RICHARD LOWRY
A Massachusetts state representative named William Reinstein approached
John Kerry at a political event in early 1996 and introduced himself with
the fictional name “Butchy Cataldo,” just to test Kerry. The
senator merrily slapped “Butchy” on the back and told him how
good it was to see him again. The story was quickly passed around in Massachusetts
political circles as a sign of Kerry’s embarrassing lack of a common touch.
This incident is recounted in the new Boston Globe biography of John
Kerry (John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters
Who Know Him Best). Together with Douglas Brinkley’s book, Tour of Duty,
it provides a ready guide to the Democratic nominee, who is the kind of
guy who would feign delight in being reunited with his good friend Butchy
Cataldo.
Kerry has many virtues. He has physical courage, whether on his swift
boat in Vietnam or in one of his outdoor activities. He is prodigiously
talented. The excerpts from his Vietnam journals in Douglas Brinkley’s
book are impressively written. He wanted to write an autobiographical
novel about Vietnam — it might not have been a terrible one. He is
fiercely competitive and doesn’t lose easily. These qualities will be
on display during the campaign this year. So will his foibles.
Character tends to be enduring. If you were familiar with Bill Clinton’s
first two years as Arkansas governor, you had a pretty good idea of how
his first couple of years as president would play out. So too with Kerry
there are themes that have been apparent right from the beginning: the
air of phoniness, and the exaggerations and minutely fine-tuned positions
that come with it; the blatant-to-the-point-of-rank ambition; the wealthy
wives funding his political career; the exploitation of his Vietnam service
and his demagogic indignation at any questioning of his activities during
or after the war; his belief that nearly any U.S. intervention is mistaken
and driven by “pride.”
Kerry has Al Gore’s aloofness and his talent. Like Gore, it’s possible
to imagine Kerry a professor somewhere. Unlike Gore, Kerry has always
unabashedly wanted to run for office. Gore had to force himself to be
a campaigner. Kerry has been doing it more or less — debating, speechifying,
etc. — since prep school. The awkwardness (some might say weirdness)
of Gore seemed to come from the tension between what he truly desired,
i.e., being off somewhere writing books on global warming, and the political
career he foisted on himself. Kerry has no such tension. But there’s the
same sense of him trying too hard, of compensating for something missing.
A SENSE OF PLACE
That something may be a sense of place, of belonging. John Kerry has always
had trouble fitting in. He had no real home as a child, because his diplomat
father dragged the family around the globe. He wasn’t rich or privileged
enough to be one of the gang at the fancy prep schools he attended. Later,
he wasn’t working-class or locally grounded enough to fit into Massachusetts
politics. If you combine Kerry’s outsiderness with his naked ambition
(and naked is the right word — he has never tried to hide it), you
catch the particular scent that has always followed Kerry and offended
many noses.
Kerry’s anti-Vietnam activism was a picture of not fitting in. Nixon
called him “sort of a phony,” and Chuck Colson dubbed Kerry
“quite a phony.” Nixon-haters sensed much the same in Kerry.
Doonesbury skewered him, once having Kerry think to himself after a speech,
“You’re really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy.” There
was resentment against Kerry among his fellow war protesters, who were
a scruffier lot. One tried to call Kerry at home and was told, probably
by a maid, “Master Kerry is not at home.” Shortly afterward
someone hung a sign on Kerry’s chair at a meeting that read, “Free
the Kerry Maid.”
When Kerry, in his protest days, appeared with the families of some POWs,
they were heckled by other women whose husbands were POWs: “You’re
stupid, Kerry is using you to run for office.” They were not far
off the mark. Kerry the itinerant political-climber was on stark display
in his first run for Congress.
In 1972, he had mailing addresses in three different congressional districts
in a two-month period. His first wife, Julia Thorne, bought a house in
Worcester, where Kerry considered challenging a Democratic incumbent.
His wife had the money he didn’t, so she propped up his political ambitions.
Sound familiar? But the couple never moved into the home. Kerry set his
sights on a different district and rented an apartment in Lowell. One
local newspaper editorialized, “If [Kerry] doesn’t stop house-hunting
soon, he’ll not only need a campaign manager, but a full-time real-estate
agent.” Desperate to show he had roots in the district, Kerry would
say, “I learned to walk in the Fifth District,” referring to
a year he had spent there as a toddler.
Kerry had to win a Democratic primary. He had celebrity support, from
the likes of George Plimpton and Leonard Bernstein. He spent massively,
making it the most expensive congressional primary in the country. He
won, doing well in the upscale towns, but lagging in the working-class
cities, where Julia cut a conspicuous figure. “Her distinctive, upper-class
accent earned her the title ‘La Professoressa’ among residents,”
according to the Globe. She told Douglas Brinkley, “I was totally
fluent in three languages, and considered myself European.” Again,
sound familiar?
The general-election race featured a dynamic that would often be repeated:
Kerry using his Vietnam experience, but crying foul when anyone questioned
his service or anti-war advocacy. The editor of the local, powerful Lowell
Sun hammered Kerry for his high-profile opposition to the war. After he
lost, Kerry complained in a letter he sent to contributors, “For
two solid weeks, they called me un-American, new-Left anti-war agitator,
unpatriotic, and labeled me every other ‘un-‘ and ‘anti-‘ that they could
find.” This sort of victimized outrage is now a Kerry staple —
it is almost impossible to question any aspect of his record, from his
Senate votes to his allegations of widespread war crimes in Vietnam, without
supposedly questioning his patriotism.
After licking his wounds and going to law school, Kerry got a job in
the office of district attorney John Droney. Droney was suffering from
Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and needed the boost that Kerry’s energy and media
appeal could give him in his race for reelection. As theGlobe reports,
“The only complication was that Kerry had his eye on his boss’s job.
Two sources from the period . . . said Kerry approached them sometime
in early 1978 and suggested Droney’s ailment could cost him the election.
Kerry asked them to talk to the D.A. about the possibility of bowing out
and letting Kerry run.” Later, when it was clear that Droney would
win, Kerry let the powers-that-be know that he would be interested in
being appointed as his replacement if Droney couldn’t serve out his term.
This was an instance of Kerry being, as one observer has put it, “a
slick operator without the slick.” Droney, on to Kerry, quickly forced
him out of the office.
His experience there is the basis for his argument that he is tough on
crime, and also an example of how Kerry can portray his experiences with
groan-inducing exaggeration. The Globe writes, “Early in his campaign
for the White House, Kerry often said he wiped out an inventory of 12,000
criminal cases. But a 1978 Droney election ad that Kerry helped write
put the number at closer to 3,800 cases.” According to the Globe,
“The entire superior court caseload, including backlog, never exceeded
7,265 during Kerry’s tenure.”
Kerry won election as lieutenant governor and then ran for Senate in
1984. He had to win a tough primary against Congressman James Shannon.
The race featured a vintage Kerry flip-flop, involving a straddle that
had to be readjusted to suit more snugly Kerry’s political purposes. Anti-nuclear
activists were a crucial constituency in the primary. Shannon outscored
Kerry by 100-94 on the “Freeze Voter ’84” questionnaire. A member
of the group’s executive committee pointed out to a Kerry staffer why
Kerry had gotten one of the answers “wrong.” Kerry had hedged
in his opposition to funding new submarines.
The Kerry staffer wrote a memo to the candidate: “You should explain
how your position was misinterpreted so that he will correct the rating
before it is distributed to the Board tomorrow evening . . . [He] is favorably
disposed to change the grading because he knows of your strong support
for the Freeze and knows this is what you must have meant.” Kerry
changed his answer, and tied his opponent for a perfect score, thus preventing
Shannon from getting the exclusive endorsement of the group. It was in
his need to shift left to play to this constituency that Kerry called
for many of the weapons-systems cancellations that still haunt him.
When Shannon said that Kerry shouldn’t have gone to Vietnam in the first
place if he opposed the war, Kerry quickly worked to make it appear that
Shannon was insulting veterans. This, too, is now a familiar Kerry tactic
— he hides behind the honor of the very veterans he accused of war
crimes upon his return home. “You impugn the service of veterans
in that war by saying they are somehow dopes or wrong for going,”
Kerry said. According to the Globe, “A band of Vietnam vets, all
Kerry men, then wheeled into action,” shadowing and harassing Shannon.
Kerry won the primary and coasted in the general election, but still
felt the need to puff his record. He said in a flyer, “Ever since
I worked as a young volunteer in John Kennedy’s presidential campaign,
I have been deeply committed to participation in politics and political
issues . . . Back then, I joined the struggle for voting rights in the
South.” But Kerry participated in one Kennedy literature drop —
just a single one — while at prep school, and never traveled to the
South as a “Freedom Rider” as his literature implied.
Kerry wouldn’t be seriously challenged again until 1996, when the popular
Republican governor William Weld took him on in a classic campaign. Kerry
clawed his way to victory. He desperately needed legislative accomplishments.
So Kerry bragged at one point that he had introduced a bill to provide
health care to uninsured children. This was three months before he actually
filed the bill, which had to be crafted for him by Ted Kennedy’s staff.
Thus another Kerry theme: using Ted Kennedy as a crutch at critical moments.
For Kerry, the bill was just a prop. Kennedy was the one who shepherded
it to passage.
Just as in the presidential primaries, the home bought for Kerry by his
multi-millionaire second wife, Teresa Heinz, bailed him out against Weld.
Before he married her in 1995, he basically didn’t have a home, revisiting
one of the main storylines of his life. He had six different addresses
in three-and-a-half years. Kerry and Weld had agreed to a spending cap
in their race. Kerry busted it by mortgaging his Beacon Hill house. According
to the Globe, he “dumped the first $900,000 of what would be $1.7
million in personal funds into his campaign kitty.” The agreement
with Weld had been a signed contract. But there’s no honor among thieves,
or desperate incumbents.
Finally, when a newspaper column questioned whether Kerry had committed
a war crime by finishing off a wounded Viet Cong, Kerry surrounded himself
with veterans and complained that the column sullied “the honor of
those of us who served.” In beating Weld, Kerry achieved the trifecta,
relying on Kennedy’s political pull, Teresa’s money, and the Vietnam card.
EVER KERRY
Over the last year, Kerry’s position on the Iraq war has featured agonizing
indecision, or as his supporters call it, “nuance.” This intellectual
temper seems woven into Kerry’s very being. He may have absorbed it from
his father. Richard Kerry once wrote, “Casting issues in the form
of polar choices . . . readily leads to the conclusion that if one is
wrong, the other must be right. In a more relative view of the issue,
both are likely to be wrong.” Who does that sound like? As John Kerry
put it more colloquially to Douglas Brinkley, “As Yogi Berra said,
‘I came to the fork in the road and I took it.’ Now that, to me, is real
philosophy. That’s one of my favorite philosophical statements.”
This intellectual tendency is augmented by Kerry’s sense of caution.
An overweening political ambition is often associated with fear. So Bill
Clinton was always scared of the choice that would end his career, or
merely depress his poll numbers. Kerry trembles in the same way. According
to the Globe, “As a student and later as a senator, Kerry often internally
debated an issue before making up his mind in a process that could take
weeks.” It continues, “He often sounded as if he were talking
himself out of the decision he had just made.”
As Kerry meanders, he is prone to make two criticisms of any U.S. action:
that it is alienating the world, and is the product of pride. These were
staples of his father’s foreign-policy thought, and Kerry can’t resist
returning to them in almost any circumstance. He made these criticisms,
of course, of Vietnam. He also made them of Grenada. “The invasion
only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle U.S.–Soviet
and North–South relations,” he said. He made them of the 1991
Gulf War. “There is a rush to war here,” said Kerry. “We
are willing to act . . . with more bravado than patience.” He added,
“It sounds like we are risking war for pride, not vital interests!”
Kerry even sounded some of these notes during the Afghan war.
In light of all this, we haven’t seen much new or surprising from Kerry
this campaign season and shouldn’t expect it. But the glee with which
Republicans have greeted his early stumbles is premature. The cliché
about Kerry, that he is a “strong closer,” appears to be true.
He proved it against Weld in their tough race in 1996 and against Howard
Dean just months ago. He is too competitive and too smart to run a campaign
as stumbling as he has over the last several weeks. But for Kerry there
is no escaping John Kerry, which may well prove the ultimate drag on his
campaign.
| Kerry, Kerry, Quite Contrary The lifelong contortions of the Democratic nominee National Review May 31, 2004 Issue |