Duty -- and ambition
John Forbes Kerry's first draft for his Yale University class oration was a vapid affair, with predictable phrases about how the class of 1966 must be prepared for an uncertain future. The words were already published in his class yearbook. But when Kerry delivered the oration, the young man who frequently told classmates that he dreamed of being president switched his text. Now he seemed to be questioning the need to fight in Vietnam.
"The United States must, I think, bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world," Kerry said in the graduation speech.
To those who believe Kerry's difficulty in explaining his Iraq war vote has defined his candidacy, it is worth noting that Kerry has traveled down a similar road before. Back when the debate was not academic -- he was enlisted in officer training school -- Kerry overcame his doubts and chose service. As the skipper of a small Navy "swift boat" that typically carried five or six sailors, Kerry went beyond the usual orders that called for flushing out the enemy. He would often order the boat to charge the shore, and at one point he chased down and killed a Viet Cong who had pointed a weapon at the craft. But after six months of dangerous duty on the waterways of South Vietnam, Kerry decided it was time to leave. He had received a Silver Star and a Bronze Star, as well as three Purple Hearts, all for relatively minor wounds, only one of which kept him out of action for a day or two. Naval regulations enabled someone with three Purple Hearts to leave early, and Kerry decided he had seen enough. One of his closest friends, Richard Pershing, the grandson of famed World War I general John Joseph Pershing, had been killed in combat, and Kerry had become disillusioned with the war. So he left behind his crew and returned home.
Soon, Kerry was once again sounding like the Yale senior who doubted the rationale for the Vietnam War, but this time he acted upon his doubts. He joined an organization called Vietnam Veterans Against the War and soon became its leader. The Nixon White House, which until then had dismissed the group as a bunch of long-haired radicals, worried that Kerry could become a legitimate threat. He spoke with a Kennedy-like accent and came across as an articulate officer.
"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry said in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 22, 1971. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Attacking the Nixon White House, he said: "This administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifices we made for this country."
The testimony made Kerry a media star, prompting an interviewer on the CBS news program "60 Minutes" to ask whether he would seek the presidency. (Kerry said he had no such plans.) In the White House, President Nixon sneered at his adversary. "Well, he is sort of a phony, isn't he?" Nixon said on April 28, 1971, in secretly recorded tapes.
Kerry, now 60, went on to become Massachusetts assistant district attorney, lieutenant governor, and, for the past 20 years, US senator. While his legislative record pales in comparison to the state's senior senator, Edward M. Kennedy, Kerry has made a mark as an investigative figure, making key discoveries in the Iran-contra scandal and in probes of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International and the international drug cartels.
Divorced in 1982, he is now married to Teresa Heinz Kerry. While some of his constituents had assumed that he had Irish roots, the Kerry side of the family in fact came from Austria. A genealogist hired by The Globe confirmed that Kerry's grandfather was originally Fritz Kohn, of Jewish descent, a discovery that surprised Kerry, who had suspected only that his grandmother might have been Jewish. Kohn and his wife, the former Ida Lowe, changed their name to Kerry, converted to Catholicism, and immigrated to the United States in 1905. Kerry's Brahmin roots come from his maternal side, the Winthrops and Forbeses. A Winthrop great-aunt helped pay for much of his education at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H. Even now, some of Kerry's fondest memories are of skating on the pond that rings St. Paul's. Now he campaigns in the state where he spent his formative years, hoping a strong showing in the primary there will give him a speedy start as he seeks to fulfill his lifelong ambition of becoming president.
