Kerry war letters show his conflictsThe 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 Unpublished letters written by Kerry in 1968 reveal him to be committed to public service but feeling the stirrings of doubt.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. Continued... |
