Proof please.
ANALYSIS: Kerry proves a complex potential candidate
By MELISSA B. ROBINSON, Associated Press
Last Updated 10:35 p.m. PDT Monday, June 16, 2003
WASHINGTON (AP) - A decorated Vietnam veteran who protested the war. A liberal-leaning Democrat who cautiously backed President Bush's Iraq war resolution. Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, both hawk and dove.
To some, those views show the potential presidential hopeful as thoughtful and complex. Or contradictory, say others.
"We learned something about the lies of our government and the savagery of war," said Brian Willson, who knew Kerry as an organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971 and worked with Kerry on veterans' issues and for his 1984 Senate campaign.
"We would expect him to adhere to those lessons," said Willson, 61, a Vietnam veteran and peace activist in Arcata, Calif.
Kerry entered the Navy in 1966 after college and served on a gunboat in Vietnam's Mekong Delta, said he is not bothered by criticism.
"I learned a long time ago that you do what's right in your gut, and you let the chips fall where they may, and you don't worry what people think," he said.
In a speech last week recommending middle-class tax cuts, greater energy independence and expanded health care coverage, Kerry accused President Bush of using the threat of war in Iraq to distract attention from economic problems.
Even so, some supporters think Kerry's own combat experience, and work on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, could help convince voters that he could lead in a crisis. Of those currently considered potential Democratic candidates, only Kerry and Al Gore, an Army journalist, were in Vietnam.
Former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam veteran who is president of New School University in New York City, said Kerry learned from Vietnam.
"He understands the world better as a consequence," said Kerrey. "There's a lot of gray areas in life. Vietnam was a very humbling experience."
Since Vietnam, Kerry has supported most U.S. military ventures, in Bosnia, Kosovo, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Grenada. In Kosovo, he went further than the Clinton administration, arguing that ground troops should remain as an option for stopping former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic's violent crackdown on the Serbian province's ethnic Albanian majority.
On Iraq, Kerry opposed the main resolution authorizing force in the Persian Gulf in 1991. But he has since criticized both former President Clinton and his successor, President Bush, for missed opportunities to disarm President Saddam Hussein. Recently, Kerry voted with 28 other Democrats and 48 Republicans for Bush's war resolution on Iraq.
Rick Weidman, director of government relations for Vietnam Veterans of America, said the question is not whether the use of force is ever justified, but whether, in a specific case, there is a plan in the national interest that warrants the cost of lives.
"It's different for every conflict," said Weidman, who has known Kerry for 30 years.
Other veterans cannot forgive Kerry for his protest days when he tossed medals - they were not his own - over a police barricade outside the Capitol in 1971.
"I don't see how he can take any position that we must support the troops on the battlefield," said Ted Sampley, 56, of Kinston, N.C.
Sampley, who did two combat tours in Vietnam, has been a longtime critic of Kerry's protests and his work as co-chairman of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs.
Kerry and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a former prisoner of war, became convinced in the early 1990s that some men may have been left alive in Vietnam but probably had died since. Sampley argues Vietnam should have been compelled to account for the fates of those captured but never returned.
McCain's North Vietnamese captors taunted him with press accounts of the medal tossing, and he has said he disagreed with Kerry's anti-war activities. But after years of working together, especially on the POW issue, the two have grown close.
For those who served with Kerry in Vietnam, his subsequent protests, or views on other conflicts, are irrelevant.
Del Sandusky, 58, of Elgin, Ill., served under Kerry on a patrol boat in 1969. When another boat hit a mine, Kerry ordered the dead and injured brought aboard and the sinking boat towed, about six miles, to the Gulf of Tonkin.
Because Americans had died on the boat, Kerry would not leave it behind for the enemy.
"All the boat crewmen volunteered to help in any way we can" with Kerry's campaigns, said Sandusky. "Whatever he wants, we'll help him with. Because we believe in him."