John Kerry's White House hopes

Can a Vietnam veteran be elected president? Kerry, with his heroism during the war and high-profile protest of it afterwards, may be just the one to do it.

By Seth Gitell

THIRTY YEARS AGO this week, John Forbes Kerry traveled to Capitol Hill to testify against the Vietnam War under the auspices of Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW). It was then that the former Navy officer posed this oft-quoted question to Congress: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

The anniversary of Kerry's dramatic testimony raises another question: can a Vietnam veteran be elected president? The query hangs over Senator Kerry as he puts the very beginning touches on a 2004 presidential run. Although his office is officially focused on his Senate re-election campaign next year, Kerry is unofficially gearing up for a potential 2004 run. He's already hit Tinsel Town to line up the Hollywood heavy hitters. Earlier this month, he showed up at the Bel Air home of Lawrence Bender, producer of such films as Pulp Fiction, Good Will Hunting, and The Mexican, for a fundraising soirée. He's also visited Jefferson-Jackson Day events in Georgia and Colorado, and in June he'll address Washington State's largest gathering of Democrats. If Kerry runs and wins, he'll be doing what no other Vietnam veteran has been able to do.

The 2000 presidential campaign saw a Vietnam veteran, Al Gore, lose to a man who evaded combat by joining the Texas Air National Guard, who left Texas and did his training in Alabama, and who failed even to serve out his minimal obligation. Gore not only refused to make Bush's de facto AWOL status an issue in the campaign, but also made little of his own status as a veteran. The public's continuing ambivalence about the war -- which divided the country and saw tens of thousands of men make the same sort of decision Bush did in order to avoid combat -- made it difficult, if not impossible, to make much of Bush's actions in the late 1960s and early 1970s. And since Gore himself served in a non-combat role as an Army journalist, the vice-president seemed loath to play up his service. In his acceptance speech before the Democratic National Convention, Gore said: "I was an Army reporter in Vietnam. When I was there I didn't do the most or run the gravest danger, but I was proud to wear my country's uniform." Because neither man saw combat, both the public

and the candidates themselves seemed to view their wartime actions as morally equivalent.

Almost every man elected president since 1968 has had to deal with Vietnam in some way or another. In 1968, Vietnam was the campaign's central issue. Lyndon Baines Johnson refused to run for re-election; Richard Nixon won the White House with his "secret plan" to end the war. In 1976, Jimmy Carter made points with the electorate by promising pardons for those who fled the US to evade the draft. In 1980, Ronald Reagan leveraged post-Vietnam and hostage-crisis malaise to a landslide victory over Carter. In 1988 George Bush selected Dan Quayle, first among the Republican chicken hawks, as his running mate -- a move that almost capsized his presidential contest against Michael Dukakis. Bill Clinton had to fend off attacks for having essentially dodged the draft, but in the 1992 Democratic primary he easily defeated Senator Robert Kerrey of Nebraska, a Navy veteran who had been awarded the distinguished Medal of Honor -- the nation's highest military honor.

But among all of these presidential candidates -- as well as those likely to run in the foreseeable future -- only Kerry can place on his résumé both heroic service in America's most controversial war and high-profile public protest against it. In many ways, Kerry is the perfect candidate for a public still coming to terms with the 30-year-old war. Should Kerry run, he'd do so amid a shifting cultural climate that's far more sympathetic to veterans. Steven Spielberg's 1998 masterpiece Saving Private Ryan sparked a wave of renewed interest not just in World War II but in veterans of all America's wars. The same can be said for Tom Brokaw's runaway bestseller about World War II veterans, The Greatest Generation. Time will tell whether Touchstone Pictures' Pearl Harbor, a May-release film starring Ben Affleck about the Japanese bombing raid that plunged the US into World War II, will do the same.

Kerry also has something else working in his favor. If he runs in 2004, it would be in the wake of Arizona senator John McCain's 2000 presidential bid. McCain, who spent six hellish years in the North Vietnamese prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton, was ultimately unsuccessful, but he broke ground by simply being able to talk about his background as a veteran. That was in stark contrast to Nebraska senator Kerrey's 1992 campaign, which played up his service on the stump but not in his television advertising. It's in even starker contrast to Kerrey's first run as governor of Nebraska. Kerrey recalls that one of the first things the press wanted to know was whether he suffered "flashbacks" from his time in Vietnam. The changing social climate toward veterans will help Kerry, says Kerrey, who now serves as president of the New School University in Manhattan: "We've learned a lot, if you ask me."

THE WAR-FORGED template for the John Kerry story was set in a 1985 Washington Post profile of the newly elected senator titled "The Vietnam War Hero, the Protester, the Senator." The Boston Globe's Charles Sennott restated the tale during Kerry's hard-fought 1996 campaign against former governor William Weld, with a richly detailed 4400-word candidate profile rife with description of the "lush green palms and mangroves" of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. And Kerry himself has accented his war experiences. An Unfinished Symphony, a 2001 documentary about the war which played at the New England Film & Video Festival last month, perpetuates the leftist narrative of US involvement in Vietnam: that of the American soldier, trained by his country to be a killer, who returns home from the war to protest it. None other than John Kerry plays a visible part in the film.

As public perception of the war has shifted, so has Kerry's. As the 30th anniversary of his testimony before Congress approached, the Phoenix asked him to talk about his wartime experiences and how he feels about them now. He agreed.

Early Patriots Day morning, Kerry and two aides greeted me in front of his Louisburg Square home. Kerry wore a brown leather bomber jacket festooned with patches designating the Navy units with which he served in Vietnam. (The jacket serves as his regular casual wear; when we arrived for a veterans' event in Auburn he changed into a navy-blue blazer.) We set out in a Chrysler mini-van for Hopkinton, the start of the Boston Marathon, where Kerry was to fire the starters' pistol for the wheelchair race.

As Kerry began to talk, it became clear that with the perspective of three decades he is able to move beyond the shibboleths of both the right and the left in his discussion of Vietnam. More to the point, Kerry is able to criticize his comrades on the left during that time -- something that would have been impossible 30 years ago. He still believes the war wasn't worth it, but now that 10 years have passed since the end of the Cold War, Kerry is able to empathize with those who argue that Vietnam was a "necessary struggle" against the expansion of Communism.

Kerry's newfound openness is evident in the ease with which he -- a proud sailor -- relates to other veterans of all ages. On Patriots Day, for instance, Kerry visited an American Legion post in Auburn to pin missing medals on an elderly veteran of D-Day. Sitting at a table of World War II vets, he held court like one of them. Two days later, he was the only speaker to focus on Representative Joe Moakley's military background at a ceremony honoring the South Boston congressman. Kerry lauded Moakley as a "man of the Navy" and a "citizen soldier." Three decades ago, Kerry says, he could not have interacted with World War II vets the way he can now. "Thirty years ago, those guys would not have understood what we were saying," he says.

For Kerry, the war didn't assume major significance until after President John F. Kennedy's assassination and the 1964 Tonkin Gulf incident, which prompted President Lyndon Johnson to announce a muster of 100,000 troops headed for Vietnam. Motivated by a sense of duty, a "semi-hawkish" Kerry enlisted in the Navy and applied for Officers Candidate School, a posting as difficult as getting into law school. At this point, Kerry thought a "thoughtful, moderated" response in Vietnam was preferable to "all-out war."

Yet some of Kerry's enthusiasm began to dim as his ship made its way overseas in January of 1968. News of the Viet Cong's Tet Offensive hit while Kerry was en route. The January 31 offensive, named for the Vietnamese New Year, marked a turning point in American perceptions of the war. Before that time, most of the American public believed that US forces were drubbing the Viet Cong. The powerful enemy offensive demonstrated that the Pentagon had been shading the truth. Kerry's reaction was in line with many Americans'. He recalls being "taken aback that the Vietnamese were able to mount that kind of offensive, contrary to what most of the military people had been prognosticating at that point."

Whatever his reservations, Kerry went into his mission gung ho. After a stint patrolling the coastline, his job shifted to performing search-and-destroy missions in the canals and small rivers that snaked through the Mekong Delta. The mission, in Kerry's words, was "to take the fight to the enemy's back yard."

Though Kerry later testified on Capitol Hill about American atrocities in Vietnam, and much of An Unfinished Symphony concentrates on American wrongdoing, Kerry today is today unafraid to talk about brutality on the Viet Cong's part -- something rarely acknowledged by the antiwar movement in the 1960s and '70s. "The Viet Cong were engaged in terrorist tactics throughout the region," Kerry remembers. "They were going into villages, killing known South Vietnamese sympathizers, taxing people -- basically setting up their infrastructure to fight the war."

As hard as Kerry drove himself and his crew, the young officer and his comrades quietly began to question how the war was being fought. "Once I got in country and began to see what was happening with my own eyes and make my own judgments about how the war was being fought, I began to turn against it," says Kerry. The men hashed over everything from tactics and strategy to the "overall goals and objectives of the Vietnam struggle itself."

Questioning established practice also thrust Kerry into the role of hero. One day in February 1969, Kerry's boat, which ordinarily carried seven men, was weighted down with roughly 20 troops while making its way down a river beset by Viet Cong ambush. Gradually, Kerry began to question the wisdom of merely continuing down the river. If the approaching fusillade comes mostly from light-caliber weapons such as AK-47s, he thought, why not attack? "I figured rather than sit broadside for a long period of time, this was the perfect opportunity to surprise them and try a new tactic," Kerry says. When attacked, Kerry ordered his boat and two others to steam toward the ambush site. Once there, Kerry leapt off and personally pursued one of the attackers. Soon the Americans overpowered the enemy. "We destroyed the bunkers," he says. "We killed a bunch of them -- captured their weapons and ran right over the ambush." The episode won Kerry a Silver Star.

EVEN IF Kerry had personally turned against the war, he still saw -- and sees -- value in military service. "The duty was extraordinarily exciting and rewarding and challenging. I learned an enormous amount from it," says Kerry, while acknowledging that "being shot at" is not fun. Kerry praises military service for management and character training. "I think a lot of people who don't get the discipline or [the chance to serve] miss something."

Kerry returned from Vietnam opposed to the war, and he wanted to do something about it. But first he had to finish out his military service, which he did by working for an admiral in New York City. It was in New York that this opponent of the war confronted the animosity of the left for the first time. Kerry remembers dirty looks and harsh language from others opposed to the war. "There were hippie protesters here and there who objected to people in uniform," he says. "On a couple of occasions I heard people say `baby killer.'" Friends of his, Kerry says, were even spat on by antiwar types.

Despite the scorn he suffered, when the Navy mustered Kerry out of active service he planned to run for Congress from Massachusetts as a protest candidate against pro-war hawk Representative Phil Philbin. But state Democrats thought Father Robert Drinan was a better choice, so Kerry backed Drinan and joined up with the nascent VVAW. Their first action was the Winter Soldier Hearings in Detroit, which publicized American atrocities. "I had some misgivings about Detroit," says Kerry. "In the end I think it was too harsh -- too difficult for Americans to connect to."

Despite his reservations, Kerry participated in the hearings. Black and white footage in An Unfinished Symphony shows a boyish-faced Kerry with sideburns wearing a dark turtleneck underneath a groovy, multipatterned long-collared shirt. "Is there something that you really kinda want to say about the crimes and why they happened?" he earnestly asks another vet. "I'd almost need a book to answer that, man," responds the vet, a wide bandana wrapped around his head. Basic idea? American soldiers in Vietnam were a group of bloodthirsty maniacs ruining somebody else's country for no apparent reason.

What Kerry saw as the failure of the Detroit action ultimately led him to the antiwar action for which he is most remembered -- testifying before the Senate on April 23, 1971. Kerry thought a more broad-based critique of the war would be more successful in reaching Middle America. Wearing old fatigues, he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a spokesman for VVAW, reciting a litany of American atrocities committed in Indochina. He had learned these stories two months earlier at a VVAW inquiry in Detroit: "They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power," Kerry stated before going on to his main point about the need to end the war in Vietnam, the line everyone remembers.

As part of the protest staged outside the hearings on the steps of Capitol Hill, Kerry publicly discarded his combat decorations -- though the incident would come back to haunt him. In 1984, Kerry acknowledged that on that day he threw away other people's medals as well. The issue came up in the 1985 Washington Post profile when Kerry was asked about the demonstration and why he hadn't thrown away his own medals -- as he certainly appeared to have done. "They're my medals. I'll do what I want with them," he said. "And there shouldn't be any expectations about them.... It's my business. I did not want to throw my medals away." Sennott reported in 1996 that Kerry discarded the ribbons of his Silver Star, along with medals given to him by other veterans in New York and Massachusetts. Kerry gave the same account to the Phoenix.

"I threw back my ribbons," Kerry says today. "Somebody tried to make a deal out of that and it's not a deal." The most important thing about a military award, after all, is not the physical medal or ribbon but the fact that the award was ever given. Any Silver or Bronze Star or Purple Heart can be purchased and pinned to a uniform to wear if a person rightly won it. What's really wrong is if a veteran wears an unearned medal.

What is a big deal and relatively little known is that only months after being in the national spotlight for the VVAW, Kerry left the group. Although Kerry kept the move relatively quiet at the time, he now says that he began to have second thoughts about the polemical tilt the group began to take on. He had earlier raised concerns about others in the antiwar movement who, he thought, failed to serve the interests of veterans. (The best example of this is actress Jane Fonda who appeared in a North Vietnamese photo inside an anti-aircraft gun turret.) "We were trying to talk to the heart of America and some of those folks had overstayed their welcome in my judgment or been so abusive in their rhetoric that they lost the ability to communicate," says Kerry of some antiwar protesters. He left the VVAW for similar reasons: "I resigned and left because the agenda of some of the folks within the veterans movement ultimately became confused and went way beyond just trying to end the war. There was a lot of rhetoric about every social ill and evil there was."

Still, not everyone in Kerry's shoes protested the war. Former Nebraska senator Bob Kerrey didn't join the VVAW or participate with any other organized protest group, even though he came back from Vietnam opposed to the war. "I became very uncomfortable with the people protesting the war," says Kerrey. "I did not feel as close to them as the people I served with." (As a student at Berkeley, however, Kerrey worked with antiwar activist Allard Lowenstein to register new voters.)

At the time, not all Kerry's wartime friends thought pride as a veteran could be reconciled with opposition to the war. "Some of them were not supportive of what I did," he says. Still, he believes that time has brought most of the others to the view that he and the other war protesters were right. "Nowadays most of the people who had second thoughts about it have come around to realize -- most of them, not all, but most -- that it was a mistake.

WHAT KERRY won't do is criticize members of his generation in leadership positions, such as Bush, Vice-President Dick Cheney, and former president Clinton, for failing to serve. "I have infinite respect and love for the guys who served and the bond that we all have, which is unlike anything anyone else will have, but I'm not going to hold it against the other person because they made a different choice," he says. The fact that they failed to serve "affects my view of the depth of their understanding," he says of these people, particularly those who are now hawkish on foreign policy. "It certainly clouds my sense of that person, but I'm not going to personalize it."

Kerry also emphasizes that age differences radically altered the way people approached the war. The war as fought in 1965 -- heavy on advisers -- was different from the war of Tet and Khe Sahn in 1968. And Kerry, who was in college during the Kennedy presidency, experienced the war differently from those who faced the draft under an increasingly discredited Johnson in 1968. By the early 1970s, things were different again. The South Vietnamese faced a largely conventional threat from North Vietnam. Besides, throughout the prosecution of the war, the military gave personnel only one-year tours, which meant that the soldiers and sailors who confronted the enemy came in with none of the institutional knowledge of their predecessors.

One fact about Vietnam cannot be erased or spun -- more than 58,000 Americans lost their lives there. More Marines died in the Vietnam War than in World War II. An increasingly influential school of thought sees Vietnam as one battle in the Cold War, along with Korea and other theaters of action. In 1999, Michael Lind pressed that point in Vietnam: The Necessary War (Free Press). What does Kerry think of this thesis? "I think in the end you can make an argument that there were some salutary consequences notwithstanding the outcome. The energy expended in it probably had a long-term outcome for the Cold War." Does this mean that Kerry the onetime war protester thinks the war was really worth it? No. "You could make the argument," Kerry says. "I personally think the outcome [of the Cold War] would have been the same.... I think you could have avoided a lot of grief by avoiding it in the first place, and I still believe that."

Thirty years ago Kerry never would have talked publicly about Viet Cong wrongdoing or raised the possibility that the hawks may have had at least half a point. His willingness to discuss the Vietnam era in new terms suggests that America may be willing to think about that period in a new way as well. But we won't know that that for sure until 2004.

Seth Gitell can be reached at sgitell[a]phx.com.