by John Kerry
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I THANK GOD Don, Judy and Tracy had that time to share in Hawaii—even though Tracy would only know about it from her mother. The promise of his life to come with his new family juxtaposed with his bloody, muddy death in a river in Vietnam has always been a heavy burden to bear for all who knew Don. Judy would later lead a march in Washington against the war—and, in a sign of the times, be criticized by other war widows for doing so. It was a bitter pill to swallow because Don had often written home about the significant shortcomings of Operation Sealords and his opposition to the war itself.
Twenty years later I had the pleasure of offering Tracy an internship in my Senate office, where I was touched to be able to help her get to know her dad. I was so happy I could do that. It was a way of keeping faith with Don. Tracy went on to produce a wonderful documentary called Be Good, Smile Pretty, the story of discovering her father. Today, she is a well-respected documentary filmmaker.
The letter from Skip triggered a combination of anger and purpose in me. Rage at the way Don died turned to rage about the reasons he died. Everything I had been writing reflected my belief that every man who had served on the riverboats on the Mekong Delta was as courageous as every man who had jumped out of a Higgins boat to take Omaha Beach at Normandy. But this was a different war from World War II.
Don’s death was the spark. I could also feel the anger and frustration of Skip and other friends. But they could not speak out. I could.
My months in-country, beginning with the first moments after I walked off the plane at Cam Ranh and observed the division of labor, steadily instilled in me a sense of the absurdity of our engagement. Like cement drying in the sun, my impressions had hardened into convictions. The guys I served with were amazing. I remain hugely respectful of their sacrifices for our country. They were courageous and innovative, the best our country summoned to service, but the war itself wasn’t right. There was no standard by which it constituted a justifiable use of brave young men’s lives.
Don’s death punctuated those feelings with urgency. It forced me to act. I moved from thinking I had time to write a book to feeling compelled to get out and tell the story of the war publicly. It was then I knew I had to become an activist to try to end the war. I felt a fundamental responsibility to do something. But what—and how?
My sister Peggy was a great connector. She embodied the sixties—and still does. She’s a “movement” person, actually more committed over a lifetime to the women’s movement than anyone I’ve known. In the fall of 1969, she was spending most of her time in the run-down offices of a grassroots organization dedicated to ending the war, the Vietnam Moratorium Committee at 150 Fifth Avenue in New York City. Peggy connected me with Adam Walinsky, one of the band of brothers who had been with his boss, Robert Kennedy, in Los Angeles when RFK was assassinated.
Walinsky was continuing to speak out for peace, as Kennedy had. A day of events—rallies, teach-ins, vigils—was planned for October. There were politicians on the playbill, including Gene McCarthy and New York’s Republican senator Charles Goodell, and Yale’s activist chaplain, William Sloane Coffin, whose eloquence against the war defined just how much the Old Campus had changed since I’d graduated in ’66. It was the young activists, though, who were most stirring, not just Walinsky, but my contemporaries, notably Sam Brown, David Mixner, Marge Sklenkar and John Gage, who showed remarkable leadership and helped change the course of history. They literally organized the country’s campuses against the war. All of them became great friends on the long journey ahead.
Walinsky needed a pilot to get him around New York to speak at as many of the events as possible, but this was the peace movement on a shoestring budget. The group could afford to charter a tiny plane, but it needed a pilot. Peggy knew exactly who to volunteer for the job. Those carefree days spent taking flying lessons at Tweed New Haven Airport during my senior year were about to lead me into an experience I never could have predicted. I took a vacation day and soon enough was flying Walinsky around New York—from the Hudson Valley to Albany and up to Buffalo and Syracuse—usually wherever there was a big campus population. We soared over the fall foliage, dipping into tiny airports in a single-engine plane, then driving to each event while Walinsky, his tie sporting the PT-109 tie clip given to him by RFK, scribbled notes on a dog-eared legal pad, updating the speech he was about to give. In between rallies, I enjoyed listening to Adam talk about the road he had traveled.
Together with Jeff Greenfield, Adam Walinsky had become one of the most important aides to RFK. A graduate of Yale Law School, he was one of a vanguard of young, thoughtful activists committed to changing the country. His passionate, forceful advocacy for justice and an end to the war in Vietnam earned him the nickname “Adamant Adam,” a moniker I would have been proud of in those turbulent times.
I didn’t speak at any of the events. I didn’t even contemplate it. I was there to observe. I was in my civilian clothes, enjoying the anonymity of standing off to the side of the crowd, just absorbing the scene. For the first time since I’d left Vietnam, I felt a sense of common purpose. The feeling of being part of a movement took me back to more innocent days on campus, hearing Allard Lowenstein speak on civil rights, challenging us to care about a cause beyond the comfortable confines of campus. But everything was so different in so many other ways. The Al Lowenstein I first met exhorting us to action on the Yale campus was now a young congressman fighting to end the war in which I’d fought. We’d gone from the excitement of the New Frontier to the political revolution of the McCarthy and Kennedy insurgencies, and yet somehow Richard Nixon had been elected president and seemingly brought at least some of the country back to the 1950s.
Now, the great enterprise of grassroots democracy was in the hands of people like Adam Walinsky, still in his thirties. The times had changed and, as always, the music reflected our mood. Peter, Paul and Mary had gone from the hopeful “If I Had a Hammer” during the civil rights marches when I was a sophomore, to the wistful “Leaving on a Jet Plane” in 1969, with an entirely different meaning for those of us who had boarded planes to the war in Southeast Asia. I looked out across the crowds: young faces, older faces, tears and chants—“End the war.” “Bring them home.” Occasionally an unmistakable whiff of marijuana would waft across the sea of humanity. There was palpable excitement in the air, a feeling that young people could change the world if we organized. It was refreshing to feel a surge of idealism after Vietnam had ripped apart so many of my assumptions and hopes. In a transition that felt a little strange, the next day I put on my uniform and went back to work.
I also continued to write. The idea came to me to turn all my scribbles into an open letter to America, an attempt to lay out the truth I had witnessed in Vietnam and the lies people were being fed at home. Peggy introduced me to the incomparable Pete Hamill, the columnist for the New York Post. We met at the Lion’s Head, Pete’s hangout in the Village. He read my “manuscript” and told me he thought I was onto something, that my personal recollections, details from my journal written when I was in-country and factual input could be an important addition to the debate. But he also had a gentle way of telling me that no book or article, however passionate, was going to make the difference I hoped for. Few writers had that kind of impact. I loved the meeting. Pete was direct and tough. He had no patience for the war and even less for the politicians who seemed at a total loss for what to do with Nixon at the nation’s helm, keeping his secret plan for peace a secret.
One weekend when I was home in Massachusetts, my father invited me to talk to the Groton Rotary, where he was a member. I think he and the audience were a little surprised by the critique that I delivered, just speaking from my gut and from my own analysis, at once the son of Foreign Service Officer Richard Kerry as well as a fully formed twenty-six-year-old whose views of the war had been shaped not in Foggy Bottom but on the Cà Mau Peninsula. It felt right, that I should speak out and that someone should hear it.
There was, of course, one hurdle to running for Congress, and it was formidable. I was still very much in the Navy. I approached Admiral Schlech and asked him if he would support my request for an early release from the Navy so I could return home and start running. He could not have been more supportive. A wonderful “old salt,” a submarine skipper from World War II, he bent over backward to facilitate my departure. I was lucky to have such a boss. He put in the papers right away. I still had obligations to fulfill in the Navy, which I did, even as my mustering-out date crept up fast. I began to look ahead to a wild but exhilarating adventure in Massachusetts.
Just deciding to run without having engaged in many of the normal base-building activities of politics was a little crazy, but I was convinced that I could make the case about the war and, more important, that I had an obligation to do so. Although I enlisted filled with a sense of duty and service, I was now outraged at the deception and immorality of much of the war. I felt I had lived so much change so quickly. When I had signed up it was 1965. I was a son of World War II, and like so many others of my generation, I had been taught bedrock values of service and sacrifice. However, 1968 and 1969 had a profound transformational impact on me: they changed me as they changed my generation and the country. Few were immune to those years.
I had lost too many good friends—from high school, Peter Wyeth Johnson, who loved to read and write poetry and developed a beautiful calligraphy script with which he wrote superb essays at St. Paul’s; Steve Kelsey, the son of Army parents stationed in Paris who traveled with me on motorbikes through the Loire Valley of France, where we learned more than we could ever find useful about the beautiful châteaus of the region; Dick Pershing, friend from prep school and college; John White, my debate team partner, who shared hours with me plotting arguments against Princeton and Harvard; Bob Crosby, my classmate from Swift training in Coronado and fellow Massachusetts citizen; and Don Droz—all of whom were heroes to me. But the rationale for the war, the flawed execution of an unsound strategy, the failures of leadership, both political and military, and the stubborn, myopic impulse that dug us deeper and deeper—none of it ever lived up to the example of their sacrifice.
I was always struck by the fact that Robert McNamara, one of the principal architects of the war, never matched the courage of the men who put their lives on the line. McNamara was smart enough to come to understand the war was wrong, but he, like many others, left the battlefield to slink off to the World Bank, where he remained silent as thousands continued to sacrifice and die, even as his own son protested the war. Why hadn’t he spoken up when it could have mattered? There was in this realization a bitter taste, a leaving behind of the near-mythological awe with which the “best and the brightest” had been welcomed to Washington to set the nation on its new course in the New Frontier. It was jarring that Bill Bundy, the uncle of my roommate and the man I had sat with and been impressed by as a senior at Yale, had been so wrong about a country and a war that cost so many lives and set us on such a disastrous course.
I began to reach out and introduce myself to activists in my congressional district. For Julia, this was about as full immersion as one gets: from the freedom of Italy to the rigors of a campaign in Massachusetts. Here she was, not yet married, being plunged into my passion for ending the war. She took it on heart and soul, knowing how much it mattered with her older brother Lanny serving in the Marines near the demilitarized zone along the border of North Vietnam. We had decided to wait to get married until Lanny returned from Vietnam. By any measure, Julia was remarkably accepting of a completely alien experience.
On January 1, 1970, I received my honorable discharge and was released from active duty as a full lieutenant in the U.S. Naval Reserve. I had just learned that Father Bob Drinan, the dean of Boston College Law School, was being urged by several anti-war Democrats to get into the race for the same congressional seat. Before I knew it, I was in a pitched organizational battle against some formidable veterans of Massachusetts politics. Jerry Grossman, who was supporting Father Drinan, was an activist’s activist. Deeply involved in the Council for a Livable World, he was a force in liberal politics. He had enormous resources of money and influence, but we had youth, the passion of the war and a blind ignorance of the downsides, the last of which always helps. We had about six weeks to enlist any Democrat from the district willing to attend Concord-Carlisle High School on a Saturday in February to participate in a party caucus. We had to get the word out—an open invitation to all activists—it was a gigantic organizational task. The energy was electric. It was fun and ridiculously, but excitingly, quixotic.
I jumped right in, attending Democratic committee meetings whenever and wherever I could. When we could find even a few Democrats gathered together, we tried to persuade them to help us end the war in Vietnam. We assembled a small group of friends who loyally jumped in feetfirst. It was liberating. The fact that I was targeting a guy who supported the war with every old cliché and factless slogan was invigorating. I felt finally that I was doing something to bring the war closer to its end. My argument was straightforward. Freshly back from Vietnam, with war experience under my belt, I argued that I had a better chance than any other candidate of holding Philbin accountable. I was self-confident enough to think that when Philbin said, “Support the troops,” I could look right back at him and say, “Congressman, we are the troops.” I wondered whether Father Drinan, incredibly articulate and qualified as he was, would have a harder time as a priest convincing hard-core folks in parts of the district that he should be in Congress. On many issues, there was no difference between us, but we went at it in a pitched battle of Massachusetts activists all aiming to end the war.
The question many asked was: Who was this upstart who just parachuted in to upset the regular order? For others, there was an excitement over having someone who had been to Vietnam and checked off several normal boxes of politics to challenge a long-term, recalcitrant incumbent.
On February 22, 1970, I made my first speech to an election audience. It was freezing outside, but the auditorium was sweat warm, every seat jammed with the most ardent end-the-war activists Massachusetts could find. It was citizens’ activism at its best and most exciting. I had worked hard on my speech, sitting on the floor of our temporary apartment with my brother, David Thorne, George Butler and Chester “Chet” Atkins, who would later become a congressman. We read it through, edited and read it through again, and now it was time to deliver.
Father Drinan had given his speech. Near the end of his comments, he had visibly paused, taken a deep drink from a glass of water on the podium and then finished up. When I took the podium, you could feel the tension. Who was this young intruder who was taking on the powerful core of the district’s liberal base? For many of the attendees, it was their first introduction to me. I looked out at the tense room of activists, reached for the glass, drank and said, “See, it can’t be that bad. We’re all drinking out of the same glass.”
The laughter and applause that followed broke the ice. The audience listened. I delivered my vision of the choices before the country and how we could win in November. At the end, whether they were with Drinan or me, people were on their feet. The vote was going to be close. It was not going to be the favorite crushing the upstart. There was, notwithstanding the liberal machine’s turnout of people brought to vote f
or Drinan, great curiosity about the two very different candidates.
The caucus broke into sub-caucuses so candidates could be questioned. Then there was a first-ballot vote that winnowed the field, followed by another, which was split nearly evenly, with a slight edge to Drinan. The question was, What now? Did this caucus mean anything? Was it just the springboard for a Kerry candidacy, or would it unite the progressive, anti-war wing and go after Philbin? The outcome depended on my decision. I could argue that the caucus was an arbitrary, completely ad hoc, tiny representation of the party and the people deserved a choice. I could take my case to the people in a primary and risk reelecting the war hawk, or I could throw my support to Bob Drinan and help defeat Congressman Philbin.
My small team and I retired to a room while those at the caucus waited. I didn’t agonize over the decision. Drinan had won more votes than I had. I wasn’t running just to go to Congress. I was running to end the war and change the politics of the Congress and country. Since we would all be running in the primary, winning there was tantamount to election. It was better for this nascent, anti-war citizens’ effort to come out united rather than split the vote so that Philbin would win again. Certainly there was the option of calling the hand of Drinan (and Grossman) by stubbornly staying in and forcing him to think about whether I ultimately had the better chance. That path seemed completely antithetical to what we were trying to achieve. It flew in the face of the moment and made the whole thing about me and not about the war. The moment needed resolution and it called for the power of unity—for a message that this citizens’ effort had succeeded and this new grassroots energy was to be reckoned with. So I withdrew, throwing my support to Bob Drinan. The grassroots group had produced unity. The concept of the citizens’ caucus was vindicated. Everyone could leave Concord-Carlisle High School with a genuine sense of excitement for the campaign ahead.