Old Harvard Crimson Interview Reveals A More Radical John Kerry [MUST READ]

Ten months after returning home from Vietnam, a young John Kerry strolled into the offices of The Harvard Crimson on Feb. 13, 1970 as an obscure underdog in the Democratic Congressional primary.

The decorated veteran, honorably discharged after a tour of duty in the Mekong Delta, spoke in fierce terms during his daylong interview with The Crimson’s Samuel Z. Goldhaber ’72.

But almost 34 years later, Kerry’s remarks on American military and intelligence operations vastly diverge from opinions expressed by the present-day Sen. John F. Kerry, D.-Mass., the leading candidate in the Democratic primary for president.

“I’m an internationalist,” Kerry told The Crimson in 1970. “I’d like to see our troops dispersed through the world only at the directive of the United Nations.”

Kerry said he wanted “to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care.”

The Kerry campaign, celebrating primary victories in Virginia and Tennessee last night, declined to comment on the senator’s remarks.

As a candidate for president, Kerry has said he supports the autonomy of the U.S. military and has never called for a scale-back of CIA operations.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert B. Reich defended Kerry’s 1970 statements as appropriate for their time.

“In the context of the Vietnam War, those comments are completely understandable,” said Reich, who has endorsed Kerry.

But a spokesperson for President Bush’s reelection campaign said Kerry’s 1970 remarks signaled the senator’s weakness on defense.

“President Bush will never cede the best interests of the national security of the American people to anybody but the president of the United States, along with the Congress,” said the spokesperson, Kevin A. Madden.

The increasingly likely matchup between Kerry and Bush has already prompted comparisons of the senator’s record in Vietnam and the president’s domestic service in the National Guard. And the two Yale graduates, both members of the secret society Skull and Bones, appeared set to square off in future months under the specter of the ongoing war in Iraq.

Goldhaber, whose first-person profile of Kerry ran in The Crimson Feb. 18, 1970, said yesterday he recalled the candidate as an emerging outsider whose campaign focused squarely on his opposition to the Vietnam War.

Still, Adam Clymer ’58, political director of the National Annenberg Election Survey at the University of Pennsylvania, said Kerry’s comments would likely find their way into Bush campaign materials.

“If I were them, I’d use this,” said Clymer, a former Crimson president. “I’d use it in direct mail.”

Kerry’s conservative opponents have already begun painting the Massachusetts senator and former deputy governor as an elite, New England liberal, and his 21-year voting record in the Senate may provide considerable ammunition.

Madden said the Bush campaign would highlight Kerry’s Senate votes should he win the Democratic nomination.

“If Kerry is the nominee, Republicans will try and search back into everything he ever said on every issue,” Reich predicted.

Kerry’s 1970 remarks to Goldhaber portray a fiery, novice politician inspired by his opposition to the Vietnam War.

“He struck me as very ambitious,” Goldhaber said yesterday. “He struck me as the sort of person—even back then, newly returned from Vietnam—who was thinking about running for president.”

He NEVER had a patriotic thought. While he was in Vietnam he compared the US help to S. Vietnam to German occupation of France!

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Here is a very long, but very insightful article:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1057936/posts

Tour of Duty: John Kerry in Vietnam (very long)
The Atlantic Monthly ^ | December 2003 | Douglas Brinkley

Senator John F. Kerry often cites his service in Vietnam as a formative element of his character. A new account of his time there—based on interviews with those who knew him well, and on his never-before-published letters home and his voluminous "war notes"—offers the first intimate look at a traumatic and life-altering experience.

"He had been considering Germany's occupation of France during World War II, he added, when "a thought came to me that I didn't like—I felt more like the German than the doughboy who came over to make the world safe for democracy and who rightfully had a star in his eye."

And here is the link to the actual full interview from the Harvard Crimson from 2/18/1970, courtesy of FReeper amordei.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1075941/posts

John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress [Original Interiew]
Harvard Crimson ^ | 2/18/1970 | Crimosn Staff Writer

Posted on 02/11/2004 7:07:14 AM PST by amordei

Excerpt:

"When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. The Navy assigned him to the USS Gridley which between December 1966 and July 1968 saw four months of action off the Vietnam coast. In August through November, 1968, Kerry was trained to be the skipper of a patrol boat for Vietnamese rivers. For the next five months, until April of 1969, Kerry was the commanding Lieutenant of a patrol boat in the Mekong Delta.

He was wounded slightly on three different occasions and received a Silver Star for bravery. His patrol boat took part in Operation Sealords, mostly scouting out Viet Cong villages and transporting South Vietnamese marines to various destinations up and down narrow rivers covered with heavy foliage on either side.

One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to be friend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities. "

"On other issues, Kerry wants "to almost eliminate CIA activity. The CIA is fighting its own war in Laos and nobody seems to care." He also favors a negative income tax and keeping unemployment at a very low level, "even if it means selective economic controls."

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P.S. Don't you get court martialed for disobeying orders from your superiors in the military?

"One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to be friend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities."

Most of us have done something in our youth that we regret and that we hope never shows up on the cover of a tabloid.

Few of us, however, can match Kut and Run Kerry's record of doing things calculated to appear noble, only to later disown them as tragic and misguided errors.

Take, for example, Kerry's military service. There is absolutely nothing in Kerry's history that suggests he ever thought of military service as anything but a resume enhancer. Anyone who's initials are JFK and who paled around with the real JFK could not help but notice that the legend of PT109 helped Kennedy's political career.

So we may assume that the man who copied Kennedy's initials was not above copying his military career, right down to the choice of assignments -- Small U.S. Navy boat -- and the choice of duty assignments: notch up a medal or two for heroism, save a comrade under fire, collect just the right number of "wounds" to earn a transfer out of combat. Kut and Run.

All of this would seem like fairly sensible behavior for most people. Service was an obligation. To have fulfilled it honorably is enough. But not for Kerry. He returned to an America that was quite different from Kennedy's. Vietnam combat experience, particularly if it included chasing down and killing an effectively unarmed enemy soldier, was not a resume enhancer.

So how to resolve this dilemma? Fortunately for Kerry there was an out, a twelve step plan for recovering veterans, the antiwar movement. At this point in Kerry's political life, a miracle occurs. LBJ decides not to run for reelection, and the Republicans take charge of the war.

Look at this miracle from Kerry's point of view. He is the reincarnation of JFK. He has all the family connections, he is a genuine war hero, but his service is tainted. The war is political poison. But now the real enemy is in power and the war that was conceived by Kennedy and escalated by Johnson is being run by Nixon. This is the perfect time to take to the streets with Jane Fonda.

All this propels Kerry into congress. The perfect timing that gives Kerry the right to claim both sides of the street. And now, thirty some years later, he has another dilemma. The country's mood has shifted again, and he has to revert to being a war hero.

This is risky, because he has spoken of the war as a criminal activity. He has avoided all discussion of the events leading to his combat medals. He has avoided discussion of his Purple Hearts, and the Band-Aid wounds that earned them.

The dilemma is this: which is the Smeagol Kerry and which is the Gollum Kerry? Is the good guy the one who served honorably in the war, or the one who blew the whistle on war crimes, including possibly, his own?

Few of us can picture ourselves in this situation. All the things we did in our youth that were calculated for political gain, now rattle about like tin drums, symbols of an empty man, a Band-Aid soldier, who never did anything or took a stand on any issue without first putting his Purple Heart hangnailed finger to the wind. But this is in fact, the real man, a hollow protuberance of the left wing anti-American Left. His only goal is to obtain power. He will do anything or say anything that furthers this aim. And right now, Smeagol and Gollum are on stage together, for all to see.

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