by John Kerry
I swallowed hard. I looked at her. Weld’s debating ploy was obvious, but the mother’s pain was real. She had suffered. I thought of Alex and Vanessa. I flashed on the phone calls I’d made to the families of fallen police officers and firefighters killed in the line of duty, the pain I’d heard in so many voices, the children left behind, the funerals I’d gone to, the wail of bagpipes.
Then I answered the only way I knew how. It wasn’t something I’d learned at Yale in hours of debate competition or on the Senate floor. Bill Weld was just a few feet away from me, but for a moment it was just me, alone with a mother who had lost her child violently, inexplicably. Her longing for retribution was justified. The room was silent. Her son’s killer’s life wasn’t worth more, it wasn’t worth anything, I said to her. The killer was scum who should be sent to prison for the rest of his life. But I wasn’t going to lie to her, and I wasn’t going to duck the issue at hand. Weld was right about one thing: she deserved an honest answer. I continued: “The fact is, yes, I’ve been opposed to the death penalty. I know something about killing. I don’t like killing. I don’t think a state honors life by turning around and sanctioning killing.”
I hadn’t planned it that way. None of the academic studies I’d seen on the futility of the death penalty as deterrent was remotely relevant to the pain of a deceased police officer’s mother. All I could tell her was what I felt deeply: I’d seen killing up close in ways that I could never forget, and nothing in that searing experience told me that’s who we wanted to become as a society.
Weld wouldn’t repeat a question like that one again. He’d opened up my voting record to scrutiny, but in so doing, he’d also forced me to open up a part of myself that I didn’t share lightly or easily.
My experience in war wound up playing a more significant role in the campaign than I ever would have imagined, and this time I don’t think it was Weld’s doing, but the strange and unexpected intervention of one unlikely columnist at the paper of record in Massachusetts, the Boston Globe.
Nine days out from Election Day, a column appeared in the Globe by a business columnist, David Warsh, speculating whether, rather than having been properly awarded the Silver Star in 1969, I was actually a war criminal who had shot and killed a defenseless, wounded Viet Cong out of view of everyone else who had been ambushed that day.
I remember picking up my morning stack of newspapers off the front stoop and bringing them up to my kitchen table, where I’d take notes on a long legal pad, make phone calls and get ready for the day. I made it through the Globe and was preparing to push myself through the daily ritual of reading the conservative tabloid Boston Herald, to learn the Weld campaign’s version of the day. Then the phone rang.
“Senator, have you seen the Globe?” It was Michael Meehan, my communications director. Michael had been with me since he was a college intern, a big Irish guy with an even bigger handshake and a love of hockey that rivaled my own.
“Yeah, I read the Globe, Mikey,” I said.
There was a long pause on the speakerphone.
“The Warsh column is a problem,” he said.
Warsh? I’d read the columnists. Tom Oliphant had a good piece on the campaign. I opened the op-ed page again. Nothing by Warsh.
“In the business section,” said Michael.
I flipped through the newspaper. I wondered how a finance and business columnist buried in the back section of the newspaper could be creating a problem for us. Michael must have been overreacting, but something in his tone sounded uneasy.
I found the column, and my blood pressure began to rise.
Warsh had taken out of context some comments by the forward gunner on PCF-94 who had been closest to me in the decades after Vietnam, Tommy Belodeau of Chelmsford. Tommy mentioned that he had shot the Viet Cong guerrilla who had ambushed us before I had pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him.
To this day, I’m not sure whether Warsh, who had covered the war after graduating from Harvard, was trying to start a political fight or whether he just wanted to speculate on the fog of war.
I knew his reputation was that of a conservative at the Globe and that he had graduated in Bill Weld’s class at Harvard. But the accusation he printed wasn’t something I could swallow regardless of background or credential: he speculated, in print, whether, out of sight of my crewmates, I’d actually committed a war crime, a coup de grâce. He dared to ask whether I had shot in the back a defenseless, mortally wounded Viet Cong, not a dangerous soldier with a live B-40 rocket launcher who was running to regroup and could have killed us all with one pull of the trigger.
“What happened behind the hootch?” Warsh asked his readers.
I was apoplectic. Tommy Belodeau was beside himself. Tommy had been there for me through it all. He was a proud, quiet, loyal friend who had worked hard to put the war behind him. Tommy was shy, particularly about his days in Vietnam. He couldn’t believe that one of the few times he’d ever talked to a reporter had resulted in his words being turned into a political weapon.
“I’m starting to get a lot of calls about this,” said Michael Meehan.
It was stunning that at the eleventh hour of the campaign, an event from twenty-seven years ago was being distorted so casually, a bolt from the blue.
I was confused. Globe staffers had spent hours upon hours writing carefully researched profiles of me and Weld. They’d asked us for military records, which we had provided in a responsive way, and yet a business columnist who wasn’t covering the campaign was suddenly allowed to speculate in print that I might be a war criminal. It was beyond irresponsible, let alone inflammatory.
I didn’t care about the campaign schedule—I wanted a press conference scheduled right away to respond to this smear, and I was calling in reinforcements. Tommy Vallely understood that this was a character test. I called Admiral Elmo Zumwalt and faxed him the column from the newspaper. He was outraged.
Admiral Zumwalt was loyal to the men who served under him, but he was also loyal to a bigger institution: He believed in the Navy. He believed that the Navy’s decisions had to mean something and had to transcend politics or party labels. He believed that all those who served deserved to have the truth known about their service.
Zumwalt was bringing the firepower of his chain of command to Massachusetts.
The very next day, there we all were, assembled together at the Charleston Navy Yard, the place where USS Constitution stands as a reminder of our country’s naval origins. Zumwalt brought with him Captain George Elliott, my commanding officer, and Commander Adrian Lonsdale (ret.), who had overseen shoreline operations.
Tommy Belodeau spoke, and my crewmates from PCF-94, from around the country, joined in person or by telephone. Their testimony was unimpeachable. Tommy Belodeau said it best: “This man was not lying on the ground. He was more than capable of destroying that boat and everybody on it.” Captain Elliott took to the microphone and defended my taking the initiative in combat. He understood what it meant. He said, “The fact that he chased armed enemies down is not something to be looked down upon.” His words brought back those life-or-death, flee-or-fight instinctual decisions that you can understand only if you’ve been there. Admiral Zumwalt could not have been clearer: “It is a disgrace to the United States Navy that there’s any inference that the process was anything other than totally honest.” He even surprised all of us when he announced that day that he had wanted to award me the Navy Cross for my actions but awarded me the Silver Star because it could happen on a more expedited basis.
I felt vindicated. Truth can be the first casualty of political campaigns. Truth carried the day, and it was the men I’d served under and those I’d served beside who made it clear that facts were facts, twenty-seven years before and in 1996. If only politics had never gotten in the way. If only Admiral Zumwalt had lived to be there in 2004.
Within a week, Warsh expressed regret for the language he used.
I was angry that the column had found its
way into the Globe. For the time being, however, the vile lies were effectively debunked.
A week and one final, rip-roaring debate later, Election Day finally arrived. The results were clear by nine o’clock that night: I won reelection by 8 percentage points.
It had been a long slog. Weld was an uncommonly talented politician. In the process, I’d learned a lot about myself as a public person.
I’d been reminded that politics is personal and that I had to fight to connect my work to the people I worked for, but that when I did, politics is still the process by which average people get to have their say.
But I also learned that my own compass was pretty damn good. Bill Weld was as smart as they come. I was happy though that when I’d been tested in the campaign on a human level, I’d done just fine. In Massachusetts, even in the company of legends like Ted Kennedy and Billy Bulger, I had my own brand of politics, and I was comfortable in my own skin.
On election night, after my victory speech, I invited the men I had served with in Vietnam over to my house. We stayed up till 3:00 a.m., reliving various moments from our time together in the brown-water Navy and the decades since. There was laughter, and some misty-eyed moments remembering Don Droz and those others who hadn’t made it home.
Some of my crew had met with struggle after they’d come home. Drugs, alcohol, a hard time finding a job, wives or girlfriends who couldn’t relate to what the men had seen in Vietnam. Every line in their faces had been earned the hard way. Others had just gone quietly home to the field or the factory and started life over, lucky to be alive. I’d had my own journey. But how incredible, what a rare moment, that politics—which had long divided America—brought us all back together twenty-seven years later. I was so lucky to have the chance to say to each of them, “Thank you.” Thank God we’d kept each other alive when it could have gone the other way.
The campaign focused my mind in a way I hadn’t felt in months, if not years.
In the morning, when I woke up, Michael Meehan brought me the New York Times and some of the other stories from around the country. The coverage made clear that between me and Bill Weld, whoever won was having his ticket punched for a national stage in 2000. “I don’t want to hear it,” I said. “Today we’re driving to Worcester and Springfield to thank the people who just reelected me.”
A few nights later, Bill Weld and I met for a beer at McGann’s in the North End to mark the end of a tough, hard-fought election.
As I raised a glass in my opponent’s honor, I remembered how, when it became clear that he would challenge me that year, so much was made of our similar backgrounds: the prep schools, the Ivy League degrees, the experience we had as former prosecutors. The campaign had brought out our differences, but in the best way. It was never personal between us. I owed him. Having a competitor like Weld taught me as much about politics as anyone ever had.
We hugged, and off we went into the night, home again.
Months later, with some wise advocacy from the First Lady of the United States (she and Weld had worked together under the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate scandal) and with some quiet assurances from me and Teddy, President Clinton appointed Weld as ambassador to Mexico. His own party in the Senate derailed his nomination and sent such a promising career into an unpredictable direction. Weld had resigned as governor to fight for his nomination, then left Massachusetts for New York and tried to run for governor there. It was a strange twist for a career that had held such promise and for such a colorful, capable character the likes of which I haven’t seen since. For me, I had promises to keep and work to do in the Senate—and soon the politics there as well would pass through the looking glass into a strange world.
• • •
THE YEARS FOLLOWING my reelection to the Senate in 1996 were filled with stark reminders of the breakdown of American politics. No sector of public life seemed spared.
I had returned to the Senate from the ’96 campaign energized. The race against Weld forced me to concentrate on many things. I synthesized my thinking. I minimized my legislative-ese. I was more focused on the fight. I came back determined to apply the important lessons of the campaign trail to my work in the Senate.
During the campaign, I spent a lot of time in the state with mayors and kids in youth centers and schools. I also spent a lot of time with graduates of YouthBuild. These visits reminded me of the spectacular job so many local programs were doing to give at-risk children the opportunity for a life of hope. Some were run by churches, others by public-private partnerships. The mayors depended on them. They were desperate for support to replicate the successes and meet the demand.
Teresa had long been a primary mover behind early child interventions like these across Allegheny County and Pittsburgh. We talked often about the incredible promise she was seeing in those efforts. We traded newspaper articles, and Teresa in particular, ever the daughter of a doctor with an interest in science and medicine, got me hooked on learning more about the science of brain development. It was jarring to read study after study that documented the difference in brain development when babies and small children are read to and nurtured versus the consequences of never having those things in their lives. The disadvantages of neglect were staggering and depressing. I didn’t care whether the answers were labeled liberal or conservative, I just wanted to know that we were reaching more kids with greater impact before we lost a generation to neglect.
An idea began to crystallize in my mind: Why not, without creating any new federal bureaucracy, use some federal dollars for grants to local organizations with proven track records? I could envision a grand bargain where Democrats got the money needed to bolster early childhood efforts, as well as after-school initiatives, but Republicans won their cherished local control, and money could flow to institutions both sides trusted to get the job done.
Everyone could find something to buy into: money could flow to secular groups like YouthBuild or to local churches, which often provided schooling and childcare, to open their doors earlier and stay open later. In many cases faith-based groups were the most effective deliverers of services. Those services had nothing to do with proselytizing. They had everything to do with humanitarian initiatives. We needed to harness that energy for our kids and our country.
I started working with my Republican colleague Kit Bond from Missouri on legislation. The Senate, I thought, was created for partnerships that break the partisan mold. A Democrat and a Republican working together for children seemed like something that could find its way into law.
But soon I had the feeling Kit and I were in the right place at exactly the wrong time. Democrats were still in the minority, and the center of gravity for policy was still the Clinton White House. I thought that perhaps after the partisanship of the last years, perhaps there would be a new window to get the country’s business done again. But from the minute Clinton was elected president, the Republicans wanted to delegitimize his presidency. They spent most of his first term doing so. Now that Clinton was the first Democrat reelected to the presidency since Franklin Roosevelt, I hoped the witch hunts and obstruction might give way to regular order and collaboration.
But that wasn’t meant to be. It was the last Congress for people like John Glenn, who embodied a Greatest Generation spirit of possibility. I was troubled that, by and large, when big people left, smaller figures seemed to replace them. Senator Howell Heflin retired and was replaced by Senator Jeff Sessions, a hard-edge Republican with a chip on his shoulder because in the 1980s he’d been denied a judgeship over his civil rights record. Sessions didn’t work with Democrats.
David Boren of Oklahoma—thoughtful, centrist, an expert on national security—retired and was replaced by Jim Inhofe, a climate-change denier.
One of my mentors, Fritz Hollings of South Carolina, had privately decided that if he were reelected in 1998, this would be his last term as well. Wendell Ford of Kentucky was retiring.
We were losing people willing to use
the rules of the Senate to deliberate and legislate and replacing them with people who wanted to posture and pontificate. The Senate was starting to feel more and more like the House: a daily shouting match, theater. Not collaboration. Certainly not the “world’s greatest deliberative body.”
Bipartisan partnerships were still forged—besides working with Kit Bond, I was also working across the aisle on education reform with a new Republican senator, Gordon Smith of Oregon—but the institution didn’t respond the way it once had.
Instead, loud, coarse rhetoric, conducted in the style of cable news, became the dominant new presence in Washington. But the worst was still to come—much worse.
January 17, 1998.
I was at home in Boston working on a speech to be delivered in a Roxbury church on Martin Luther King Day. I planned to talk about children and education as the new battle in the civil rights movement. The phone rang. It was my communications director, Jim Jones.
“You need to know because you might be asked by reporters: the Drudge Report says that Ken Starr’s investigating Clinton having an affair with an intern.”
“The Drudge Report? What the hell is that?”
“It’s this guy who posts stuff, news articles and gossip.”
If I sounded puzzled, it’s because I was. “He’s a reporter?” I asked.
“Not exactly. No. He’s just a guy who posts stuff on the internet.”
How did “a guy” with his own website know what Ken Starr was or wasn’t investigating—before Congress knew?
I turned on CNN. The speculation was everywhere. Television reporters seemed to be trying just as hopelessly as my aide to explain what the Drudge Report was and what this alleged scoop meant.
I wasn’t a stranger to the tabloidization of public life. In the Senate over my first twelve years, I’d seen a change in the media. Foreign bureaus were shut down first because of costs, then the number of news bureaus in Washington started to shrink. Cable news was transforming news cycles from daily to hourly, changing the definition of deadlines for reporters and creating a rush to be first to report a story. Then cable news entities started to fill the day with opinion programming, televised partisan bickering, beginning with CNN’s Crossfire, a far cry from the long-debate format I’d first encountered jousting with William F. Buckley on Firing Line in 1970. It created a swirl of noise where news and opinion bled into each other.
