Tour of Duty - What Douglas Brinkley's Portrait of John Kerry Reveals (About Brinkley & Kerry)

History News Network ^ | 2/9/04 | Andrew Ferguson - Weekly Standard

[NormsRevenge]

Mr. Ferguson is a senior editor at the Weekly Standard.

[JRandomFreeper]

Was Kerry in Viet Nam? I hadn't heard that.

/john

[NormsRevenge]

And then there is this from Jan Barry posted January 20, 2004 in the online version of Intervention magazine.

Jan Barry is a journalist, poet and author. A former West Pointer, he was a founder of VVAW -- Vietnam Veterans Against the War and also is involved with the VIAW -- Veterans Against the Iraq War.

Jan was in the U.S. Army from 1962-65 which included a tour in Vietnam, is the author of A Citizen's Guide to Grassroots Campaigns and an editor of three literary anthologies including Winning Hearts & Minds: War Poems by Vietnam Veterans. Jan was a New Jersey coordinator for US-USSR Bridges for Peace, and director of the Essex County (NJ) Office on Peace.

---

Book Review by Jan Barry


Whatever the outcome of John Kerry’s quest to be elected president of the United States, he is like so many Vietnam veterans lucky to still be around. Wounded three times in firefights, Kerry’s hobbies include motorcycles, flying loops in small airplanes, and taking the controls of helicopters during campaign hops.

Sporting an Ivy League pedigree rivaling that of President Bush, Kerry is flying into a political maelstrom that destroyed the presidential hopes of two other Vietnam war heroes—Bob Kerrey and John McCain—and upended the Senate career of a third (Max Cleland). Kerry’s run for the White House, therefore, is extraordinary historic drama.

By happenstance or a good hunch, historian Douglas Brinkley found an eyewitness perch to watch up close Kerry’s latest challenge of the fates. Just as Brinkley was wrapping up a carefully researched examination of a Yale grad’s transformation from warrior to antiwar activist to venerable member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the subject of this interesting slice of history announced he was running for president.

Brinkley scrambled to finish his 16th work of history—with an excerpt hustled into the December issue of Atlantic Monthly—on a political journalist’s deadline. The combination of scholarly research and first-hand reporting creates a fascinating portrait of a star-crossed presidential candidate, seemingly in training since he was a teenager invited on a summer cruise with the Kennedy clan, including the president who uncannily shared the same initials: JFK.

Brinkley found that John Forbes Kerry is hardly a Kennedy wannabe. Instead of launching a political career as a chesty war hero—the tried and true path of John F. Kennedy and many other national leaders—Kerry returned from Vietnam with a fistful of medals and joined the war protestors. Most of this book focuses on Kerry’s experiences as a Navy lieutenant in Vietnam that led to his decision to break ranks with the establishment he was born and bred to defend and perhaps one day lead.

Perhaps the biggest surprise in this account of Kerry’s military exploits is that amid sleepless rounds of river patrol missions deep in Viet Cong-held regions, Kerry kept a meticulous journal. He was constantly asking other GI’s about their experiences and jotting down notes. But back home he found it too hard to write the book he planned. Decades later, Brinkley was offered a look at Kerry’s war journals.

They record in staccato Hemingway-style running narrow rivers with machineguns blazing from a patrol boat, hoping to survive the shooting from the riverbanks. And then being ordered to run the same ambush alleys again and again. They describe in vivid detail the deaths of soldiers and civilians, who are treated as mere statistics by higher-ups. “Take the fight to the enemy’s backyard, Operation Sealords ordained, and the American Swift boats roamed the waterways of the Mekong Delta shooting up everything in sight,” Brinkley wrote. Kerry recorded every detail of these missions and his growing disgust with military assaults on Vietnamese fishermen and farmers “that betrayed the very reason that we were supposed to be there,” he wrote.

Joining Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry’s raw-edged, impassioned call to end the war and provide better treatment for battered veterans attracted intense media coverage. He drew the wrath of the Nixon administration, many former Navy buddies, and outraged wives of American POWS held in North Vietnamese prisons. His denunciation in an address to Congress of brutal U.S. military actions that he bluntly called war crimes infuriated flag-waving patriots. The shock wave set off by Kerry’s antiwar activism derailed his campaign for a seat in Congress.

Hounded by journalists who kept snidely speculating on what national office Kerry would seek next, he snapped at a Boston Herald American reporter in 1978: “If I had been calculating, I would have kept my mouth shut when I got out of the service and run for office on my record,” said Kerry, who was working as a lowly assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. “There I was, a decorated veteran, a Yale graduate—I could have gone the traditional road and probably been in Washington now.”

Kerry felt a kinship with the scruffy, bitter, working-class young veterans in VVAW that drew him to blaze a different path to public service. “Kerry thought, these veterans need to be heard—they had earned that right the hard way, on the battlefield,” Brinkley writes of Kerry’s decision to organize a veterans’ protest march on Washington that rocked the Nixon administration and ensured that Kerry was a marked man in traditional circles.

“I wouldn’t put Vietnam away,” Kerry told Brinkley. “It was a question of responsibility, of keeping faith with why I survived, why I was lucky enough to come back—and others didn’t. I took on a deep responsibility on a very personal level of making sure guys like [his close friends] Dick Pershing and Don Droz didn’t die in vain. We had to make something positive out of all this absurdity.”

Kerry’s Ivy League background and the media spotlight he attracted irked many of his VVAW comrades, who resented what they felt was a crass maneuver to launch a political campaign from the righteous platform of their protest. But Kerry also inspired many veterans to focus their anger and articulate their own stand.

“I felt isolated in Georgia,” Max Cleland, who was severely wounded in Vietnam, told Brinkley. “Then all of a sudden a fellow Silver Star winner named John Kerry was on TV saying what I was saying—only better.” In an astute piece of political reporting, Brinkley brackets the beginning and conclusion of his book with comments by Cleland.

“Decades later, Cleland, who would go on to be elected a U.S. senator, still vividly remembered April 22, 1971. “It was a day that changed my life…Kerry’s words still bolt right through what’s left of my body…When he said ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’—that was gutsy.”

When Kerry announced his candidacy for president in September, flanked by former patrol boat crew members he served with in Vietnam, Cleland rolled up in a wheelchair, sporting a Kerry for President button, Brinkley writes. “Brother,” he said as he placed a well-worn volume in Kerry’s hand, “this is my family Bible. I want you to keep it with you at all times…You’ve got to keep it, brother. You’ve got to win. It’s your duty.”

These days, John Kerry sounds as traditional as a political figure can get—declaring his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in front of an aircraft carrier, invoking prayers amid an arsenal of military might, his image flashing repeatedly on television, defending his vote for war in Iraq as a bipartisan stand for action through the United Nations that Bush, Kerry maintains, misused as license for unilateral invasion.

Once again, many in VVAW and other war protestors are at odds with John Kerry. Regrettably, Brinkley doesn’t explore Kerry’s stance in the current war debate. But he does uncover another astonishing example of Kerry’s influence on a wide range of Vietnam veterans. Among those who tried to discredit Kerry’s 1971 antiwar testimony to Congress was another Navy officer named Armistead Maupin. In a bizarre twist of fate, Maupin went from hobnobbing with Nixon in the White House to writing popular novels about the gay lifestyle in San Francisco. “Kerry, as it turns out, was dead right about Vietnam,” Maupin told Brinkley. “These days, of course, I’m a lot more antiwar than Senator Kerry, so I hope he takes a tougher stand against Bush’s invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq. Just as important, he also needs to lead on the issue of allowing gay people in the military.”

In the interest of full disclosure, I am one of Brinkley’s sources quoted in this book, as a VVAW organizer who worked with Kerry on the 1971 veterans’ march on Washington. Brinkley concisely recreated the atmosphere and issues that inflamed people in those days. But the haste in publishing amid a heated presidential campaign resulted in some bloopers, such as the misspelling of some veterans’ names and places in Vietnam and misstated titles of cited books. These are minor irritants, however, in a major league book that describes through John Kerry’s story how greatly the war in Vietnam transformed many Americans.

[Just mythoughts]

"Kerry's Bronze Star was awarded for an action that has lately been well-publicized--the rescue of Army Lieutenant Jim Rassman, who earlier this year, unbidden, phoned Kerry's presidential campaign days before the Iowa caucuses and volunteered to help. Rassman believes, "

and the citation makes clear, that he owes his life to Kerry and his crew."

When a fleet of Swift boats came under heavy fire from AK-47s and rocket launchers on shore, several of the boats were blown to a shambles, and Rassman was thrown overboard. He swam through sniper fire coming from both banks of the river, but there was nowhere to go. Kerry turned his boat and headed into the barrage, toward the floundering Rassman. Though his own right arm had already been hit by shrapnel, Kerry left his pilothouse and pulled Rasmussen out of the water as his crew returned a hail of gun and rocket fire."



What citation, and whose citation? This is the first time this event has been mention since Vietnam that I have been able to find.

I have been putting off checking out this book, to see what evidence is given for this story.

I am not saying it did not happen.

[jackbill]

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Your paragraph:

Swift boats--fifty-foot aluminum craft built to maneuver in shallow water--were assigned to patrol the Mekong Delta, stopping Viet Cong supply boats loaded with ordnance for guerrilla fighters in the south. It was perilous duty. Kerry volunteered for it. "You had to be a bit of a cowboy to want a Swift," a veteran tells Brinkley. "It meant that you were willing to get shot up all the time." On the evidence, Kerry was indeed a bit of a cowboy, though he never endangered his men unnecessarily, and he did indeed get shot up, though only one of his three wounds put him out of action for any length of time. Kerry's heroism is simply a fact, bald and undeniable. And it is the form his heroics took that is especially impressive.

is bull-shit. When Kerry volunteered for the Swift boats, they were doing coastal duty, not Mecong Delta patrols. Kerry volunteered for cushy duty and two weeks later was moved into the river. Four months later he was state-side.

[jackbill]

In the inimitable words of Lyndon Baines Johnson, Douglas Brinkley is a piss-ant.

[river rat]

I think I'm going to be sick....
Semper Fi

[NormsRevenge]

Sorry about that , Chief.

I didn't have any room on the title line for a BARF Alert. :-)

[Plutarch]

... it sheds light on the life of a presidential candidate who is not a boob.

Not so fast there, Andy....

[Paladin2]

"Having been wounded three times, Kerry was entitled to ask for reassignment, and he did, angling for something out of the line of fire. He was sent home early, to Brooklyn, where he landed a comfortable assignment as a personal aide to an admiral, who after a few more months granted Kerry's request for early discharge from the Navy."

By enlisting in the Navy, JFK avoided the draft.

[NormsRevenge]

Speaking of boobs,, and the name Andy ..

Kind of off the track, but hey, It's Saturday night ;-}

Is Andy Rooney ready for retirement or what?

He is so far over the edge, he can't even see it anymore. His latest diatribe last Sunday earns him the "Certifiable" Stamp, imo.

[Wolverine]

"I never wanted to be a professional veteran," he protested to a reporter during one of his early political campaigns. But of course that's what he's been....

Just another exploiter, liar, denigrating honorable veterans.

[u-89]

"...common attribute of the presidential historian is toadyism--an admiration for his subject that sooner or later puddles into sycophancy"

That line says it all. Doris Kearns Goodwin squirms and glows like she's cuming every time FDR or LBJ's names are mentioned. I'll never forget the time Walter Williams was on the McNeal/Lehr News Hour with their regular panel of presidential historians Beschloss, Goodwin and Haynes Johnson. Williams said taxes were legalized theft and the 3 of them had a collective conniption fit - one they couldn't get over for the whole segment. It was funny that by their heated overreaction in defending a basic tenet of liberalism, the income tax they exposed themselves for the frauds they really are - they're not professional historians they're liberal activists and professional butt kissers.

[okie01]

... it sheds light on the life of a presidential candidate who is not a boob.

Not so fast there, Andy....

If not a boob, then surely a pompous ass.

[Mr Rogers]

...and he did indeed get shot up, though only one of his three wounds put him out of action for any length of time.

2 Purple Hearts for injuries that required NO time missed from work. One Purple Heart which, depending on who you ask, resulted in either no time missed, or 2 days. At best, his 3 Purple Hearts were from 'wounds' resulting in 2 days missed - not quite what most of us think of as Purple Heart material.

Instead of turning the boat back from the line of fire, which would have exposed other crews to danger, Kerry ordered his helmsman to steer the Swift straight to the point on shore from which the gunfire was blazing.

Don't know if it is true - know nothing about Swift boats - but have read that by beaching his boat, he was needlessly endangering his crew. If he had turned away, he could have raked the area with 50 cal machine gun fire with no significant danger to his boat. That is why his commander was uncertain if he should put JK in for a medal, or court-martial him. It was brave, but stupid.

From a Boston Globe account of JK's Vietnam record, it sounds like he got a lot of credit for being brave when he was really just stupid.

[NormsRevenge]

FRom National Journal and on Drudge FRiday Night...

Kerry's Tour of Duty in the Senate Yields Prestigious 'Most Liberal" Senate Ranking

This takes some doing, Folks.

XXXXX DRUDGE REPORT XXXXX FRI FEB 27, 2004 09:39:45 ET XXXXX

NUMBER ONE: KERRY RANKED 'MOST LIBERAL' IN SENATE ROLL CALL VOTES, TOPS KENNEDY, CLINTON

NATIONAL JOURNAL on Friday claimed Democrat frontrunner John Kerry has the "most liberal" voting record in the Senate.

The results of Senate vote ratings show that Kerry was the most liberal senator in 2003, with a composite liberal score of 96.5 -- far ahead of such Democrat stalwarts as Ted Kennedy and Hillary Clinton.

NATIONAL JOURNAL's scores, which have been compiled each year since 1981, are based on lawmakers' votes in three areas: economic policy, social policy, and foreign policy.

"To be sure, Kerry's ranking as the No. 1 Senate liberal in 2003 -- and his earning of similar honors three times during his first term, from 1985 to 1990 -- will probably have opposition researchers licking their chops," NATIONAL JOURNAL reports.

[middie]

The award of every medal is accompanied by a narrative of the event that precipitated the award, it's called the "citation" and it is what's read to the assembled folks when the actualy medal is placed either around the neck of pinned on the recipient.

[middie]

Let's see if I got this correct: It's heroic for a non-flying National Guard pilot who removed himself from flying status to receive an early out and a discharge from the Guard but it's something sinister when a guy who was where the bullets were whizzing and with three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star gets an early out. (I puposely omitted the Bronze Star since virtually all of us got one of those for simply being there. That was an example of medal inflation and career enhancement). To the contrary, Purple Hearts and Silver Stars were awarded only when the proper criteria was met.

Hey, if you think Sen. Kerry's public policy positions are wrong, stupid or for whatever reason, etc. Or, if you don't care for his political orientation or philosophy, then by all means work to defeat him. But it's nothing less than idiocy to denigrate his service record---especially in comparison to G.W. Bush's absence of any meaningful service. Notice please I didn't say lack of service. His Guard service was lawful and honorable, but still unremarkable and non-contributory.

[Intolerant in NJ]

“If I had been calculating, I would have kept my mouth shut when I got out of the service and run for office on my record,” said Kerry, who was working as a lowly assistant district attorney in Massachusetts. “There I was, a decorated veteran, a Yale graduate—I could have gone the traditional road and probably been in Washington now.”...Total BS - by the end of the '60's it was absolutely necessary for anyone with any ambition in the 'rat party to be vociferously anti-war - Robert F. Kennedy, who was giving speeches in support of the war in 1963, had taken the hipsters in the party to the anti-war side by the time he was assassinated in 1968 - and Kerry lost out in his first bid for Congress in 1970 because the party nominated a rabid anti-war candidate, Father Drinen, in the district he wanted to run in...to get where he wanted to go, being anti-war was an absolute mandate.....

[Just mythoughts]

The citation that JFKerry has on his web site makes no mention of saving anyone.