Can Kerry find his voice?

JOHN KERRY enters the presidential debates as a curious hybrid of hero and hack.

No man in my generation had a better run in his 20s, in two epic roles: first as wily Odysseus in battle, beloved of his fighting mates in Vietnam; then as the electrifying spokesman of 1,000 dissident "winter soldiers" before the US Senate in April 1971.

Kerry's unanswerable question sent a chill through the old worthies on the Foreign Relations Committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" It was the line of a lifetime, spoken at age 27, the mantra of a movement.

But Kerry's first campaign as a peacenik for Congress in 1972 was a loser. And when he reengaged in politics, running for lieutenant governor in 1982, he was running a much safer game in the well-worn grooves of correct Massachusetts politics. As chief Senate fund-raiser for other Democratic campaigns, Kerry proved his manhood in the politics of soft money, but he learned to soften his voice too. Kerry's 20-year record in the Senate is, despite a few famous switches, one of numbing consistency that testifies to lobby loyalties, not to liveliness of mind.

Yet the Kerry I've seen in survival debates -- and I've moderated two of them, in the make-or-break primary against Jim Shannon in 1984, and against Bill Weld in 1996 -- is something else altogether. Suddenly he is in Vietnam, or The Iliad, again -- a fearsome figure in extreme guy games. The whoops of his bonded Vietnam veterans are in his ears. The rush of adrenalin and testosterone almost whistles.

Kerry has met tougher tests than debating George W. Bush, but to win this contest he must first get his voice back. In the astonishing void of this 2004 campaign, so far we remember only "Bring it on!" and "Reporting for duty."

There is no better voice for this campaign than Kerry's own: "Thirty years from now," he told the Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, "when a man is walking down the street without an arm, or a face, or a leg, and a little boy asks him why, he will have to say `Vietnam,' and mean not a desert -- not an obscene memory -- but mean instead a place where America finally turned and soldiers like us helped in the turning."

On his first encounter with Vietnamese peasants in 1968, Kerry wrote home: "How could these people really believe we are helping them? It seemed so utterly crazy -- the idea of all this modern equipment fighting for an ideal that meant nothing to those of whom the fighting was supposed to be for. . . I can't help getting the feeling that their faces seemed to say, `Go away and let us alone."'

You didn't have to agree with the young John Kerry, but as George Bush says: You knew what he believed in and you knew where he stood. If the Bush-Kerry debates are to turn on the rugged embodiment of vision and character, the second reinforcing voice I'd urge on Kerry is that of the Civil War soldier and Supreme Court justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. The life parallels a century apart are striking. The patrician Bostonian answered Lincoln's first call for volunteers on his graduation from Harvard in 1861. Wounded three times, as Kerry was, but much more gravely, Holmes still went back for more. But from Fredericksburg he wrote home to his father that he had lost his faith -- not in the abolitionist cause but in war as its instrument:

"If civilization and progress are the better things," Holmes decided at age 21, "why, they will conquer in the long run, we may be sure, and will stand a better chance in their proper province in peace--than in war, the brother of slavery. . . it's slavery's parent, child and sustainer at once."

This was the blood-begotten insight that shaped the life work of Holmes, William James, John Dewey, among others, and produced an American system of ideas, Pragmatism, that prevailed from the Civil War to the Cold War. Experimentalism, tolerance, pluralism, skepticism, and free speech were the core values in the code. "Certitude leads to violence" was Holmes's bumpersticker, as Louis Menand told the story in "The Metaphysical Club." Holmes had "an intense dislike of people who presented themselves as instruments of some higher power," Menand writes. Holmes put it: "I detest a man who knows that he knows."

I am betting on the hero in Kerry to transcend the hack, and on standard American pragmatism ("is it working?") to break the spell of George W. Bush. Grant that there is charm for many Americans in Bush's short sentences, in the swagger that Texans call walking, in his stubborn simplifications. But in the end his case requires that we ignore the evidence, in Iraq and in every measure of our life, liberty, and happiness at home. For an experienced prosecutor like Kerry, it is just a good night's work.

Christopher Lydon has been blogging the presidential race at bopnews.com.