by John Kerry
I thought back to my father’s anger over his father’s absence, his sister’s polio and, later, her cancer. I didn’t want to let my bitterness linger the way his had. But still, I was haunted by the killing I’d seen, and the losses I’d experienced had unsettled my own faith. When I came home from Vietnam, I lived with gratitude that every day was extra. I was thankful for surviving, but all the words about God’s will working in strange ways fell on deaf ears for me. Instead, I channeled my energy into service and activism and left much unreconciled about the foundations of my beliefs. I wanted my daughters raised Catholic because I was Catholic; but if they had asked me, I would have struggled to share with them much more than that. I hadn’t found satisfactory resolution to the biggest questions about what my faith really meant beyond the power of the sacraments and the comfort of the rituals.
The prayer breakfast implicitly pushed me to work through those unresolved questions. No one asked me to do it, but the weekly hold on my calendar was a reminder in itself. With Chaplain Halverson’s suggestions and my own memory of Sacred Studies at St. Paul’s, I began to read or reread Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, Billy Graham, St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on just and unjust war, and Pope John XXIII’s Mater et Magistra and Pacem in Terris. I started listening more carefully to the personal journeys of different senators and how they might inform my own.
That’s when I met and became friendly with a lay minister named Doug Coe. Doug was an evangelical Christian, not a Catholic, and his work was focused on the life of Jesus. He was a counselor to many of the Senate chaplains, which is how I was introduced to him, and he led the nonpartisan National Prayer Breakfast. Doug was close to sixty years old, and a group he led, the Fellowship, had long brought together policy makers and faith leaders in Washington. Because Doug had little appetite for publicity, some conspiracy theories easily attached themselves to his ministry and to the Cedars, an old mansion in Arlington that the Fellowship maintained for prayer groups and sometimes even off-the-grid diplomacy.
I was struck by Doug’s quiet, thoughtful presence. We shared a common belief that many organized religions spent far too much time and energy chewing over the interpretations of one faith or another, when the real essence of faith was the life and teachings of Jesus. Doug understood that Jesus’s ministry of just three years, culminating with his death on the cross, was the central teaching and meaning of Christianity. He started sending me articles and excerpts from Scripture to supplement what I was reading on my own.
The hardest and highest barrier for me to get over in reconciling my faith with my experiences remained the issue of human suffering. The shorthand about “God’s plan” didn’t sit well with me. If I watched a day of college football and listened to the postgame interviews, I heard again and again that God had a “plan” to help certain quarterbacks win upset victories. By the time the evening news rolled around, was I supposed to believe that God had no plan for kids starving in Ethiopia, children suffering with distended bellies, covered in flies? Or worse, was this God’s will? Sometimes in our rush to have God take sides in trivial things, we miss entirely the places where God might really be seen, or the reasons we might not see Him present at all. In my mind’s eye, I came back again and again to the faces of Persh and Don Droz, and I just refused to see God’s hand in their deaths.
What brought me a certain kind of peace about my faith finally arrived after reading and rereading, underlining entire paragraphs and scribbling notes in the margins of Pope John Paul II’s Apostolic Letter, which helps the faithful understand the concept of “salvific suffering.” It spoke to me, reminding me of the words of St. Paul, which I had heard so many times in catechism: “In my flesh I complete what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions for the sake of his Body, that is, the Church.” John Paul II was remarkable: the pontiff had stood up to the Soviet Union, embraced children everywhere, survived a would-be assassin’s bullet and forgave the unstable shooter who had caused him so much suffering. In his letter to the faithful, Salvifici Doloris—the meaning of Christian suffering—written just three years after he was shot four times; his words brought clarity to issues that had caused me abundant confusion. Evil in the world was the cause of suffering, not God’s will. Evil was why innocents suffered, why people who desperately wanted children couldn’t have them, why there was illness and famine here on earth. His Holiness pointed to the Old Testament, where Job’s suffering was God’s punishment, and he contrasted that with the New Testament, where God didn’t save his only son from suffering but gave him eternal life to end the suffering, all in return for Jesus overcoming his doubts and putting his faith in the Father.
After multiple readings, it made a certain kind of sense. Something clicked in a way that hadn’t before. God didn’t make us suffer. Evil was what had taken Dick and Don. God hadn’t fired those rocket launchers into pilothouses on the Mekong Delta, and God wasn’t directing Tet when rocket fire stopped twenty-four-year-old Lieutenant Dick Pershing from searching for a fallen comrade. However, God had been there to bring Dick and Don home, to “deliver them from evil,” to bring their suffering to an end, as He had for His only son, whom He had given to the flesh.
I did pause and ask myself, If my daughters were suffering, could I be so understanding? Could I still imagine that in suffering there is the gift of being closer to Christ, who suffered on that cross? I hoped I’d never be tested in that way.
But at least now I had an intellectual, spiritual course correction: suffering brought us closer to understanding what Jesus himself endured on the cross, how extraordinary it was that even as he was slowly tortured to death, he prayed for his captors. Evil was all around us and it brought suffering, but rather than inflict it, God relieved suffering through eternal life, the mystery of which was the basis of faith itself.
I was ready to speak up at the Senate Prayer Breakfast. I brought my notes of writing and reflection and talked not about my certainty, but about my doubts, and about how I’d drawn closer to an understanding of something unknowable than I’d ever thought possible. I talked about my journey, one more meaningful to me because the path had been anything but straight.
Afterward, Alaska’s sometimes acerbic senator Ted Stevens, a Republican who wore Incredible Hulk neckties as an inside joke about his own volcanic temper, came up to me in the hallway. He’d been in the Senate since 1968, a champion of Arctic drilling, which Paul Tsongas and I had both vehemently opposed. Stevens and I were on different ends of the ideological spectrum. He touched my elbow and told me about his journey. He and his wife, Ann, had five children and lives filled with joy. But just ten years after he came to the Senate, it was all turned upside down. They were in a plane crash, and Ann suffered and died right there next to him. There was nothing he could do. He had spent years asking why God would have done this or let this happen. He told me he wished that someone had shared with him then what I had just talked about at breakfast.
I was speechless.
Ted Stevens, a private, buttoned-down older man who embodied Greatest Generation stoicism, had just opened up in ways I couldn’t have imagined doing with a near stranger. “Thank you,” he said, tapping me on the shoulder again and disappearing down the hall.
It was one of those moments I never would have predicted when I came to the Senate, or when I reluctantly came to my first prayer breakfast, but it was a lesson about life that stuck: to find the truth in people, sometimes you had to open up to the truth inside yourself. I never looked at Ted Stevens in the same way after that day. No matter which side of a debate we’d be on—and frequently it was the opposite side—because of the common ground we’d found together that morning, Ted was no longer just one of the Republican senators. He was a friend. My eyes saw a human being who loved and suffered, searched for meaning and was willing to share it. That’s a gift the Senate made possible, the gift of an unlikely moment with an unlikely friend.
I was beginning to feel more comfortable with my personal exploration
of faith. But I was still wrestling. I was still looking for rational, linear answers to all my questions, questions asked for centuries. It was one thing for the actions of people to be cast as the struggle between good and evil. But where was God’s hand in a tsunami in Japan or a volcanic eruption in Hawaii? How could those horrors occur if a benevolent God was both omniscient and omnipotent? It was a debate between my mind and my heart—and everything in between. I kept looking for the rational exposé of truth when this truth wasn’t rational at all. That’s why we call it “a leap of faith.”
A couple of years later, I awoke from a vivid dream. It wasn’t like the nightmares that could still awaken me back then—my heart pounding, adrenaline coursing through my body, back on the rivers of the Mekong Delta. It was the opposite of that. I awoke feeling profound emotion and calm.
In the dream, I was walking in the mountains with a priest, listening to him. I knew him well, although I couldn’t figure out exactly who he was. He told me he was going to die. He had terminal cancer and only months to live, so he was putting his affairs in order.
I was completely undone. I couldn’t bear the thought of saying goodbye to this friend, and I couldn’t see the justice in this young man of God dying when he had so much to share with all of us, when he had given his life to God already. Where was the righteousness or common sense in that? I said to him, “How can God do this when you have so much more to give to all of us, to share and teach? This is so unfair.”
With amazing grace, and a calm acceptance in his voice, he turned to me and reassuringly said, “No, that is not the way to understand this. By accepting God’s design for me, by using this moment to share with you and my friends the faith I have in Him, I am teaching you and leaving you far more than I could in any other way. I accept this because I believe, and believing is my strength.”
“It’s hard to have faith in God when God is taking you from us,” I said.
“No, it’s precisely why you should have faith. My suffering opens the door for me to understand God’s will and share in the suffering of others, which is the greatest manifestation of love there is. This moment between us could not happen without my dying. That is His gift and, through me, my gift to you. Faith!”
From that moment forward I was clear: Faith is putting yourself totally into God’s hands without waiting for evidence sufficient to convince you. Faith is believing not because of a completely rational line of thought, or presuming to know God’s will in this life, but because your heart and your whole self—your being—is comfortable and contented believing. That revelation forever changed my relationship with my faith.
So many books have been written about why God would allow so much evil in a world He had total control over. None of them provides a completely convincing answer. The only answer in the end is faith.
• • •
I STARTED TO find my footing in the Senate working in the areas where Ted Kennedy’s presence was less outsized, places where a good idea and patience—rather than seniority—might make the difference. Foreign policy was a logical place to start, and it mattered to me. My father sparked my interest in foreign policy, and his life in the Foreign Service had been my first window into a world shaped largely by the United States. Now that I was in the Senate, Pa still loomed large—including by occasionally sending faxes to my office, written in all caps, warning of the tendency of some policy makers to see the world almost entirely through the lens of our own policies and our own interests, casting aside the history of other peoples. Pa’s instruction that you had to study the other side if you were going to make good foreign policy had an impact on me. Inside the Senate, I was from a generation in a hurry, a generation disinclined to wait on protocol and tradition before speaking up, but overseas I wanted to listen and learn before I jumped to conclusions. As in so many chapters of my life, another branch of my family history had a funny way of colliding with the present. My grandfather’s cousin William Cameron Forbes had served a tour of duty as a diplomat. President Teddy Roosevelt had sent him to serve in the Philippines before he was even thirty-five. President Taft appointed him governor-general of the colony, and years later another Republican president—Harding—sent him back to the Philippines to help the United States decide whether the time had come for independence. When Cousin Cam, as we called him, first boarded a steamer for Asia, not long after the United States was handed the Philippines among the spoils of the Spanish-American War, I’m sure he couldn’t have imagined a more exciting destination than Manila.
When I met Cousin Cam as a kid, he was getting on in years, and struck this young kid as a little serious and formal. I was impressed that he had traveled the world and lived in the Philippines. But what I most remember was a photo of him—much younger, but only slightly less bald—alongside Teddy Roosevelt, with TR’s unmistakable bushy mustache much more memorable than my cousin. I was captivated by his tokens and trophies of service in a far-away place: he’d come home from the Philippines with a seemingly endless supply of beautiful mahogany wood baskets and cabinets, mottled, beeswing, and curly. Some found their way into the homes of family. We grew up with these exotic artifacts, and I would say to myself, “Wow, what an amazing place that must be. I want to go there someday.”
Cousin Cam died just shy of ninety and just a couple of weeks after I turned sixteen. He was a sepia-colored memory by the time it was my turn to go to Asia eight years later.
I wish I’d been old enough to ask Cousin Cam about that history back when I had the chance. Although his views weren’t as retrograde as the imperial-minded senators of his day, like Albert Beveridge, who saw the Filipinos as a lesser people permanently incapable of self-government, or President Roosevelt’s secretary of state, Elihu Root, who described them as “children,” Cousin Cam had helped cement these paternalistic attitudes. In 1921, the commission Warren Harding appointed him to lead determined the people of the Philippines were not ready for what they’d fought for against the Spanish and what they demanded under the United States: a democracy to call their own.
Sixty years later, not enough had changed. President Truman finally granted the island its independence on the auspicious date of July 4, 1946. But the Filipino people were hardly living out the benefits of democracy or freedom. President Ferdinand Marcos was a brutal but reliable Cold War ally—a strongman who had run the country for twenty years before I showed up in the Senate. Most of that time Marcos ruled under martial law. As was the case with Suharto in Indonesia and the revolving door of governments in South Vietnam, we tolerated a long litany of abuses that violated our ideals and hurt our credibility. Marcos was a central-casting tinhorn strongman. Incredible amounts of money, much of it siphoned off from American aid, lined his pockets while the country suffered in poverty. He was constantly held up by the human rights community as an exemplar of thugs wrongly supported in the name of Cold War realpolitik.
I doubt the human rights activists in Massachusetts had ever heard of my distant cousin Cameron. They just knew me as their new senator on the Foreign Relations Committee, and figured I might be sympathetic about the betrayal of American ideals under Marcos. Cory Aquino, the opposition leader in the Philippines whose husband, Benigno “Ninoy” Aquino, had been assassinated by Marcos for speaking out, had spent years living in exile in Newton, Massachusetts, so there was a beachhead of anti-Marcos activism back home. I was horrified by the photos the activists shared with me of dead bodies stacked like cordwood, victims of torture in Marcos’s police state, and stories of a free press silenced from reporting on a regime enriching itself while children suffered from malnutrition. The flashbacks to the South Vietnamese government were unmistakable: Marcos seemed at best like a cagier, savvier version of Ngo Dinh Diem. How could we export and encourage democracy around the world and urge it as an alternative to the Soviets when we looked the other way in a place like the Philippines?
I decided that my first trip to Asia as a member of the Foreign Relations Committee would be t
o the Philippines, to determine whether Marcos would change his behavior if he at least knew that Congress was watching.
I was determined to approach the trip armed with facts and with an open, if skeptical, mind. I didn’t want to rely merely on the reports from the human rights community. I wanted State Department briefings, intel community briefings, and even though I had been critical of Reagan policy in my campaign, Secretary of State George Shultz was always responsive to the Senate. He arranged a long phone call for me with our ambassador to Manila, Steve Bosworth. Bosworth was a terrific briefer. I asked him rapid-fire questions, and he pulled no punches. Was Marcos as brutal as the human rights community described? The answer was, more or less, yes. Was Marcos as corrupt as rumored? Certainly he lived a lifestyle beyond any other explanation, but, no, the administration didn’t have a smoking gun, and over the years there were arrangements with the CIA that had feathered Marcos’s nest. He warned me that I might want to be careful going down that rabbit hole. How would Marcos defend his hesitancy to hold elections? He’d describe all the opposition as communist revolutionaries doing the bidding of the Soviet Union. Were they communist? For the most part, no. Were they pro-American? For the most part, yes.
It would take about twenty hours to fly from Dulles International Airport to Manila. I couldn’t help but think of the incongruity of leaving an airport named after John Foster Dulles, father of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization that hardened Cold War alliances in the region, even if it meant looking the other way on democracy. Dulles, along with his brother, Allen, who was CIA director in that same era, had reversed the revolution in Iran and reinstalled the shah and toppled a democratically elected government in Guatemala. And here I was: forty-two, having been part of the tip of the spear in the failed extension of that philosophy in Vietnam, now an elected senator off to the Philippines to tangle with exactly the kind of autocrat whom Dulles would have found quite useful. History is funny that way: I was taking my trip by air, but it was Cousin Cam who had taken the trip by ship and who would have likely found a soul mate in Dulles, though I know his conscience would have never tolerated Marcos.
