If Sen. John Kerry’s surprising success so far in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination could be summed up in a single word, it might well be Vietnam.
Though the conflict there caused the greatest division in this country since the Civil War, Kerry is employing his war experience as a powerful credential that undergirds his campaign.
And the fact that he straddled that division, first as a highly decorated combat veteran and then back in the U.S. as the leader of veterans against the war, only seems to have added to the power of his case, at least within his party.
While Kerry talks about issues–indeed, some of his advisers thought he often went on too long about issues–it is the potency of his life story that seems to account for his current standing atop the Democratic field.
Kerry is the first Democrat since President John Kennedy–and in his party, the first of the Baby Boom generation–to effectively exploit combat valor in a campaign to be commander in chief. He infuses his speeches with military language, imploring supporters to “enlist” in the “mission,” to “stand with us” and to “fight.” And he surrounds himself with fellow Navy Swift boat mates at campaign events.
“We’re a little older, a little grayer, but we still know how to fight for this country,” he says in one of the more ready applause lines of his stump speech.
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Kerry’s military record contrasts sharply with that of most of his rivals, including former Vermont Gov. Howard Dean, who received a medical deferment, and Sen. John Edwards, who was not called. Retired general and Vietnam veteran Wesley Clark, though he has tried in recent weeks to make the same kind of connection as Kerry, hurt his own cause when he noted that he was a general and Kerry was a Navy lieutenant.
“As soon as you are arguing about John Kerry’s war record, you are on his turf,” said historian Douglas Brinkley, author of “Tour of Duty,” which details Kerry’s Vietnam service and his role as a leader of the protest against the war.
Kerry’s war record also serves to inoculate him from Republican charges that he lacks standing on the issue of national security. He can draw a sharp contrast, for example, between his decision to go into combat and President Bush’s decision to serve in the Texas Air National Guard.
Bush controversy
There was a controversy in the 2000 campaign over whether, in the 1970s, Bush completed his duties amid reports that he actually was working on a Senate campaign in Alabama.
“The National Guard resolved this issue 30 years ago when it honorably discharged George W. Bush from service in the Texas National Guard,” said Terry Holt, spokesman for Bush’s campaign. “What’s new about this is that Democrats have flat made up a story. They suggested that the president never served in the military, which is patently false.”
Holt also indicated that the Bush campaign was not going to let Kerry run strictly on a hero’s portfolio.
“This is a repackaging of Kerry’s biography in a way that helps him to burnish his image,” Holt said. “No one doubts Kerry’s military service. What’s in question is his judgment on defense issues. Since his service in the military, it’s hard to square the cuts in defense and votes against pay raises for military personnel with the current stump speech.
“If he’s the nominee, people thought that we would run against John Kerry on his liberalism. It is not his liberalism. It’s his phony-ism,” Holt said. On the one hand, he is true-blue military, on the other hand he has thrown back his medals and cozied up to Jane Fonda. It’s really the two faces of John Kerry that are the issue.”
Still, Kerry’s defenders are many.
“It’s highly unusual to have a Democratic presidential candidate feel comfortable walking into a VFW or an American Legion post,” said former Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.), who lost three limbs in Vietnam and was defeated in his 2002 re-election bid after Republicans painted him as soft on national security.
Value not guaranteed
Whether a fall election campaign turns in part on what the candidates did during Vietnam is hardly a certainty. But Vietnam and the generational angst that goes with it clearly are part of the campaign debate today.
Bush almost assuredly will face questions about the contrast between his record and that of Kerry when the president appears Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Kerry’s military service is more prominent, many officials said, because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, adding urgency to the requirements of the president also serving as commander in chief.
“I am not sure, for example, if Bill Clinton would have won in 1992 if the commander-in-chief issue would have been as big as it is now,” said former Nebraska senator and Medal of Honor recipient Bob Kerrey, who ran unsuccessfully against Clinton for the Democratic nomination that year.
And most Americans credited Bush for his handling of the commander-in-chief role in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, 2001.
“In a very real sense it is viewed as a strength of President Bush,” Kerrey said. “So one of the things that leads into is which of these guys [Democrats] is more electable. I think it became much bigger than that. I think it became an issue of character and the way that he [Kerry] conducted himself in Vietnam and what he did when he went back rallying veterans to him. It became an issue of the kind of person that he is.”
John Kerry has dwelled on his military record in all of his campaigns for public office, typically with great success. But in this campaign for president, he has leaned even more heavily on the group of men he calls his “band of brothers” who stood with him when his campaign appeared hopelessly stalled.
The portrait of aging Baby Boomers on the stage with him as opposed to that of a stiff, formal senator also helped soften Kerry’s image.
A better campaigner
“I also think it contributed to the obvious loosening up and the happier John who is out there campaigning,” Kerrey said. “It had to be a very moving, happy moment when he meets for the first time the man whose life he saved and seeing that kind of response.”
Kerrey was speaking of the dramatic moment in the campaign in late January when former Green Beret Jim Rassmann, a Republican from Oregon, came to stand with Kerry because Kerry had saved his life while putting his own in peril.
It made real the heroism on Kerry’s resume and made Democrats see him in a different, more human light.
On the night he won the New Hampshire primary, Kerry said, “This victory also belongs in a special way to the veterans who marched with us and lifted us from the lowest points to where we stand tonight.”
At the same time, however, Republicans are focusing not so much on Kerry’s war record, but rather on his legislative record. They have offered a ready caricature of Kerry as a “Massachusetts liberal,” a line of attack that helped derail the candidacy of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988.
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The fact that Kerry voted for the Iraq war resolution, while the subject of attack from fellow Democrats, probably shields him from some Republican criticism. When Dean’s campaign, which was fueled by anti-war feeling, began to fade, Kerry was there to pick up the pieces.
“People began to have pause because not all Americans think that what we are doing to fight terrorism or take out Saddam [Hussein] is a bad thing,” said Steve Jarding, a Democratic consultant and fellow at the Harvard University Institute of Politics. “And here’s a guy sitting there with medals on his chest. . . . It made Democrats feel safe about themselves.”
But some conservatives are making the case that it is not Kerry’s service but his protest of the war in Vietnam that should be emphasized. In a cover story in the new issue of National Review, author Mackubin Thomas Owens, also a Vietnam combat veteran, argues that Kerry misrepresented the actions of U.S. soldiers in Vietnam, in part because Kerry already had his eye on a political career.
Conservative’s indictment
“In his anti-war activism . . . John Kerry helped to slander a generation of soldiers who had done their duty with honor and restraint,” Owens writes.
“Today, Sen. Kerry appeals to veterans in his quest for the White House,” Owens added. “He invokes his Vietnam service at every turn. But . . . how can he? If he believes his 1971 indictment of his country and his fellow veterans was true, then he couldn’t possibly be proud of his Vietnam service.”