Kerry war letters show his conflictsPage 4 of 4 -- 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 © Copyright 2004 Globe Newspaper Company.
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