by John Kerry
The private reaction among many in the Church, including many of his fellow bishops, was that Burke was out of bounds, inviting a dangerous politicization of the tabernacle. The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops issued statements that individual bishops could tend to their flocks, a subtle but clear message: it meant Burke spoke for himself, not for the Church and not for the Vatican. Regrettably, like most retractions in newspapers, the position of the bishops did not get broad dissemination.
The Church has its own way of sending messages about politics, and in an election year, the bishops produce a voting guide for the faithful. In 2004, the voting guide was based on ten questions for every Catholic voter to wrestle with, ranging from how, after September 11, we might build “not only a safer world, but a better world,” to how we might best “protect the weakest in our midst—innocent unborn children,” to “how we can keep our nation from turning to violence to solve some of its most difficult problems—abortion to deal with difficult pregnancies; the death penalty to combat crime; euthanasia and assisted suicide to deal with the burdens of age, illness, and disability; and war to address international disputes.” The list went on identifying challenges that struck deeply at convictions of Catholic faith: children dying of hunger, inequality in America, access to health care, the environment, nuclear nonproliferation and peace.
I know my position on a few of these issues differed from that of the Church. I’d long wrestled with the issue of abortion. I wasn’t alone. Fellow Catholic senators—Dick Durbin, Joe Biden, Barbara Mikulski, Chris Dodd—also grappled with these issues to try to reconcile their views about life and the articles of our faith with the fact that we didn’t just represent our fellow Catholics. These weren’t easy matters. I would flash back to a conversation I once had with an archbishop about abortion. I shared with him the difficulty of legislating in a Senate of one hundred different opinions, representing fifty different states and myriad Americans of different beliefs and convictions, keeping in mind the role of the courts, the fact that individual senators don’t control what comes to the floor or which amendments they must vote on, and the ability of special interest groups on both sides to keep us polarized. I also pointed out that while I am allowed in public life to have personal beliefs as a matter of faith, and I can advocate for them, I can’t impose an article of faith on someone who doesn’t believe what I do, who doesn’t share a similar article of faith.
“The Church can take a position,” I recall saying to the archbishop, “but we have to vote on a policy. That’s a very different thing.” He didn’t disagree. I think that’s why the voting guide from the Conference of Bishops implicitly acknowledged the challenges and instead asked each parishioner to wrestle with the moral challenges rather than instructing him or her to be a single-issue, hot-button voter.
One afternoon, as my campaign staff and I flew across the country on a long flight to California, I tried to explain all this to them as we debated how to respond and what to do. I set out on the table in front of us a printed list of the issues the bishops had defined for critical thinking.
Our conversation got heated. “Guys, hold on here. Has anyone in the press asked Archbishop Burke about the issues? The Church opposes the death penalty. I’m against the death penalty. George Bush electrocuted record numbers of people when he was governor in Texas. The Church is opposed to the war. I fought to end a war. Bush started a war of choice. The Church is against the growing inequality in society. I oppose tax cuts for the rich; my opponent campaigns on them. The Church calls on all of us to protect God’s creation—Earth. I’m one of the strongest environmentalists in the Senate, and he’s gutting environmental protections. Why isn’t he on the defensive? Why isn’t Burke concerned about my opponent’s position on issues of life and death, fairness and justice, which often mean life and death?”
“Burke says this only applies to Catholics,” explained the campaign’s policy director. In other words, if my faithful Episcopalian mother had told my agnostic father that she wasn’t going to raise the Kerry kids Catholic as he wished, I wouldn’t be having this fight.
We were stuck in a dynamic that promised nothing but a political food fight about the most difficult and divisive issues in the country, let alone about the meaning of Catholicism and being a person of faith. What we Catholics called “the whole cloth of Catholic teaching” was supposed to be the basis for discussions about policy and public life, but one archbishop in one archdiocese had taken the entire conversation hostage with the encouragement and support of folks who were pursuing policies completely alien to Catholic teaching.
Catholics of my generation had grown up in a Church that never would have wanted this fight, this rank politics. We had very different expectations about the Church’s role in politics, and politics’ role in religion. Catholics had been proud when America elected its first Catholic president in 1960, but mindful of what President Kennedy said before his election: “I am not the Catholic candidate for president. I am the Democratic Party’s candidate for president, who happens also to be a Catholic. I do not speak for my church on public matters, and the church does not speak for me. . . .”
How ironic that Kennedy had to prove he wasn’t “too Catholic” to be president, while now one archbishop had created a different litmus test entirely: Was I Catholic enough?
Growing up I seemed to remember being taught in church by the priests that true faith is private and personal. The Church we grew up with looked inward. It reveled in the authenticity of its separation from the modern world, from the Latin Mass to the rituals. More than that, we were taught to be pious, but remain private. I remember going to Mass during the Lenten season and hearing our priest at Our Lady of Blessed Sacrament read from Matthew 6:5: “And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray . . . on the street corners to be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward in full.” I was taught not to boast about piety.
If you truly have faith and your faith informs your life, it is hard to reconcile separate worlds of political ideology and religious theology. I believe the most important teaching of the Gospels is, at least for Christians, that it is not enough to say one believes in Jesus. Believing in Jesus requires action, a bona fide effort, a commitment to live the example of Jesus. Jesus himself commands that: in Mark 8:34–35, he says, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the gospel will save it.”
So, as the Senate’s chaplain Barry Black likes to say, you can “separate church from state, but not faith from state.” The question is how you judge what acts make faith real. Belief in Jesus requires action to “keep his commandments.” Jesus’s words can’t be much clearer than that.
The media didn’t help. Every president or presidential candidate since Ronald Reagan has been followed by what is called a “protective pool” of reporters. Anytime I, the candidate, was out in public, I was followed by a handful of reporters who documented everything in astonishingly minute detail—what I wore, what I ate, who was with me, wherever I went.
They followed me to church every Sunday and began what the media feasted on in 2004, thanks to Archbishop Burke’s attacks—the “wafer watch.”
The press turned it into a Sunday-to-Sunday spectacular: If I went to Catholic Mass in a city, would I take Communion? If I were instead a guest at an African American Protestant church, was it because I feared the Catholic archdiocese would have turned me away when I came up to the altar rail for the Eucharist? The foolish feeding frenzy distracted from the intimacy of actual faith.
In 2004, I was home in Boston for one of the most special days on the Christian calendar, Easter Sunday, a day for family and a day to reflect on Jesus’s resurrection from the dead after the sadness of Good Friday. I looked forward to attending Mass down the street from our home at our church on Park Street, the Paulist Center. Socia
l justice, economic justice, fighting for the underdog, caring for the sick and the poor were all at the forefront of the center’s work. Gay and straight were welcome, and all were at the heart of this inclusive Catholic community. The Mass was often celebrated in multiple languages on the projection screens behind the altar.
As much as I had grown up in the formality of the old Catholic Church and sometimes missed the High Mass and the beauty of the Latin, I appreciated the determination of this parish to break down barriers. The Mass on this Easter was beautiful, and it was especially meaningful to have my church pray for me before I went back out on the campaign trail. How many people ever get to experience that kind of spiritual embrace?
After Mass, I walked outside holding Teresa’s hand. I could hear in the background a television anchor broadcasting live across the street: “And on Easter Sunday, live from Boston, our reporters inside tell us that Democratic nominee John Kerry did successfully receive Communion today.” He could have just as easily been broadcasting a sporting event. It missed the entire meaning of Easter Sunday, or the point of what we believe—and why.
Not once in 2004 was I refused Communion, but anyone watching at home could be forgiven if they believed otherwise. In the end, only 3 bishops out of 180 expressed support for Burke’s position. But this tiny minority got the headlines.
To me, the real tragedy was that the debate never happened—the one about what it really means to live the teachings of Jesus. That debate doesn’t fit into thirty-second sound bites, and it certainly isn’t won or lost by a “wafer watch.”
• • •
I KNEW FROM my experience in 1972 that my opposition to the war in Vietnam was a big target for the political Right. I never doubted that a presidential campaign would raise the stakes even higher.
When I protested in 1971, I lost a few friends forever. Vietnam was a divisive war, fought in a divided country by men from an increasingly divided country. Many politicians wanted to keep us divided, so they attacked those who were telling the truth. My activism was distorted to hurt me in 1972, the only campaign I’d ever lost.
I knew then what I still know now—I did the right thing by speaking out against the war. It saved lives, and when I go to meet my Maker, I’ll do so with a clear conscience about everything I said and did at the time. I made enemies by telling the truth to save lives. Others hid the truth to protect their political fortunes, at the cost of tens of thousands of names on the Wall in Washington.
In 2004, in the cauldron of a country still fresh from 9/11, just one year into the war in Iraq and two years into the war in Afghanistan, the benefit of the doubt was going to go to the commander in chief. In the first presidential election after 9/11, the Republicans’ playbook was to pit my 1971 position against the commander in chief card.
Republicans had previewed that playbook in the 2002 election cycle, when they ran a fear and smear campaign in Georgia against my pal Max Cleland, a decorated Vietnam veteran and triple amputee, to elect a senator who got out of the war with five student deferments.
Politics is a tough game. The Bush team had proven itself as skilled as the Kennedys and as hard-assed as LBJ. No one should have been fooled by the “what, me worry?” look on the face of George Walker Bush.
I knew they’d throw the kitchen sink at me, and it was logical that in a time of war, when commander in chief credentials were at stake, they would try to tarnish my legitimacy. Indeed, as it became clearer that I’d be the Democratic nominee, the shape of the attack started to unfold. The Bush campaign and the RNC distorted my voting record, while simultaneously the more unsavory elements of the right-wing machine—removed just far enough from the official Bush-Cheney apparatus—teed off on my patriotism.
Enter Ted Sampley from stage right. Ted was one of the most deceptive human beings I’d ever encountered. Ted pushed the limits of my Christian belief that all could be redeemed.
I’d first seen him in action when John McCain and I were investigating the fate of the Americans unaccounted for in Vietnam.
My campaign brought Sampley out of the woodwork again, hawking T-shirts proclaiming me “Hanoi John.” Armed with a website titled “Vietnam Vets Against John Kerry,” Sampley was back in business. He and those like him proffered what they called new material: an old photo depicting me standing next to Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally. Guilt by association. But it was a fake. Just as the photo was going viral, spreading across the internet and appearing in newspapers nationwide, two photographers stepped forward. Owen Franken had been a photographer and writer for decades. He recognized the photo of Fonda. Another photographer, Kenneth Light, recognized the photo of me from an assignment he had in 1971 covering the VVAW. The photographers confirmed the two images had been photoshopped into one. It was, literally, fake news.
Sampley was exposed for the exploitative liar he was. We won the initial battle in the media by punching back. We made sure that in real time, the media knew who Ted Sampley was, and we made his vile record the issue.
This episode, however, was the canary in the coal mine, an early warning of what would lie ahead. I believed that the antidote to the inevitable lies would surely be the complete story of who I was. I also believed we could tell that story during the campaign.
I knew that the most compelling testimony would come from the men who knew me best, who had already weighed in and wanted to be deployed everywhere and anywhere all over the country: my crewmates from Vietnam. They weren’t politicians. Many weren’t even Democrats. They were proud of our service together, and they’d long ago made peace about whatever differences we had over the war. When they spoke, crowds got quiet. They were effective because they were genuine. They defied whatever caricature of me the Republicans or the likes of Ted Sampley were trying to paint. Their friendship is the record that endures.
I believed the truth would carry the day—that is, until the day I began to hear that Admiral Roy Hoffmann was making calls to veterans, stirring up opposition to me. Hoffmann, whom I’d known as Captain Hoffmann, was a tough old bird. Skip Barker blamed him for Don Droz’s death in an ambush, and as I’ve mentioned, it was Skip’s eloquent, contemporaneous letter describing Hoffmann’s decisions that day which pushed me into anti-war activism. Ironically, I had enjoyed several positive interactions with Admiral Hoffmann over the years. I’d seen him at Swift boat reunions, and I’d seen him in 1995 at the Washington Navy Yard, when the last Swift boat was officially decommissioned and dozens of us reunited. I was surprised by his sudden about-face in this campaign, so I picked up the phone and called him. I said I had heard he was working the phones against me.
He said he didn’t like the way the historian Douglas Brinkley had portrayed him in the book Tour of Duty, which covered my service in the Navy, my protest years and my work with John McCain to make peace and come to terms with the torment and troubles over the MIAs and POWs. I first pointed out that his complaint was with Brinkley—not me—but if there was anything inaccurate in the book, I was happy to put him in touch with the author and the publisher, or to be in touch myself to rectify any inaccuracy. It became patently clear, though, that this wasn’t at all a question of inaccuracies. He just lit into me about everything I’d said when I came home from Vietnam. He said we always had to support the troops. I told him that I had supported the troops by speaking out. He said he was voting for Bush, no surprise there. It was clear he didn’t want to have a conversation.
If Admiral Hoffmann wanted a referendum on whether the Vietnam War was right or wrong, or on whether I had a right to oppose it, that was fine by me. He had a right to his opinion.
On May 4, 2004, Admiral Hoffmann and a group of former Swift boat officers held a press conference in Washington to announce their opposition to my campaign because of my position on the war.
The only person there who had served on my first boat—the PCF-44—was Steve Gardner, who had resurfaced in March in the pages of Time magazine, announcing that he was a Rush Limbaugh–listenin
g right-winger and warning that I’d be another Bill Clinton in the White House. Steve was the only one of my crewmates on either boat who seemed partisan. His feelings surprised the rest of the crew of PCF-44. Steve was not with me or on my crew in any of the later actions for which I was decorated. He knew nothing firsthand about any of those missions.
The assembled group called for me to release my military records, which didn’t make any sense because we had already posted them online weeks before, which the press knew well. My crewmates held a press conference immediately afterward to respond to Hoffmann and company. They hit back hard and quickly. The media barely covered either of these events.
The morning of July 30, at the crack of dawn, we set out for a postconvention cross-country tour by bus, boat and train to build on the momentum of the convention in Boston. We were taking the campaign through the swing states. Bill Clinton had started the postconvention trip tradition in 1992, traveling by bus and seizing a chance to reach small towns too often bypassed. People get a chance to hear and see the candidate. I’d been looking forward to this moment of retail politics. On day one of our bus trip from Boston to Scranton, Pennsylvania, with multiple stops along the way ending with a big evening rally in Harrisburg, the politics of national security intervened. The federal government announced a surprise increase in the color-coded terror threat alert. There’s been a lot of debate about the real motivation and timing of these alerts. It immediately dragged the campaign away from our positive convention and the issues we wanted to put to the country. Five years later, Homeland Security secretary Tom Ridge would say that he’d felt pressured to raise the terror alerts for reasons that made him wonder whether it was about security or politics. Our campaign strongly suspected that we knew the answer, but we couldn’t say so at the time.
