Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  I proposed to VVAW that we try something new. It was a risk, in part because it ran against the instinct of many who genuinely and justifiably felt alienated from Washington and had given up on the government. But I argued we should take the fight directly to Washington and make Congress hear us, go door-to-door in the Senate and House, demand meetings, march on D.C. the way the Bonus Army had once marched. After some debate, everyone agreed to give it a shot. VVAW being VVAW, it was given a name—Operation Dewey Canyon—after the last major Marine offensive mission in Vietnam. It was planned for the third week of April 1971.

  We had to rush like hell to pull the damn thing together. The organization was unalterably democratic—except when it wasn’t. Everything seemed to be put to a vote—except when it wasn’t. I learned quickly that we were in a financial hole and was slightly irritated to find out that something like $100,000 had been blown on a series of print ads without appropriate authorization. So it was a mad scramble to raise the money to bring the veterans to Washington, to “bivouac” on the Mall.

  A dignified march into Washington through Virginia, past Arlington National Cemetery, joined by Gold-Star wives like Judy Droz was agreed to with unanimity. Some fights weren’t winnable: the guerrilla theater and the painted “ghost faces” of some activists, which I thought scared folks, were going to be a part of the days in Washington whether I liked it or not. A demonstration to reach the hearts and minds of the country by “returning” our decorations from Vietnam was a particularly fraught debate. I agreed with the idea of “returning” our decorations. I thought it captured our anguish. But what bothered me was I couldn’t look at a Silver Star, a Purple Heart—whatever decoration—without thinking of Persh, or Don Droz, or families of other deceased for whom the medal they had was their final connection to their loved one. It was all that was left of some people. Return it, yes, I thought, but return it the way the military returns a flag to a war widow: with dignity, with solemnity. I proposed having a table covered by a white tablecloth, with each veteran approaching solemnly to lay his medals down, and then we could collect them to be officially delivered to the Pentagon. I was outvoted. Instead, the other vets wanted to leave them on the steps of the Capitol.

  I was aware always that I was one of thousands, speaking and acting not just as an individual with individual opinions, but for a group. We pressed on. The whole enterprise almost crumbled when I was informed that we still didn’t have the money to pay for buses. Unless we found $75,000 quickly, the buses wouldn’t roll. I had to make a last-minute trip to New York to see if we could find this emergency infusion. We had no credit, but thanks to good friends and strong opponents of the war, Adam Walinsky, Seagrams CEO Edgar Bronfman Sr. and Jerry Grossman all helped us raise the money to pull it off.

  Once we arrived in Washington, it sometimes seemed as though everything that could go wrong did go wrong. The National Park Service refused to issue us permits to camp on the Mall. The sense of indignity was profound and made a lot of the veterans angry. President Nixon’s Department of Justice actually sought an injunction to prevent us from camping. The court ruled we could stay, but not remain overnight. We counted down anxiously as the sky darkened and night crept in. At midnight, an alarm clock went off loudly, to cheers. We stood our ground, pitched tents and laid out sleeping bags. We gave the police a choice: arrest us or let us be. The police never moved in.

  As we met during the day with members of Congress, we told them of our precarious situation on the Mall. To this day, I remember how some pulled closer to us while others backed away. Some no doubt worried about being associated with so-called shaggy-haired rabble-rousers, while others bought into rumors of drugs or worse being used in our encampment. Still others thought that the occupation of the National Mall could turn violent. There are many ways to measure character. Even as the police threatened to arrest us, I saw Senator Ted Kennedy come down to the Mall. I was impressed. He spent an hour among the veterans, listening, learning and cheering us on. His commitment to the cause was bigger than politics. I was at a VVAW fund-raiser at Senator Phil Hart’s house in Georgetown one night—keeping the lights on and paying our bills was never far from our minds—when, unbeknownst to me, someone from Foreign Relations Committee chairman William Fulbright’s staff heard me speak. Fulbright was courageous, an opponent of the war even though his home state of Arkansas was conservative. Not soon after, I was asked to take a phone call: Would I be willing to come to the committee to testify the next day?

  My answer was yes. Now I just had to encapsulate in brief testimony not just everything I felt, but everything the men of VVAW felt. I holed up in the temporary VVAW office in northwest Washington, pulled out my sheaf of papers from the last year and a half, from the “Letter to America” I’d shared with Pete Hamill to my notes from speeches, and I started writing. The sun was coming up over Washington when I finished. I showered, shaved, went to the encampment to check signals and touch base and then headed toward the Dirksen Senate Office Building. I was locked and loaded when I passed the Supreme Court and saw a few VVAW vets in an argument with the police. It looked as if they were being arrested. It was the one occurrence we’d managed to avoid thus far. I walked up to them and tried to calm the situation. The police were nice guys. They had a job to do, but the last thing they wanted to do was handcuff a bunch of young veterans who could have been their kids. In the end, we worked it out, but now I was late.

  To my right was a cub reporter for the Boston Globe, Tom Oliphant, a kid about my age straight out of Harvard. “Let’s run,” I said to him. I entered the hearing room breathless and sweating. It was packed. Senators stood behind the dais talking. Apparently, they were waiting for me, as, unbeknown to me, I was the only witness. I apologized for being a few minutes late and sat down at the witness table. I’d had no idea what I was walking into. Adrenaline took over. I spread my notes out in front of me and described why we were there and what we hoped to accomplish.

  At the end, I summarized, at one point posing a question:

  How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

  We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.

  Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifice we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in ’Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witnesses enough for others and for ourselves. We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us.

  But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last ten years and more and so when, in thirty years from now, our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say “Vietnam” and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.

  CHAPTER 6

  Finding My Way

  “ARE YOU THE one who testified against the war?”

  I
t was an innocent question, but when strangers approached me with a glint in their eyes, I never knew what to expect. I learned quickly to steel myself for the possibility of what might come next.

  It was strange to walk down the street, get on a plane or sit down at a restaurant and be recognized. Generally, people were nice, often emotional: the veteran who said he wished he could have been there in Washington for the protests, or the sister of a fallen soldier, or, especially, the African Americans I met who put it right out there that the war was still going on because they were the ones being drafted, while the sons of the “elected and connected” found a way out.

  Occasionally someone would unleash a torrent of abuse. Didn’t I know good men were fighting in Vietnam? Well, yes, I sure did, sir. That’s why I was protesting, so they’d come home alive sooner, instead of letting Nixon keep sending young men to die for his still unrevealed secret plan for peace. The people who would sometimes shout “support the troops” as we vets walked by were the most vexing: We were the troops. We had done our duty and earned the right to speak our minds. When I was on the receiving end of a tirade, I realized the critics didn’t distinguish between us and the hordes of hippies piled into VW buses headed for the Haight. But whatever the reaction, it was clear that our week in Washington in April 1971 had struck a chord. My testimony had received three or four minutes of direct coverage on the evening news of all three television networks. It was a different era in media. Morley Safer interviewed me soon after for 60 Minutes. He even asked a question that seemed preposterously removed from the activism that had motivated me: he asked whether I would run for president someday. Black-and-white posters with my photo appeared—origins unknown—and I was asked for autographs. We didn’t have this word then, but Dewey Canyon had gone viral and I’d gone viral with it. Seemingly without warning, at twenty-seven, I was a public figure with a public purpose but without a public position from which to lead.

  For a number of months after the Washington protests, I gave speeches around the country, drawing a small salary and donating money raised from the speeches to VVAW. I was booked for speaking engagements as far from home as Norman, Oklahoma, to standing-room-only crowds. As the fall of 1971 turned toward the winter, I began to pull back a bit. I had been going nonstop since I had come home from the war. VVAW had become more fractious. I was inspired by all the men and women who had poured their pain into our movement, many of whom became friends for a lifetime, brothers and sisters I know would be at my front door in ten minutes tomorrow if I asked them. But within VVAW, there were suddenly too many different agendas competing for priority—some of them controversial. Mirroring the national mind-set of the times, VVAW was divided over issues of class, between those doing drugs and those who weren’t, between opposition to the war in Vietnam and opposition to all wars, between those who believed America could be put back together and those who thought the whole system was rotten to the core. I was decidedly in the camp that wanted to set the country right.

  Julia and I sought a measure of peace and refuge at our home in Waltham. We settled down for a tranquil Christmas in a rented cottage on Squam Lake in New Hampshire, together with Julia’s brother David and his wife, Rosie. George and Victoria Butler were nearby at George’s family property, True Farm. It was a cozy time, with long snowshoe and cross-country ski expeditions across the frozen lake, incredible silence, gray skies and early dark, warm fires and hearty meals. Nearly a half century later I can still feel the peacefulness. Then, in early 1972, word leaked out that Congressman Brad Morse, who represented my hometown of Groton, together with a large swath of Middlesex County, was leaving Congress.

  I was nearly two years out from the Concord-Carlisle citizens’ caucus. Father Drinan had gone to the House, and the war was still raging. Nixon was still president. I wanted to go to Washington, to join Drinan and do all I could to end the war. And I believed I could do far more as a member of Congress than as a professional activist.

  I knew I would be criticized for jumping into the race. But the district included my hometown where we had lived since my father returned from the Foreign Service in 1962.

  I decided to go for it. We campaigned our hearts out. It was exciting, fun and brutally hard work. First, I had to contend with a crowded Democratic primary against nine other candidates. Conventional wisdom argued that the winner would have the wind at his or her back for the general election. Coming out of movement, activist politics, I had strengths and weaknesses.

  The strengths were clear. I had a singular passion to end the war. I had a national fund-raising base that set me apart from the other candidates, whose base of support was entirely local. I brought home with me a group of the most creative and talented political organizers who were changing the way campaigns were run in the early 1970s, guys like the strategist John Marttila, the pollster Tom Kiley, Frank O’Brien, and David Thorne, who was now a budding political consultant.

  We had idealism on our side. The campaign was a family affair. Peggy was calling every friend she’d ever met as an activist, begging for help for her kid brother. Cam took off time from Harvard to be my loyal lieutenant. My mother became the biggest and best booster of all. She proudly wore a button that proclaimed “I’m John’s Mom,” a button I have to this day, tucked away in a safe place. Despite her formal upbringing, my mother discovered her activist genes and never looked back. I still double over in laughter remembering the lengths to which she went to see me speak at an anti-war rally at the Capitol in Washington, D.C., during Dewey Canyon. She drove down from Massachusetts and found herself a place on the Mall to watch the speeches. As the crowd filled in, her view of the far-off podium became obstructed by the sea of onlookers. Near some picnicking hippies, Mom climbed a tree and watched the rally from her own personal balcony. That evening, Julia, David, Peggy, Cam and I went out for dinner. My mother was supposed to meet us there. She was late. Finally, we saw her car pull up. She parked it in the middle of the street with the lights on and the engine running, hopped out and came into the restaurant. “Mama—are you okay?” I asked. Her pupils were enormous. It turned out that for hours as Mom sat in the tree watching the speeches, the hippies sitting below her were smoking joint upon joint. To our amazement and eternal amusement, Rosemary Forbes Kerry had showed up to dinner secondhand stoned.

  Collectively, our campaign was like nothing the district had experienced before. That was precisely part of the problem that we didn’t realize was developing. To many in the district, I was appearing out of nowhere, crushing the ambitions of favorite sons, without local ties that mattered to most of the district. Despite what I told myself, my roots were not tangible to voters who lived there. I didn’t have a mentor who advised me to tread lightly or think harder about the local sensitivities. There were culturally conservative neighborhoods in the district, people who had voted Democratic for decades but were feeling unsettled by the cultural changes of the era—including the anti-war movement. Furthermore, the most powerful news outlet in the district, the Lowell Sun, boasted an editorial page run by a famously colorful, eccentric John Birch Society zealot, Clem Costello, who set out to turn me into a caricature.

  Sunday night before the primary, around one in the morning, Cam and my field director, Tom Vallely, were in our headquarters. They were planning the details of a massive primary day operation. Tom had received a warning that people might mess with our phone lines in order to disrupt our activities on primary day. We had developed a state-of-the-art political operation to turn out the vote. It depended on more than one hundred phone lines to turn out record numbers of voters. Cam and Tommy were spooked. Everything Tommy had seen in VVAW taught him, and me, that dirty tricks actually happened in politics.

  They went downstairs to check the phone trunks terminating in the vacant building between our office and that of a primary rival, Tony DiFruscia. Tommy kicked open the door, walked down to the basement, and within minutes, they were met by the Lowell police force, which appeared on cue to
arrest them for breaking and entering. I was awoken by my first-ever 3:00 a.m. phone call in politics: Cam and Tommy were in jail. The next afternoon, the Sun’s blaring headline announced “Kerry Brother Arrested in Lowell ‘Watergate,’ Breaking into the Headquarters of an Opponent.”

  I won the primary anyway, but it was an omen of things to come, including a persistent barrage by the Sun. I started the general election considerably ahead of my relatively unknown and underfunded Republican opponent, Paul Cronin. But what Cronin was unable to do for himself, the Lowell Sun did for him.

  Rumors swirled that the Nixon White House—en route to a landslide reelection—was fixated on my campaign. Years later, the Nixon tapes would reveal the president himself had talked to his closest aides about me when I was protesting in Washington. But in 1972, even absent audio evidence, we feared he and his henchmen would do everything they could to deny me a seat in Congress. The race was tightening. Suddenly, a week before the election, the third candidate in the race, an independent named Roger Durkin, pulled out, threw his support to my opponent and then disappeared, mysteriously unavailable to answer questions about his withdrawal. We suspected the fix was in.

  I could feel the race slipping away. It wasn’t Kerry versus Cronin. It was the Lowell Sun versus Kerry, and the Sun made it Kerry versus Kerry—their distortions and my war. On election night, I lost convincingly.

  I stood at the podium in a subdued hotel ballroom for a painful concession speech and, gritting my teeth, made one thing clear to the Lowell Sun and challenged the newspaper to print it: if I had to do it all over again, I would still stand with the veterans in Washington, D.C.

  I learned decades later that even after his landslide reelection was secured, Richard Nixon waited to go to bed until he got confirmation of my defeat.