Consider the treatment he was handed when the two contradictory letters to Walter Carter surfaced a decade earlier.I remember it because it happened at the annual Lincoln Day Dinner of the Allegheny County Republican Party, March 20, 1991, at the William Penn Hotel.
At the time the first George Bush was still flush with victory in the Persian Gulf, and dinnergoers chortled over a videotaped presentation of assorted senate Democrats backpedaling in the wake of a war they'd opposed. Ted Kennedy was shown. News clips were shown. But for Kerry, the speaker simply read the two letters, to everyone's amazement.
"It's like those before-and-after pictures they print in the papers," the speaker said. "If they didn't tell you so themselves, you'd think they were different people."
Kerry has to remember that one. The speaker was Sen. John Heinz. Two weeks later, he would die in a plane crash. Four years after that, Kerry would marry his widow -- a woman who speaks directly and without equivocation and doesn't need two sets of letters to make her mind known.
He might want to ask her for a copy of the speech.
First I've heard about this one .. and frankly I find it scray