Kerry's Past Is Key to His Future
The Republicans have tried to turn John Kerry's military service against him with repeated derogatory references to his 1971 testimony on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. But this negative tactic could backfire. If voters were actually to read what the young war hero said 33 years ago, most would come away with increased respect for Kerry's prescience, his patriotism and his willingness to speak truth to power.
After all, the young veteran was daring to state the obvious to leaders who had been in denial for nearly a decade, pointing out that tens of thousands of Americans and many more Vietnamese were dying because "we can't say we have made a mistake" in taking sides in a civil war.
"Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be -- and these are his [Nixon's] words -- 'the first President to lose a war,' " continued Kerry. What Kerry did not know, because the White House tapes were then still secret, is that Lyndon B. Johnson had uttered sentiments similar to Nixon's to justify the major escalation of the U.S. intervention in 1964.
"I stayed awake last night thinking about this thing," LBJ told national security advisor McGeorge Bundy on May 27, 1964. "And the more I think of it
Why would Johnson expand a war he didn't believe in? Because, as another advisor cynically warned: "The Republicans are going to make a big political issue out of it" in that year's election. Johnson agreed. "It's the only issue they've got." So off to war went hundreds of thousands of Americans, many of them still suffering today -- mentally, emotionally and physically.
Consider, for one, Max Cleland, who gave three limbs to that misguided war, only to lose his Georgia Senate seat in 2002 to a Republican demagogue. His opponent, Saxby Chambliss, who avoided service in Vietnam with a knee problem, ran campaign ads morphing Cleland's image into Osama bin Laden's, implying the veteran was a soft-on-terror traitor. This is a prime example of how false patriotism can trump the real thing.
Unfortunately, the measured cadence of Cleland's and Kerry's calls for strength tempered by wisdom during their party's convention were muffled by almost obsessive flag-waving, which is fine so far as it represents a genuine love of country but too often is a cover for mindless us-against-the-world militarism. It is one thing to criticize the war in Iraq -- President Bush's version of Vietnam -- but it helps little if your solutions center on even heavier applications of military force, as some Democrats advocate. Kerry, to his credit, on Sunday vowed to bring a significant number of troops home.
