Kerry war letters show his conflicts

The up-close horror of the Vietnam War was still months away as Navy Lieutenant (junior grade) John F. Kerry, perched safely at a San Diego training camp, watched TV footage of antiwar protesters descend on the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. Kerry, 24, had a personal connection to the anger that burned through the protests.

Six months before the convention, Kerry's best friend had been killed in combat, prompting him to write a letter about how "sick and mad at this war" he was.

"I'm also so damn mad at what is happening in the good United States that there isn't anything brighter to look at on the home front," Kerry wrote to a Michael Dalby, a friend and classmate from Yale who recently rediscovered the letter. "Would that this country could some day choose an intelligent man with honest foresight to be its president. But no, the television smile and the ad campaign will be elected."

That spring, Kerry had hoped that Robert F. Kennedy, brother of his idol, John F. Kennedy, would extract the nation from war. But Bobby Kennedy was dead by the time the 1968 Democratic convention opened. So was rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. Riots and antiwar protests rocked the nation.

As Kerry prepares to accept the Democratic presidential nomination in Boston this week, the shadow of another war hangs over another election. Vietnam and Iraq, 1968 and 2004, are bookends for several generations of Americans, touching similar themes of war and dissent. These two election years also illuminate the inner conflicts felt by the man poised to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Unpublished letters written by Kerry in 1968 reveal him to be committed to public service but feeling the stirrings of doubt. As a college student he had condemned antiwar protests against visiting political leaders, but just a few years later Kerry was at the forefront of the protests himself.

Dalby discovered Kerry's letters during a recent home renovation, and read passages to a Globe reporter. Another Yale classmate, David Thorne, also provided quotations from 1968 letters and showed them to a reporter. Other friends provided recollections of that year as well.

The glimpses into Kerry's thinking provide at least a partial portrait of a young man wrestling with matters of war, duty, and sacrifice, and slowly changing his mind -- an aspect of Kerry that would be part of his Senate career and that would become fodder in the presidential race for Republican critics who accuse him of not adhering to positions and principles.

"I too have no regard whatsoever for this war but I do see that as a member of the armed service and as a responsible person I have an obligation to take on the most interesting and challenging thing there is," Kerry wrote to Thorne in September 1968.

These competing sides thread through Kerry's life. He had misgivings about the war, but was prepared for a tour of duty. He opposed the 1991 Gulf War resolution, but applauded the US victory. He voted for the resolution authorizing war against Iraq, but now expresses misgivings about President Bush's handling of it.

Friends expected Kerry's service to launch a brilliant political career. Instead, Kerry became an antiwar hero, and then suffered a bruising defeat trying to leverage his prominence in a bid for Congress.

A dozen years later, he won a US Senate seat opposing the Reagan-era military buildup; he invoked Vietnam's deadly legacy in opposing the 1991 Persian Gulf War. But in 2004, Kerry decided not to lead the Democratic Party's antiwar wing.

In Vietnam, Kerry developed a keen appreciation for what he calls the "horrors" of war. But he is no pacifist. "I am willing to accept the horror that goes with war -- when the interests or stakes warrant it," he said in 1991.

In Vietnam, Kerry developed a visceral distrust of government motives. But he has aspired to lead government. His letters from 1968 reveal a young man who assumed he would be part of the establishment, not a warrior against it. As he wrote simply to Dalby while cruising across the Pacific: "I am in it and I am going full hog now to do my best."

A presidential ambitionIt was almost exactly 40 years ago that Daniel Barbiero introduced his Yale roommate to his mother. "This is Johnny Kerry," Barbiero recalls telling his mother. "He's going to be president someday." Lydia Barbiero, a Republican, said that if the prediction ever came true, she would cross party lines and support Kerry -- which she now plans to do.

"He gets painted as this ambitious guy," Kerry's first wife, Julia Thorne, said last year. "But it's in his bones to be a public servant. As long as I've known him, he has been committed to his country. I've reread some of the letters that he wrote to me while he was at Yale -- they are about public policy; this has been his life. It's petty to call him ambitious -- it's accurate, but it's not a dirty word."

Kerry was no dissident at Yale. As a freshman, he wrote a letter to President Kennedy, whom he had met months earlier, apologizing for students who had heckled the president that year in New Haven. "Gradually the realization of the disrespect shown the office of the President of the United States is sinking in to those who are the offenders," the 18-year-old wrote.

As a college senior, Kerry handed Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey a petition signed by 550 people condemning those who "impugn the integrity of the US leaders and political institutions through irresponsible protests." (A Yale Daily News article on the incident was recently unearthed by The New York Times.)

But when asked to deliver the class oration at his graduation, Kerry discarded a pedestrian first draft and penned a more provocative speech questioning the US mission in Vietnam: "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism." Then, in a sentence that helps explain his 2002 vote for the Iraq war resolution, Kerry said: "This Vietnam War has found our policy makers forcing Americans into a strange corner . . . that if victory escapes us, it would not be the fault of those who lead, but of the doubters who stabbed them in the back."

For Kerry, the only logical path to take in Vietnam was to serve, qualms and all.

"We had this very naive belief that the only way to understand what was going on in Vietnam was to go there, which is the naive view of a 19-year-old," Barbiero said. "We'll go there, we'll see."

Barbiero said this reflects one of Kerry's traits, a passion for examining an issue from every angle. "He definitely is a man who studies a question six ways to Sunday," Barbiero said. "He was always that way. He was that way in prep school and college. If he would write a speech, I would have to read it 26 times. He would focus on it ad infinitum but once he makes a decision on it, he is absolutely very direct. I think in Vietnam he learned that the war close up was not a good thing, so when he came back he acted on that."

As Barbiero tells it, Kerry's positions have remained constant since he first met Kerry at St. Paul's School. "John's views on our role in the world, in terms of our engaging in foreign policy, these are ideas that John had when he was 16 or 17 and I met him way back in prep school," Barbiero said. "His concept of America's role in the world was always that we would engage with other countries, not isolationist."

A '60s crossroadsThe year 1968 was a turning point not only in the country's history but also in Kerry's political development. His best friend, Richard Pershing, the son of World War I General John Joseph (Black Jack) Pershing, was killed trying to locate a fellow soldier in a rice paddy.

Months before his death, Pershing had written a letter that Dalby said was also reflective of Kerry's evolving views about service in Vietnam: "The ethics of the war are no longer my concern," Pershing wrote to Dalby in July of 1967. "My main concern is and must be the safety of my men and myself. In this apparently inevitable impending test, I'll be far too busy keeping alive to juggle colored balls of moral sophistry."

But the question has remained all these years later: Why was Kerry gung-ho if he had decided the mission was wrong? Having trained for duty as a "swift boat" skipper, Kerry composed his thoughts in a letter to Thorne.

"From what I hear at Swift school, I may be in for more than I bargained for but I refuse the privilege of second guessing this thing," Kerry wrote. "I am in it and I am going full hog now to do my best."

In another letter to Thorne, shortly before leaving on his combat tour, Kerry summed up his outlook on life. In retrospect, it sounds almost Reaganesque in its sunny optimism.

"I think that occasionally we may stub a toe [on idealism] but the pain only warns us to pick our feet higher next time," Kerry wrote. "I think that we use it to the best advantage -- without it, one loses the ability to see and understand the dreams, and without the dream, what something different do you have to offer and to drive for? The world is full of people who don't have dreams. I would hate to be one."

Kerry arrived for combat in Vietnam in November 1968, just after Richard M. Nixon had been elected president. At first, Kerry had time to read his collection of history books; he joked in a letter to Dalby that he would soon be able to "rightly name myself to the John F. Kerry chair at Cam Ranh Bay."

But within two weeks, Kerry would see his first combat. He headed out on a covert mission that left him slightly wounded, and he was given his first Purple Heart. Over the following 4 months, he earned two more Purple Hearts, a Silver Star, and a Bronze Star, all the while becoming increasingly convinced that the war was wrong and that he had to return home and speak publicly against it.

An Iraq conundrumOn Sept. 25, 2002, as Kerry faced the decision of whether to vote for the Iraq war resolution, his long-time political supporter Jerome Grossman sent him a handwritten fax. Grossman urged Kerry to recall his experience in Vietnam as a rationale to oppose the resolution authorizing President Bush to go to war.

"Dear John," Grossman wrote, according to a copy of the letter he supplied to the Globe. "As a long-time supporter of your illustrious political career and an admirer or your policies, I urge you to take the lead on the current crisis over Iraq."

Grossman then spelled out his rationale, asserting that Congress should not give Bush a "blank check similar to the Gulf of Tonkin resolution of 1964," which gave President Johnson the rationale for pursuing the war in Vietnam.

Grossman thought the Vietnam analogy would persuade Kerry to oppose the resolution; Kerry did not heed his advice. Grossman said he talked with Kerry this year, and suggested that Kerry say he regretted the vote because it had been based on bad intelligence supplied by the Bush administration. Kerry rejected the idea, Grossman said.

"He told me that this would indicate that he had been brainwashed, a la Romney," Grossman said. That was a reference to the incident in which the Michigan governor and 1968 candidate, George Romney -- father of Governor Mitt Romney -- said he had initially supported the Vietnam War because he had been "brainwashed" by US military officials.

The comment was widely quoted during Romney's run in the 1968 GOP primaries.

To some of Kerry's old friends from the Vietnam days, Kerry's Iraq vote can be understood in the context of his 1968 letters.

"It is not so surprising," Dalby said. In both cases, he said, Kerry's "sense of duty would prevail over the sense of doubt."

Alex Beam of the Globe staff contributed. Michael Kranish can be reached at kranish@globe.com. Kranish is a coauthor of "John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography, by The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best." For information, go to: www.bostoncom/kerrybook