Since quitting the Navy six months early at age 27 so he could run for
Congress on an antiwar platform, John Kerry has built a political
career on his service in Vietnam.

His unsuccessful 1970 congressional bid lasted only a month, during
which it proved impossible for even he to get to the left of the
winner, Robert Drinan, but it forged a conflicting political persona –
one hammered out between his combat medals earned in the Mekong delta
and the common cause he made with the enemy upon his return home.

Now, at age 60, the junior Democratic senator from Massachusetts is
milking his veteran status once again in an effort to show he's
tougher and more patriotic than the man he seeks to replace, President
Bush. And, as unrepentant as ever for his pro-Hanoi activism, he is
just as conflicted in 2004 as he was in the 1960s.

If there is any consistency in Kerry's political career, it is his
in-your-face use of that four-month stint in Vietnam. He enlisted like
many other young men of privilege, trying to serve without going to
the front lines. When in 1966 it looked like his draft number was
coming up during his senior year at Yale University, and already
having spoken out in public against the war, Kerry signed up with the
Navy under the conscious inspiration of his hero, the late President
John F. Kennedy.

As a lieutenant junior grade, Kerry skippered a CTF-115 swift boat, a
light, aluminum patrol vessel that bore a passing resemblance to
PT-109. He thought he'd arranged to avoid combat.

"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," he later would tell
the Boston Globe. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very
little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling,
and that's what I thought I was going to do."

Soon, however, Kerry was reassigned to patrol the Mekong River in
South Vietnam, a formative experience for his political odyssey. The
official record shows that he rose to the occasion. It was along the
Mekong where he first killed a man, aggressively fighting the enemy
Viet Cong and reportedly saving the lives of his own men, earning a
Bronze Star, a Silver Star for valor and three Purple Hearts in the
process.

Kerry opted for reassignment to New York City, where – as a uniformed,
active-duty officer – he reportedly began acting out the antiwar
feelings he had expressed before enlisting. Press reports from the
time say that he marched in the October 1969 Moratorium protests – a
mass demonstration by a quarter-million people that had been
orchestrated the previous summer by North Vietnamese officials and
American antiwar leaders in Cuba.

Kerry had found his purpose in life. The New York Times reported April
23, 1971, that at about the time of the Moratorium march, Lt. Kerry
had "asked for, and was given, an early release from the Navy so he
could run for Congress on an antiwar platform from his home district
in Waltham, Mass."

For Kerry, politicizing the nation's war effort for partisan purposes
was the right thing to do, in contrast to the violent revolutionary
designs of colleagues who were out to destroy the system. Kerry didn't
want to take down the establishment. He wanted to take it over.

His aborted, monthlong 1970 congressional campaign was a victory for
him politically, as it landed him on television's popular Dick Cavett
Show, where he came to the attention of some of the central organizers
of the antiwar/pro-Hanoi group known as Vietnam Veterans Against the
War.

VVAW was a numerically small part of the protest movement, but it was
extremely influential through skillful political theater, the novelty
of uniformed combat veterans joining the Vietniks, and a ruthless
coalition-building strategy that forged partnerships with the
Communist Party USA, its Trotskyite rival, the Socialist Workers
Party, and a broad front that ranged from pacifists to supporters of
the Black Panthers and other domestic terrorist groups.

Kerry signed on as a full-time organizer and member of the VVAW's
six-member executive committee. By early 1971 he had become one of the
antiwar movement's principal figureheads, lending a moderate face to a
movement that championed, and was championed by, imprisoned murder
conspirator Angela Davis and actress Jane Fonda.

The young former and future political candidate acted as one of the
main leaders of a massive, five-day April protest in Washington and
other cities. Kerry's partner, Jan Crumb, read a list of 15 demands.
According to the Communist Party USA paper Daily World, the VVAW
demands were, "Immediate, unilateral, unconditional withdrawal of all
U.S. armed forces and Central Intelligence Agency personnel from
Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos and Thailand," plus "full amnesty" to all "war
resisters" and draft dodgers, and "withdrawal of all U.S. troops from
Latin America, Africa, Asia and elsewhere in the world."

Kerry was the star of the political theater that historic week, angry
that the law forbade political protests at veterans' graves in
Arlington National Cemetery and angrier that President Nixon enforced
the law and that the Supreme Court upheld it.

He led an illegal encampment of veterans and people who dressed as
veterans on the Mall in downtown Washington and used the services of
Ramsey Clark – a former Johnson administration attorney general who by
that time openly was supporting the enemy in Hanoi – to fight a
federal order to disperse.

According to the Daily World, which published a page-one photo of
Kerry passing Clark a note during the march, the protesters converged
on the White House chanting, "One, Two, Three, Four – We Don't Want
Your F- - - - - - War."

Kerry's establishment model was working where the home-baked
revolutionaries were failing. The activist bumped into William
Fulbright, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, at
a party and landed himself in the spotlight as a witness in a hearing
held the last day of the weeklong march.

There, he made his infamous exaggerated and untruthful allegations
that his fellow servicemen, not merely the commanders, deliberately
were committing widespread atrocities against innocent Vietnamese
civilians.

Afterward, he joined a dramatic political-theater display at the
Capitol steps, where hundreds of vets took a microphone and, one by
one, stated their name, identified their combat medals and flung them
over a police fence on the steps. Kerry renounced his Bronze Star, his
Silver Star and his three Purple Hearts. (Later, as a politician, he
would give ever-changing versions of the story.)

He seemed to want it both ways in the protest movement. While claiming
to "hate" the communists, he decried any attempt to marginalize them
within the movement. Once, when questioned about his political
alliance with supporters of the enemy, Kerry said that any attempts to
push out Hanoi supporters might result "in seriously dividing and
weakening the movement, and making it less effective."

That didn't sit well with some VVAW members beyond the Washington
Beltway. Back in Massachusetts, VVAW state coordinator Walker "Monty"
Montgomery, a Tennessee native, publicly differed with Kerry. The
Boston Herald-Traveler reported Montgomery "was considerably more
candid than Kerry about the problems posed by revolutionary communists
inside an antiwar organization."

"You can quote me," said Montgomery, "as one who believes that the
revolutionary communists in our organization are detrimental to the
organization."

Kerry had trouble discerning the line between legitimate dissent and
collaboration with the enemy. In the summer of 1971, he spoke at a
VVAW news conference in Washington, assailing President Nixon for not
accepting an enemy propaganda initiative – a Viet Cong statement in
Paris that Hanoi would guarantee the release of American prisoners of
war once the last U.S. troops left Vietnam.

Featuring a photo of Kerry in the July 24 Daily World, the Communist
Party USA said Kerry "asked President Nixon to accept [a] seven-point
peace proposal of Vietnamese patriots."

Kerry traveled the country that fall, trying to breathe new life into
a sagging college antiwar movement. The protest spirit was coming
alive, he said.

"It isn't withering," he told a reporter at Fort Hays State University
in Kansas. "The feeling is there. I do seriously believe there's
beginning to be a turning away from the tear-it-down mentality. The
movement is turning toward electoral politics again."

Covering his antiwar campaign, the National Observer reported at the
time, "He wants the Vietnam Veterans [Against the War] to move quickly
and strongly into grass-roots electoral politics."

He sought to organize like-minded veterans to become delegates at the
upcoming 1972 presidential conventions.

"Though the veterans are, for the record, nonpartisan," the Observer
said, "what this really means is whether the [George] McGovern
Commission reforms for the Democratic Convention are implemented and
enforced. Most antiwar veterans laugh at the idea of getting anything
started in the Republican Convention."

Yet for all his want of the spotlight, Kerry avoided public debates
with other veterans. On seven occasions, by July 1971, he had refused
to allow other veterans to challenge him publicly on television, even
when CBS and NBC offered to host formal debates. He relented only when
Dick Cavett, who had made him a national figure not long before,
agreed to terms Kerry found advantageous. Even then, with Kerry
holding all the advantages, Boston Globe political columnist David
Nyhan observed, his "scrappy little" opponent, John O'Neill, "was all
over Kerry like a terrier, keeping the star of the Foreign Relations
Committee hearings ... off balance."

Kerry couldn't hope to take over the political establishment without
the political organization skills, mobilization abilities and support
networks of those radical groups that supported the enemy against U.S.
troops. He needed to latch on to those in the establishment who funded
them.

The New York Times reported on a millionaire's gathering in East
Hampton, Long Island, in August 1971. Many of the attendees had
participated in "fund-raising affairs for the Black Panthers" and
other extremist causes. With fellow VVAW leader Al Hubbard, Kerry
sought a less radical position, but he showed parts of a full-length
film containing testimony of 125 alleged veterans who said they had
witnessed U.S. atrocities in Vietnam, "before a request for funds sent
everyone scrambling for pens and checkbooks."

As with Kerry's Senate testimony, which contained wild and
unsubstantiated allegations of deliberate U.S. atrocities throughout
the ranks, many of them disproved, the mission outweighed the truth.
His VVAW sidekick Hubbard identified himself as an Air Force captain,
a pilot, when in reality he was an ex-sergeant who had never served in
Vietnam.

Kerry was content to stand by VVAW's claims that it had 12,000 members
in 1971. Massachusetts VVAW coordinator Montgomery was more open about
the figures. He said that only 50 to 75 members in the entire state
were really active and that the official statewide membership of 1,500
Vietnam vets was just a "paper membership."

The angry young veteran's political ambition shone through his public
earnestness. The 1970 congressional race that had propelled him into
national politics also undercut his credibility, exacerbated by his
drive to run for office again. Many saw him as exploiting the war for
political gain.

"Angry wives of American prisoners of war [POWs] lashed out yesterday
at peace advocate John Kerry of Waltham, Mass., accusing him of using
the POW issue as a springboard to political office," the Associated
Press reported July 22, 1971. "One of the women accused Kerry of
'constantly using their own suffering and grief' for purely political
reasons."

Patricia Hardy of Los Angeles, whose husband had been killed in 1967,
told reporters, "I think he couldn't care less about these men or
these families."

Cathi and Janice Ray, whose stepbrother was a POW, accompanied her.
(Official records show only one U.S. serviceman named Hardy was killed
in the war, Marine Lance Cpl. Frank Earle Hardy, whose platoon was
ambushed in Quang Tri on May 29, 1967. His name appears on panel 21E,
row D14, of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington.)

The wife of Air Force Col. Arthur Mearns, a pilot missing since he was
shot down in 1966, protested Kerry with them. Her husband later was
declared killed in action. His name appears on panel 12E, row 055, of
the wall.

"Mr. Kerry, when asked if he planned to run again for political
office, said only that he was committed to political change and that
he would use whatever forum seemed best at the time," according to AP.
"He did not rule out mounting another political campaign."

At the time, "I was totally consumed with the notion of going to
Congress," Kerry later told the Washington Post. AP hinted that Kerry
already held presidential ambitions. A Boston newspaper agreed: "The
gentle cloak of idealism and dignity which Kerry had worn during his
televised testimony in Washington now appeared to be stitched together
with threads of personal ambition and political expediency. Was this
to be the payoff for one of the finest and most moving chapters of the
counterculture antiwar movement? Just another slick Ivy League
phrasemaker ego-freak political hustler with a hunger to see his name
on campaign posters and his face on national television?"

By 1972, Massachusetts' third congressional seat was firmly held by
radical Robert Drinan. Kerry, now 28, left Waltham and bought a house
in Worcester, anticipating a run for Congress from the 4th District.
But when President Nixon picked the congressman representing the 5th
District for an ambassador's post, Kerry leased out his house and
moved to the dying old mill city of Lowell to run for the
soon-to-be-vacated seat there. The Boston Phoenix, an alternative
newspaper whose reporter traveled with Kerry on the 1972 campaign,
profiled the candidate in a story headlined, "Cruising with a
Carpetbagger."

"Kerry, media superstar, suddenly found himself having to deny that he
had political plans lest he be accused of ripping off the veterans by
using them as a bow for the arrow of his ambition," the Phoenix
reported. "John Kerry is burning with desire to be a congressman, but
he has to keep paying off that loan from the Vietnam Veterans [VVAW]
by seeming to be cool and indifferent to personal gain, and this
underlying dilemma produces an uncomfortable tension around him."

The candidate had trouble balancing himself between Kerry the patriot
and Kerry the minion of Hanoi's agitprop apparatus. He tried to
distance himself from his brand-new book, The New Soldier. According
to a major newspaper in the district, the Lowell Sun, the book cover
"carried a picture of three or four bearded youths of the hippie type
carrying the American flag in a photo resembling remarkably the
immortal photo by Associated Press photographer Joe Rosenthal of U.S.
Marines raising the flag on Iwo Jima after its capture from the
Japanese during World War II. The big difference between the two
pictures, however, is that the photo on John Kerry's book shows the
flag being carried upside down in a gesture of contempt."

The book was hard to come by at the time, according to the newspaper,
but a rival in the Democratic primary found one in Greenwich Village
and tried to publish the cover as an advertisement in the Sun. Kerry
tried to cover it up.

"Things began to get hot as the old pressure went on to prevent
publication of the advertisement showing the cover of the book," the
Sun's editors wrote on Oct. 18, 1972. "Permission from the publisher
of the book, Macmillan Co. of New York, to reproduce the cover,
granted by Macmillan in a telegram on the day publication of the ad
was scheduled, was quickly withdrawn hours later by Macmillan with the
explanation that the approval of the author, John Kerry, would be
required before the cover could be reproduced in a political
advertisement. So that killed the ad."

Kerry said it wasn't he who blocked publication. According to the Sun,
"Subsequently, efforts were made to obtain Mr. Kerry's okay to
reproduce the famous book cover, but Mr. Kerry now says he doesn't
have the right to give this permission because the copyright on the
book cover belongs to a coeditor of the book, one George Butler." The
Sun couldn't locate Butler.

When the book had come out the year before, Macmillan sent a review
copy to Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., requesting an endorsement. Byrd
wrote back, "I say most respectfully to you, I threw it in the
wastebasket after leafing through it."

Having lost the primary in humiliation – his brother had been caught
trying to wiretap an opponent's office – Kerry went to Boston College
Law School. Later, he was appointed assistant district attorney, then
was elected lieutenant governor under Mike Dukakis in 1982.

Two years later, he ran for the U.S. Senate – dusting off his
veteran's credentials by standing in front of the black Vietnam
Veterans Memorial in Washington to shoot a TV campaign ad, defying
regulations that the memorial not be used for political purposes.

The ad "was filmed illegally against the wishes of the National Park
Service," according to the Boston Globe. Kerry authorized its
broadcast anyway.

Kerry's campaign only stirred up long-smoldering embers from the war.
Retired Maj. Gen. George S. Patton III, who had commanded combat
troops in Vietnam, said that, medals or no medals, by the nature of
his wartime protests Kerry gave "aid and comfort to the enemy" in the
style of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda.

"Mr. Kerry probably caused some of my guys to get killed," Patton
said, even as he self-deprecatingly acknowledged shortcomings of his
own as a commander. "And I don't like that. There is no soap ever
invented that can wash that blood off his hands."

Responding to controversy over his remarks, Patton wrote in the
Worcester Evening Gazette, "The dissent against our efforts in that
unhappy war, as exemplified by Mr. Kerry, and of course others, made
the soldier's duties even more difficult. ... These incidents caused
our opponent, already highly motivated, to fight harder against us and
our Vietnamese allies. Hence the comment made by me which included the
provision of 'aid and comfort to the enemy' by Mr. Kerry."

Under relentless attack from the pro-Kerry Boston press, Patton
received strong veteran support. Robert Hagopian, past commander of
the Massachusetts division of the Disabled American Veterans, spoke
for many about the general's views, telling reporters, "I agree with
everything he said."

The Lowell Sun ran a cartoon of Kerry trying fruitlessly to wash his
blood-covered hands. An accompanying editorial said, "During his
antiwar years, John Kerry was about the closest thing to a male Jane
Fonda in the U.S. anybody could find – and Ms. Fonda came as close to
treason to her country as anybody ever could without being convicted
of it."

To no avail. Massachusetts voters elected Kerry that year to join Ted
Kennedy in the United States Senate.



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