Kerry's Lionizing Shift From Officer to Activist
The week he became an American household name, John F. Kerry carried his credentials pinned to his shirt pocket.
For five days in late April 1971, Kerry wore his battle ribbons on old combat fatigues as he led 1,000 disillusioned Vietnam veterans massed in Washington for a protest against the war they fought.
"Mr. Kerry, please move your microphone," Sen. Stuart Symington (D-Mo.) prodded the 27-year-old former Navy lieutenant during a climactic appearance before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "You have a Silver Star, have you not?"
Solemn, gangling, hunched over a witness table, Kerry obliged, showing the cloth bars that stood for his Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts. Kerry's pained plea -- "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" -- stiffened congressional opposition to the war and made him a peace movement icon for giving voice to veterans weary of death without victory.
The embittered grunts called themselves "Winter Soldiers," conjuring up Thomas Paine's vision of a Colonial army of patriots. They dubbed their protest "Dewey Canyon III," a play on the Nixon administration's code for secret incursions into Laos. They flashed their decorations everywhere they went that week. Then, in a bitter farewell that still shadows Kerry's career, he and his peace platoons tossed away honors.
Antiwar Turning Point
A signal moment in the slow fade of American support for the war, the 1971 protest by the Vietnam Veterans Against the War was Kerry's entry point into public life. No other presidential aspirant of his generation won such early prominence or endured such microscopic scrutiny.
"I did what I thought was the right thing to save the lives of American soldiers," Kerry said in a recent interview. "It wasn't easy. I mean, I knew people would be critical, that there would be people who wouldn't like it."
Kerry's two-year transformation -- from disaffected patrol boat skipper home from Vietnam to an antiwar leader coming into his own at the Washington protest -- sheds insight into the nuances of his character. His determined entry into the upper echelon of the peace movement was a daring high-wire act for a Yale graduate with no constituency beyond his own conscience and ambition.
