Kerry's World: Father Knows Best

By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book, The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man. Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off Cape Cod. If he had any reasons for professional bitterness, they should have long since faded.

None of these facts, however, becalmed him. His book has a young man's brash, polemical tone. The Star-Spangled Mirror is a critique of moralism in America's foreign policy -- and, more than that, it is a critique of America's national character.

"Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority.

Despite its blunt arguments, The Star-Spangled Mirror received little attention. Foreign Affairs greeted it with a 90-word summation in its review section. But the work of Richard Kerry, who passed away in 2000, will soon experience posthumous reconsideration. It won't be because of the renewed relevance of his arguments (although his book does read like a contemporary brief against neoconservatism). It will be because his son is a leading candidate to run U.S. foreign policy.

According to the conventional telling of John Kerry's biography, largely told by Kerry himself, his foreign policy views were forged in the Mekong Delta. During his disillusioning four-month combat stint on a Navy Swift Boat, the limits of U.S. power were revealed to him. As Newsweek argued in a cover story last month, "Kerry's policy views, as well as his politics, were profoundly shaped by the war." But, for all the neatness this narrative provides, it overlooks an entire chapter in Kerry's intellectual history: his childhood. In fact, Kerry's foreign policy worldview, characterized by a steadfast belief in international institutions and a suspicion of U.S. hard power, had fallen into place long before he ever enlisted. As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry."

Richard Kerry's father, a Czech Jew, fled Europe. The son, by contrast, embraced it. As a law student at Harvard in the late '30s, he read continental philosophers like Kierkegaard and histories about Bismarck and Metternich; he traveled to France, where he took sculpture classes and met his wife. Hoping to parlay his love of Europe into a career, he chose international law as his law school specialty. After World War II, which he spent in the Army Air Corps testing new airplanes at high altitudes, he moved his family to Washington to take a spot in the Department of the Navy's Office of General Counsel, hoping that his proximity to the State Department might help him land a job there.

Two years into his Washington stint, Kerry's relocation paid off. The State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs hired him to help work through the thicket created by America's adherence to a new set of postwar international agreements. According to Brinkley, the cosmopolitan Kerry was a true believer in the United Nations and the postwar promise of global government.

But, as much as he believed in the United Nations, it was not his prime passion. A devoted Europeanist, Kerry was more preoccupied with the devastation of Europe and the monumental task of reconstructing it -- a romantic project that enticed a generation of young diplomats, including George Kennan and George Ball. The appeal of the task wasn't just the economic and physical rebuilding of the continent. Kerry and others like him viewed themselves as building a new political order for the continent, a new method for arranging international affairs that would consign war to the dustbin of history. In the early '50s, Kerry became an enthusiast for NATO and the nascent efforts at creating a unified Europe.

In 1954, Kerry received an assignment that put him at ground zero of the cold war. He moved to Berlin to advise former Harvard President James B. Conant, whom Dwight D. Eisenhower had charged with overseeing the rehabilitation of West Germany. Once again, Kerry's job consigned him primarily to lawyerly work. His chief task was to devise answers to the questions created by Berlin's confused status. Martha Mautner, a political officer who served with Kerry in Germany, told me, "There were so many questions about the status of Berlin that the lawyers had to handle. There were Four Powers [the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union] running the city. What was its relationship to the Federal Republic?" But Kerry's interests extended far beyond these matters. During his tenure in Europe, he attended conferences in Paris, London, and The Hague, where he discussed with other mid-level diplomats the future of the transatlantic alliance and the possibilities of a new continental order. According to Brinkley, through these conferences, Kerry established relationships with a group of like-minded government officials, including the famed French planning commissioner (and intellectual architect of the European Union) Jean Monnet.

These conferences reinforced Kerry's belief that the preservation of the Atlantic alliance and the creation of a new Europe should be the overriding priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the reality of U.S. policy was far different. For most of the Eisenhower administration, America's prime objective was containing communism. And, unlike the administration he served, Kerry believed that cooperation and diplomacy, rather than militarism, should resolve these tensions. In The Star-Spangled Mirror, he condemns the United States for "lecturing" European allies about the horrors of communism and accuses it of "bad manners" and "spoiled behavior." He writes, "At times we expected the allies unquestioningly to follow our leads; sometimes we failed to consult them in advance before reversing policies; at other times we ignored their requests."

Even at the time, Kerry wasn't quiet about his disagreement with the hard-line anti-communists. Although he had initially viewed Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a kindred spirit and cultivated a relationship with him, Kerry felt uncomfortable with his rhetoric about "godless communism." (In his book, Kerry spends several pages arguing against Dulles's "intensely moralistic outlook.") According to Brinkley, Kerry bluntly told Dulles the shortcomings of his increasingly hawkish approach, undermining their relationship in the process. This was typical behavior for Kerry, who had a growing reputation for outspokenness. John Kerry's friend and former aide Jonathan Winer says, "[Richard Kerry] was a dissident in a time of conformity."

For all his impolitic instincts, Kerry's undeniable competence kept propelling his career forward. Following his posting in Berlin, he served as top aide to Georgia Democrat Walter George, the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And, in 1958, he took what would be his highest posting in the Foreign Service, as Oslo's chief political officer, where he played a vital role in opening Norway to American spies and weapons. But his competence could get him only so far -- which is to say, it couldn't overcome his maverick reputation and win him a coveted ambassadorship. By the Kennedy administration, Brinkley says, Kerry sensed he had hit a ceiling in the Foreign Service. Kerry told his family, "They seem not to listen to what I have to say, so I'm going to quit." Brinkley adds, "He saw his role as becoming a protester, criticizing the government from the outside in lectures and his book."

Richard Kerry, whose own father committed suicide, was not a very effusive parent. When his twelve-year-old son John lay quarantined with scarlet fever at his Swiss boarding school, Richard Kerry didn't make the trip from Berlin to visit him. But there was at least one subject that fostered easy conversation between the two: foreign policy. "It allowed them to break through an emotional wall," says Brinkley. "They talked about foreign policy the way most fathers and sons talk about football." Well into his Senate career, John Kerry would phone his father to ask his opinion about international issues ranging from arms control to Central America. Watching the conversations, Winer says, "I saw two people talking about policy very seriously with unexpressed affection."

From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians.

There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry. Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not, even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the administration's "high-handed treatment of our European allies, on everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just deeply felt; they're in his blood.

Grandpa Kerry threw off his Jewish heritage, chose an Irish last name and an Irish town to live and run a business in.

It is strange why the grandfather chose an Irish name and moved to Boston with its large Irish population. Brookline, though, was a WASP stronghold when he lived there, and became quite Jewish in subsequent years.

I don't know why he converted, but many Jews of his generation felt alienated from Orthodoxy and saw conversion as a step towards assimilation. Some felt as though they were already virtually in the gentile world, and conversion would simply be an acknowledgement of this. Many did so for purely practical and opportunistic reasons, but Frederick Kerry does seem to have taken it seriously. He may not have been the only Austrian to take the name Kerry, either. Manfred Kerry, a politician in Vienna, claims to be a distant cousin.

You may have a point about Richard Kerry. I don't know if he blamed America for his father's suicide, but he was probably looking for something to attach himself to in order to make sense of the world and have a place in it, and found it in the Old World. Perhaps he was returning to such roots as he did have. Perhaps Harvard opened the European option for him and made it hard for him to find a place in ordinary, everyday America without opening the world of Brahmin Boston to him.

John Kerry inherited his father's marginal position: not quite being a Brahmin, but not quite being anything else. So perhaps he clings to his father's book and ideas as one legacy or root that he clearly does have. Father and son shared the arrogance of the person who always claims to know better than others, and the frustration that this isn't recognized by people. Apparently, European opinion and One World sentiment became the rock they built their would view upon.

This is truly strange, though:

What's also curious about the article is that it doesn't let on how Richard Kerry supported himself after leaving the government.

I think this is worth the time reading......

Subject: An Interesting Speech By A Navy Captain

Subject: WW III

Read the catalogue of events in this brief piece. Then, ask yourself how anyone can take the position that all we have to do is bring our troops home from Iraq, sit back, reset the snooze alarm, go back to sleep, and no one will ever bother us again?

In case you missed it, World War III began in November 1979................that alarm has been ringing for years!

U.S. Navy Captain Ouimette is the Executive Officer at Naval Air Station, Pensacola, Florida. Here is a copy of the speech he gave last month. It is an accurate account of why we are in so much trouble today and why the
action we are taking now is so necessary and critical for our future as a free society.

AMERICA NEEDS TO WAKE UP!

That's what we think we heard on the 11th of September 2001 (When more than 3,000 Americans were killed) and maybe it was, but I think it should have been "Get Out of Bed!" In fact, I think the alarm clock has been
buzzing since 1979 and we have continued to hit the snooze button and roll over for a few more minutes of peaceful sleep since then.
It was a cool fall day in November 1979 in a country going through a religious and political upheaval when a group of Iranian students attacked and seized the American Embassy in Tehran. This seizure was an outright
attack on American soil; it was an attack that held the world's most powerful country hostage and paralyzed a Presidency. The attack on this sovereign U. S. embassy set the stage for events to follow for the next 23 years.

America was still reeling from the aftermath of the Vietnam experience and had a serious threat from the Soviet Union when then, President Carter, had to do something. He chose to conduct a clandestine raid in the desert. The ill-fated mission ended in ruin, but stood as a symbol of America's inability to deal with terrorism.

America's military had been decimated and downsized/right sized since the end of the Vietnam War. A poorly trained, poorly equipped and poorly organized military was called on to execute a complex mission that was
doomed from the start.

Shortly after the Tehran experience, Americans began to be kidnapped and killed throughout the Middle East. America could do little to protect her citizens living and working abroad. The attacks against US soil continued.

In April of 1983 a large vehicle packed with high explosives was driven into the US Embassy compound in Beirut. When it explodes, it kills 63 people. The alarm went off again and America hit the Snooze Button once
more.

Then just six short months later a large truck heavily laden down with over 2500 pounds of TNT smashed through the main gate of the US Marine Corps headquarters in Beirut and 241 US servicemen are killed. America
mourns her dead and hit the Snooze Button once more.

Two months later in December 1983, another truck loaded with explosives is driven into the US Embassy in Kuwait, and America continues her slumber.

The following year, in September 1984, another van was driven into the gates of the US Embassy in Beirut and America slept.

Soon the terrorism spreads to Europe. In April 1985 a bomb explodes in a restaurant frequented by US soldiers in Madrid.

Then in August a Volkswagen loaded with explosives is driven into the main gate of the US Air Force Base at Rhein-Main; 22 are killed and the snooze alarm is buzzing louder and louder as US interests are continually
attacked.

Fifty-nine days later a cruise ship, the Achille Lauro is hijacked and we watched as an American in a wheelchair is singled out of the passenger list and executed.

The terrorists then shift their tactics to bombing civilian airliners when they bomb TWA Flight 840 in April of 1986 that killed 4 and the most tragic bombing, Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland in 1988, killing 259.

Clinton treated these terrorist acts as crimes; in fact we are still trying to bring these people to trial. These are acts of war.

The wake up alarm is getting louder and louder. The terrorists decide to bring the fight to America. In January 1993, two CIA agents are shot and killed as they enter CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The following month, February 1993, a group of terrorists are arrested after a rented van packed with explosives is driven into the underground parking garage of the World Trade Center in New York City. Six people are killed and over 1000 are injured. Still this is a crime and not an act of war?

The Snooze alarm is depressed again.

Then in November 1995 a car bomb explodes at a US military complex in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia killing seven service men and women.

A few months later in June of 1996, another truck bomb explodes only 35 yards from the US military compound in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. It destroys the Khobar Towers, a US Air Force barracks, killing 19 and injuring
over 500. The terrorists are getting braver and smarter as they see that America does not respond decisively.

They move to coordinate their attacks in a simultaneous attack on two US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. These attacks were planned with precision. They kill 224. America responds with cruise missile attacks and goes back to sleep.

The USS Cole was docked in the port of Aden, Yemen for refueling on 12 October 2000, when a small craft pulled along side the ship and exploded killing 17 US Navy Sailors. Attacking a US War Ship is an act of war,
but we sent the FBI to investigate the crime and went back to sleep.

And of course you know the events of 11 September 2001. Most Americans think this was the first attack against US soil or in America. How wrong they are. America has been under a constant attack since 1979 and we chose to hit the snooze alarm and roll over and go back to sleep.

In the news lately we have seen lots of finger pointing from every high official in government over what they knew and what they didn't know. But if you've read the papers and paid a little attention I think you can see exactly what they knew. You don't have to be in the FBI or CIA or on the National Security Council to see the pattern that has been developing since 1979.

Our President is right on when he says we are engaged in a war. I think we have been in a war for the past 23 years and it will continue until we as a people decide enough is enough.

America needs to "Get out of Bed" and act decisively now. America has been changed forever. We have to be ready to pay the price and make the sacrifice to ensure our way of life continues. We cannot afford to keep
hitting the snooze button again and again and roll over and go back to sleep.

After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Admiral Yamamoto said "...it seems all we have done is awakened a sleeping giant."
This is the message we need to disseminate to terrorists around the world.

Support Our Troops and support President Bush for having the courage, political or militarily, to address what so many who preceded him didn't have the backbone to do, both Democrat and Republican. This is not a
political thing to be hashed over in an election year; this is an AMERICAN thing.

This is about our Freedom and the Freedom of our children and grandchildren in years to come.

Please forward this, especially to the young people and all those who dozed off in history class and who seem so quick to protest such a necessary military activity.

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