What You Don't Know about John Kerry

KERRY'S TESTIMONY BEFORE THE SENATE FOREIGN RELATIONS COMMITTEE, APRIL 22, 1971

Very good ! Post it far and wide ! :O)

Google shows over 2500 entries for "John Kerry" and "Jane Fonda."

A good question for Teresa to ask her husband (John effing Kerry): "John, did you do the horizontal bop with that traitorous whore since we've been married?"

5.56mm

WOW! Thank you so much Salvation for finding this and posting it. I never heard of any of it.

One correction. I do remember hearing something about him throwing his medals over the White House fence but that's about it.

Did you see this?

**WOW! Thank you so much Salvation for finding this and posting it. I never heard of any of it.**

Amazing, isn't it? I definitely remember being so angry at Jane Fonda. Somehow Kerry was able to squelch his name in connection with all of it.

Definitely a good question.....LOL!

Here's another article:

[Kerry's Group] Vietnam Veterans Against the War Statement on September 11 Attacks

And is it true that he was only in Vietnam for four months?

Those two other people with Ortega are Mr. and Mrs. Tom Harkin.

Shortly after taking office in 1985, Kerry and Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa went on a fact-finding trip to Nicaragua, where they met with Daniel Ortega (right) and other Sandinistas. The trip was criticized when the Sandinistas cemented ties with Moscow.
(Globe File Photo)

At first, Kerry's audacity cost him. Within weeks of taking office in 1985, he was off to Nicaragua, accompanied by reporters on a 36-hour, self-appointed fact-finding mission with another freshman, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa. Congressional Democrats had accused the White House of exaggerating the communist threat posed by the Sandinista regime. So the two senators were publicly castigated when -- just days after meeting with Daniel Ortega and other leaders of the regime -- the Sandinistas climbed aboard a plane to Moscow to cement their Soviet ties.

Secretary of State George Shultz declared that Kerry and Harkin had been "used" by the Nicaraguans, and he ridiculed them for their naivete in "dealing with the communists." Kerry was called "silly" in the Boston press.

During this time, North was an obscure White House aide, a man with a ramrod-straight disposition, short cropped hair, patriotic zeal, and unflagging allegiance to President Reagan. North had secretly begun to organize a complex scheme to raise money from wealthy conservatives, foreign nations, and eventually from the proceeds of secret arms sales to circumvent the Boland amendments and keep the contras in the field.

Word that something was afoot began to seep into Kerry's Capitol Hill office, which had become a magnet for tips from left-leaning journalists, activists, and conspiracy theorists drawn to the senator's antiwar history and his criticisms of Reagan's Central American policy.

Kerry worried that a repeat of Vietnam -- with a White House misleading the public -- was in the making. "A central part of my campaign had been the notion that I would bring to the Senate the experience of the Vietnam period, which cautioned me against the kind of illegal activities we were hearing about, and the things that were going on," Kerry recalls. "Literally, I did do an ad hoc investigation."

SNIP

During the investigation, an Oregon businessman claiming CIA ties, Richard Brenneke, whose testimony was taken by Kerry's committee, made the sensational and undocumented charge that Vice President George H. W. Bush's office had sanctioned a contra-drug smuggling operation. Bush challenged Kerry to "show some evidence and stop leaking out information that is not true."

Kerry denied he was the source of the leak, and the committee dropped the Brenneke angle.

Republican senators were suspicious of Kerry's motives. The Kerry investigation -- done in the midst of the 1988 presidential campaign pitting Vice President Bush against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis -- was "being conducted as if it were a division of the Dukakis campaign," recalls Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who served as ranking Republican on the subcommittee. The probe "deteriorated into a biased partisan agenda" that, to McConnell, was primarily aimed at cooking up allegations to tarnish Bush's reputation and presidential hopes.

SNIP

Kerry's personal life, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly tumultuous. He had separated from his first wife, Julia Thorne, in 1982, and the divorce became final in 1988. For much of their marriage, Julia, who came from a wealthy Long Island family, had provided significant financial contributions. The divorce left Kerry strapped for cash and looking for ways to meet child-support payments, campaign debts, and tuition costs.

He took out a $473,000 loan to purchase a home in Washington, thinking his daughters would be staying with him for periods of time. It was "a huge mistake," he says, as he found himself returning to Boston most weekends to maintain his ties to his children and the state. He sold the D.C. home and bought a Boston condo but "lost his shirt" when he sold it a few years later, as he told the Globe in 1996. "He was broke," Blum says.

To make ends meet, Kerry collected speaking fees, averaging about $1,400 apiece and $26,000 a year total during his first five years in the Senate. Most of the honoraria were from think tanks and schools; some were paid by trade associations such as the Massachusetts Bankers Association or corporations such as Goldman Sachs and Chevron, which had legislative interests before Congress.

Kerry pocketed another $21,000 in a low-risk real estate deal in 1986, arranged by his campaign treasurer, developer Wesley Finch. In a business brochure the next year, Finch boasted about his relationship with Kerry, stating he "works closely with the senator and his colleagues on tax and economic issues that come to the floor of the United States Senate."

Finch had cut in his friends, Kerry and his then-Senate aide, Ronald Rosenblith, on an investment in condominium units in Salem and Clinton. One of the units was already under a purchase-and-sales agreement by the time Finch brought in Kerry and Rosenblith as partners, the Globe reported in 1996, although all three said Finch never informed them of that. The Globe calculated their profit at 31 percent in about six months.

Kerry has long maintained he never used his influence on Finch's behalf, but he did acknowledge he was stung by the press reports on the deal and soured on investments after that. "I thought it was legitimate," Kerry said of the deal. But "I found that the inquiries made me profoundly uncomfortable, and I never invested again in the 11 years after that . . . I have never since invested one penny in anything" as exotic.

Kerry acknowledges money "was tight" for him in those days. "I was spending all I had," he says. Regarding honoraria, which Congress banned in 1991, Kerry says: "I did not take honoraria from anyone who had anything in front of my committee."

Kerry also signed on as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the fund-raising arm for Senate Democrats, for the 1987-1988 cycle. This would help him tap the network of national Democratic donors.

Kerry's current wife, Teresa Heinz, calls the late 1980s his "gypsy period." For months at a time he had no fixed address and crashed instead with his daughters when Julia was away or with Julia's brother David.

Sometimes, he stayed with a girlfriend who had been his former law partner, Roanne Sragow, now a district court judge in Massachusetts. (She declined to be interviewed.) Or he stayed with a Vietnam buddy or on a per diem basis in condos owned by wealthy contributors: developers Finch and Edward W. Callan, and lobbyist and campaign fund-raiser Robert Farmer. Eventually, he rented a one-room apartment in Washington and an apartment in Boston.

During this period, Kerry was linked romantically with several Hollywood starlets, including Morgan Fairchild, and his dating life became fodder for gossip columnists in Boston and Washington. Kerry declined to discuss this period of his social life, other than to make this reference to the 2000 presidential campaign, in which then-candidate George W. Bush confessed only to unnamed youthful indiscretions.

"If George Bush can run around and say `When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible,' " says Kerry. "I can say when I was young and single, I was young and single."

A new campaign

As Kerry prepared for his reelection campaign in 1990, he found that the tables were sometimes turned -- the senator who loved investigations became the subject of informal inquiry. Reporters queried candidates in the race about drug use, and Kerry was forced to admit that he had smoked marijuana after he returned from Vietnam. "About 20 years ago, I tried marijuana. I didn't like it. I have never used or tried any drug since," Kerry said through a spokesman at the time.

Republicans and the media also raised questions about his dealings with wealthy donors. The most prominent inquiry focused on one of Kerry's major fund-raisers, a savings and loan executive named David Paul, who emerged as a principal figure in the savings and loan scandals of the time and who had ties to BCCI.

Paul's CenTrust Savings Bank of Miami failed in 1990 and cost taxpayers an estimated $2 billion, according to a report prepared by the Republican staff of the Senate Judiciary Committee. The investigation found that Paul "spent millions of dollars of insured deposits on such lavish personal perquisites as an art collection, the leasing of an airplane frequently used for personal and political purposes, operating expenses of a $7 million yacht owned by another Paul business interest, the purchase of a sailboat, Persian rugs, Baccarat crystal, foreign linens, and other expensive furnishings."

The Republican investigators also found there was "an interlocking relationship" between CenTrust and BCCI in the person of Ghaith R. Pharaon, a Saudi investor in both banks, who paid to fly six French chefs to a lavish 1988 dinner party at Paul's Florida home, attended by Kerry and other legislators. Kerry was among those politicians who flew on Paul's jet, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Kerry chaired, leased Paul's yacht for fund-raisers.

When their relationship became known, Kerry acknowledged that Paul had asked for special consideration of a banking amendment CenTrust needed. Paul had contacted Kerry and other key lawmakers in 1989, seeking to weaken a portion of the savings and loan bailout bill. Specifically, he wanted to dilute the part of the bill that restricted institutions' use of "good will" assets rather than capital, as reserves against losses.

Kerry wrote Paul a friendly letter, inviting him to Washington "so that we can sit down and perhaps follow up." But, the senator said, he ultimately opposed Paul's request, which failed to win support in Congress.

Blum, the former Kerry aide, says the senator "came to understand he was being compromised." Blum stresses that Kerry in the end "got out of there."

Still, the matter became fodder in the reelection campaign, with Republican hopeful Jim Rappaport asking: "How could John Kerry possibly have appointed David Paul to a senior position in the Democratic Party?" Despite Rappaport's self-financed campaign and the nation's anti-incumbent mood, Kerry's performance during his first Senate term proved sufficiently popular to secure a healthy 57 percent of the state's vote.

This will come out in the wash...good to know ...if it's true

If it is true, this will never be known by the general public.
It will be hidden, denied, and ridiculed to make anyone that brings it up out to be, "just another heckler spouting garbage".

That's the way politics works when you get into the upper arenas. Especially the Dem arenas.

And even if it does get out, do you think that the DemoncRATS care?
How else did a womanizing, scum of the earth, draft dodging, Soviet loving, backwater governor get to be President of the United States?

Thanks... yes I saw it or another posting of it..... I guess he'll get center attention now that Dean slipped some. NH will be a telling event for Dean... If he doesn't finish in at least 2nd place I think he'll be out of it, imo. There are several more states with primaries the first week of Feb..... In just a few days I think things will shake out for them and we'll see who the viable ones are .... Sharpton may hang around for a little longer hoping to get a seat at the table as he says....

**Those two other people with Ortega are Mr. and Mrs. Tom Harkin.**

And Harking endorsed Deaniac Dean? LOL!

Great post!

It looks like we have Senator Two-Face here

The REAL John Kerry