Taking the Measure of John Kerry
Published: August 15, 2004
To begin with a small question that I trust is not a trivial or a petty one: how often have you met a self-described Kerry supporter? During the truncated and front-loaded Democratic primaries, it was relatively easy to encounter Dean enthusiasts, Gephardt union activists, Clark fans, Edwards converts, Kucinich militants and even dedicated Sharptonians. (My circle wasn't wide enough to encompass any Braun campaigners.) But a person who got up every morning and counted the day wasted if he or she hadn't made a Kerry convert? I've asked this question on radio and on television, and on campus and in the other places where people sing, and I've heard only a slight shuffling of Democratic feet. Just as the junior senator from Massachusetts used to say, for arcane fund-raising purposes, that he was only the ''presumptive'' nominee, so he was earlier the ''presumptive'' or last-resort choice once all the passion and spontaneity had been threshed out by the party machine. The name Kerry is thus another tired synonym for ABB, or ''Anybody but Bush.'' Shall we ''take America back'' this November? In such a case, we would be taking it back to a fairly familiar version of Democratic consensualism.
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Yet these books make it plain that Kerry is not a taller version of Mondale or Dukakis. This year's Democratic aspirant has a fascinating family history, extending not just to the earliest years of the ancestors of the Republic but to the yearnings of those later Europeans who sought refuge on this continent. (He must be the only Catholic Jew with Mayflower-Winthrop roots to have sought the highest office.)
By being a brave warrior and a prominent antiwarrior, Kerry was profoundly involved in the two largest claims to participation in a ''noble cause'' that the last half-century has offered Americans. He has succeeded in getting two very striking and independent women to marry him, the second of whom, though she sometimes resembles a large-print version of Bianca Jagger, is nonetheless living proof that ketchup is not a vegetable. His service in the Senate, while not describable as stellar, has featured some important moments of gravity and responsibility. He might wince from the compliment, but he deserves to be called un homme serieux.
Why, then, the penumbra of doubt that surrounds him? (Doubt on his own part, I mean, not just doubt by others.) The answer is not complex. One of these books, ''John F. Kerry,'' by a Boston Globe team, makes reference to the song ''Give Peace a Chance,'' as sung by John Lennon in Kerry's presence in far-off days. The second, ''The Candidate,'' by the journalist Paul Alexander, has a verse from Bruce Springsteen's ''No Surrender'' as its epigraph, speaking of ''blood brothers in a stormy night'' and refusing the idea of any retreat. (This stirring song, indeed, was played at top volume by the party managers in Boston to herald Kerry's acceptance speech at the Democratic convention.) The third, ''A Call to Service,'' by Kerry himself, merits Mark Twain's comment on the Book of Mormon -- ''chloroform in print.'' It has no music at all. But if it were to draw its title from any popular song, it would have to bow toward Joni Mitchell and announce itself as ''Both Sides Now.''
If Kerry is dogged and haunted by the accusation of wanting everything twice over, he has come by the charge honestly. In Vietnam, he was either a member of a ''band of brothers'' or of a gang of war criminals, and has testified with great emotion to both convictions. In the Senate, he has either voted for armament and vigilance or he has not, and either regrets his antiwar vote on the Kuwait war, or his initial pro-war stance on the Iraq war, or his negative vote on the financing of the latter, or has not. The Boston Globe writers capture a moment of sheer, abject incoherence, at a Democratic candidates' debate in Baltimore last September:
''If we hadn't voted the way we voted, we would not have been able to have a chance of going to the United Nations and stopping the president, in effect, who already had the votes and who was obviously asking serious questions about whether or not the Congress was going to be there to enforce the effort to create a threat.''
And all smart people know how to laugh at President Bush for having problems with articulation.
Actually, when Kerry sneered at ''the coalition of the willing'' as ''a coalition of the coerced and the bribed,'' at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, no less, he was much more direct and intelligible. Yet I somehow doubt that he would repeat those clear, unmistakable words if confronted by the prime ministers of Britain, Poland or Australia. And how such an expression is likely to help restore America's standing is beyond this reviewer.
The Globe's group-grope demonstrates that Kerry's Janus-like manner is not new. In 1982 he was running for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. Two men, Michael S. Dukakis and Edward J. King, were vying for the gubernatorial nomination, and at the endorsement convention that year Kerry's staff had two sets of buttons printed, reading ''Dukakis/Kerry'' and ''King/Kerry,'' to demonstrate their man's utter readiness to serve the ticket. (This reminds me of Albert Brooks in ''Taxi Driver,'' indignantly declining to pay for buttons that say ''We Are the People'' instead of ''We Are the People.'') In an otherwise soporific rehash of Kerry's early struggles in Bay State politics, the book does contain some intriguing anecdotes about dirty tricks allegedly committed by Cameron Kerry, the senator's younger brother. How fascinating to think that the well-bred nominee may have an embarrassing sibling, with the promise of popular amusement a la Billy Carter or Roger Clinton.
It was only when he got to the Senate that Kerry was able to break free of such parochialism and refight his Vietnam battles. During the early 1970's, Nixon's own dirty tricksters had paid him flattering attention, as the Watergate tapes have shown. ''Let's destroy this young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader,'' Charles Colson wrote, with a mixture of prescience and paranoia, to a fellow White House aide. Over a decade later, in confronting the uniformed and bemedaled figure of Oliver North, who really could have been his evil twin from Vietnam, Kerry came close to unmasking yet another secret Republican state-within-a-state. I vividly remember the way in which his Senate office and then his subcommittee became the clearinghouse for a whole series of seemingly unbelievable rumors about the Iran-contra connection, most of which turned out to be true. And much credit belongs to Kerry for winnowing out the genuine stuff, about drug running and death squads and slush funds and secret deals with foreign dictatorships, from the conspiratorial garbage. He had played a similar role in the Vietnam veterans' movement, keeping the Pol Potists in their place at the admitted cost of some rhetorical excess on his own part. Two-sidedness has its uses.
EVENTUALLY, having minutely investigated the rumors and hoaxes that constituted the remnant of the P.O.W./M.I.A. case, John Kerry and John McCain were able to flank President Clinton in 1995 as he declared the resumption of diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Kerry's feeling of solidarity with McCain is one of the few human notes in his otherwise abysmal campaign book, which is replete with ''hold it right there'' remarks like ''I'm proud that Business Week magazine named me one of its Digital Dozen'' or ''Part of what excites me about a new strategy for renewable energy sources. . . .'' When was the last time a candidate turned to his own party for a running mate only after exhausting the possibility of choosing a man from the opposing team? That this ''Indecision 2004'' episode has eventuated in the selection of John Edwards -- whose own sprightly and punchy campaign biography was co-written, in another first, by a distinguished scholar of Henry James -- speaks well for Kerry, albeit in yet another ambivalent way.
But wasn't there some other Democratic war veteran on whom he ought to have called, if the man is to be a heartbeat away from the position of commander in chief? To hear Kerry speak in Boston, you could draw the conclusion that past military service is not just a good qualification for the presidency, but the equivalent of a necessary condition. If this is true now, why was it not so true in 1996 or 1992?
In the same speech where King Henry V refers to his ''band of brothers'' -- ''we few, we happy few'' -- he also lampoons the way in which veterans become bores and blowhards in later life: ''But he'll remember with advantages / What feats he did that day.'' This does not apply only to soldiering. From the podium in Boston, and by an astute deployment of the ''we'' pronoun instead of the ''I,'' Kerry managed to suggest that he had been part of the ''we'' who marched for civil rights. As the Boston Globe truth-squadders point out, he has tried this before. In his 1984 Senate race, he gave out a flier that began, ''Ever since I worked as a young volunteer in John Kennedy's presidential campaign,'' and that further claimed, ''Back then, I joined the struggle for voting rights in the South.'' Neither boast has the merit of literal truth. Kerry may not have taken part in the 1960 election at all, and has since had to admit that the most he could have done for the Freedom Ride buses was to give them a cheering wave as they set off. Though this may have signaled that ''help is on the way,'' it was not exactly ''reporting for duty.''
I had not known until I read these books that Kerry had had his first marriage annulled, signifying in effect that he was never wed to Julia Thorne, the mother of his children, in the first place. How odd that he would invoke one of the Roman Catholic Church's most pitiless dogmas while treating so many of its other teachings as essentially optional. The general effect he has striven to create is the opposite: that of a man who dislikes ruthlessness. After all, Kerry is against the death penalty, except in cases where the perpetrator has done something really heinous or unpopular. And he stopped saying ''Bring it on'' when he realized it made him sound ridiculous. But here may be the inescapable contradiction. When he voted against the MX missile and the Star Wars program, he was opposing the arms race and the implied ''first strike'' doctrine. But when he voted against the precision-guided weapons -- like the Apache helicopter and the Patriot missile -- that have helped make possible the relatively bloodless removal of aggressive despotisms, he was failing to see that the Pentagon, too, had assimilated some of the important lessons of Vietnam.
He still gives, to me at any rate, the impression of someone who sincerely wishes that this were not a time of war. When critical votes on the question come up, Kerry always looks like a dog being washed. John McCain was not like this, when a president he despised felt it necessary to go into Kosovo. We are looking at a man who would make, or would have made, a perfectly decent peacetime president.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a visiting professor of liberal studies at the New School University. His study of Thomas Jefferson is forthcoming in the series ''Eminent Lives.''
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