Kerry war letters show his conflictsPage 2 of 4 -- 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.) Continued... |
