the antiwar protest before Kerry's speech.

And Vallely was at Kerry's side in 1972, as field director of Kerry's first campaign for Congress.

Vallely doubts Kerry will deliver the type of electrifying oratory that propelled him to fame in 1971.

Tonight's speech will be about attending to the details, themes, and politics of a presidential campaign, he said.

But Vallely, during an interview yesterday in his office near Harvard Square, where he is director of the Vietnam Program of the Kennedy School's Center for Business and Government, predicted Kerry will rise to the occasion.

''He operates at his best when there is tension," said Vallely, who won a Silver Star in Vietnam.

Vallely, 54, met Kerry in 1970 when they were helping Robert F. Drinan, a Jesuit priest, win a Massachusetts congressional seat as an opponent of the war.

He said he believed Kerry was capable of becoming president ''maybe from the minute I met him."

During Kerry's 1972 congressional campaign, Vallely spent a few hours in jail after being arrested with Kerry's brother, Cameron, in the basement of a building that housed the headquarters of Kerry and an opponent. It was a setup, a prank, the result of an anonymous call warning that the campaign's phone lines would be cut, both have said. (Breaking-and-entering charges were dropped a year later.)

Vallely recalls vividly the stirring speech Kerry gave the night he lost that election, an upset after Kerry was pounded for days as a carpetbagging radical in editorials of the Lowell Sun.

''John needed to lose that election" to succeed as he has in politics, Vallely said.

''He couldn't be a star and get to this point, and he was a star, a remarkable, remarkable young man. He needed to have a slow, complicated, difficult rise, which he has had," he said.

Vallely is among the band of Kerry loyalists who have seen the near-death political experiences of 1982, when he barely won the Democratic nomination to run for lieutenant governor on a ticket headed by Michael Dukakis, and of 1984, when he and a couple of dozen other ''dog hunters" badgered Kerry's chief opponent, Representative James M. Shannon, in the final days of a close primary.

And in 1996, he located all of Kerry's crew members from the swift boats of Vietnam so they could come to Boston and help their former skipper in the waning days of a withering challenge from William F. Weld, the popular Republican governor.

Vallely and his family basically moved to Iowa late last year to help rescue Kerry's sagging candidacy and begin the amazing turnaround that produced a stunning victory in the Iowa caucuses on Jan. 19, igniting a winning streak that wrapped up the nomination in six weeks.

''My wife hasn't come home yet," said Vallely.

Victoria Vallely is working on Kerry's campaign headquarters staff.

Over the years, Vallely has had a choice seat from which to view his friend's ascent.

''He's changed by growing and he doesn't see the world, as he once did, through his own experiences but through knowledge," he said. ''Everyone knows he's very smart, but he spends a lot of time learning the details of how things work and how you can look at things differently and make them work better."

Vallely shrugs when asked about the ''flip-flop" charges aimed at Kerry.

''He's changed his mind about a lot of things as he learned more . . . He has a huge core. He keeps things interesting, although he might keep it complicated at times too, and he always moves forward. I think he would say: 'I'm going to experience the world, I'm going to be in politics, and I'm going to try to influence the way things work in the world.' That's certainly what he was doing at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, trying to help Senator William Fulbright end the war in Vietnam."

And tonight, Vallely will be on the convention floor, with his daughter, Blair, at whose birth 24 years ago, Kerry was present.

What will he be thinking as he peers up at his friend?

''I'll be nervous," said Vallely. ''I'll be thinking: Let's close the deal, John. Let's get out of here and go to the swing states."