East Berlin balderdash

"When I was a young man," Sen. John F. Kerry told the Democratic National Convention on Thursday night, his father, Richard Kerry, "was in the State Department, stationed in Berlin when it and the world were divided between democracy and communism. I have unforgettable memories of ... Russians standing guard on the stark line separating East from West. On one occasion, I rode my bike into Soviet East Berlin. And when I proudly told my dad, he promptly grounded me. But what I learned has stayed with me for a lifetime. I saw how different life was on different sides of the same city. I saw the fear in the eyes of people who were not free."

His story was reported uncritically in Friday's newspapers. The Boston Globe even editorialized that "he was indelibly impressed by the constricted lives he saw" in East Berlin. Indelibly impressed? This is Hanoi John Kerry we're talking about, not some right-wing Red-baiter.

Sen. Kerry didn't supply dates and times for his bike trip, but his father went to West Berlin in 1954 as an adviser to the diplomat in charge of rehabilitating West Germany. By 1958, Richard Kerry was working in Norway; in between, he was a senatorial aide in Washington. But for most of the time Richard Kerry was in Germany, John Kerry was in boarding school in Switzerland.

But let's accept for the moment that the future Sen. Kerry, all of 11 or 12 at the time, bicycled past the heavily armed border guards and came upon the misery inflicted on East Berliners by communist totalitarianism. Let's say pubescent John Kerry had the wisdom to connect the nuanced dots between the suffering and the repressive communist government before pedaling home past the armed border guards whose orders were to stop people fleeing to freedom. And let's say his father, a foe of America's hard-line Cold War policies, grounded him for trying to broaden his liberal horizons. If Master Johnny was "indelibly impressed," how did he turn out to be one of America's most reliable communist sympathizers?

Frankin Foer, associate editor of The New Republic magazine, offers some insight: "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 (School in New Hampshire) 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.'

Of course, this latest attempt to remake John Kerry conflicts with the standard line that his foreign-policy views took shape in the rice paddies of South Vietnam, where the indelibly impressed Navy lieutenant fought communist forces backed by the same Soviet regime that had repressed the East Berliners a decade earlier.

Upon returning home, the indelible lessons of his East Berlin experience supposedly still with him, he accused the men who fought by his side of war crimes. His "Winter Soldier Investigation," abetted by communists, made him a political star. He appeared at anti-war rallies with Hanoi Jane Fonda. He traveled to Paris to meet with representatives of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, and later returned to this country to push their "peace plan."

At a time when the world feared the spread of communism -- Moscow's avowed No. 1 foreign policy -- John Kerry saw it as no threat to world peace and national security. He told a Senate committee America was overreacting "to the forces which were at work in World War II and came out of it with this paranoia about the Russians, and how the world was going to be divided up between the super powers." His words carried inordinate weight because of the anti-war climate of the era and because he won three Purple Hearts for scratches he got in Vietnam.

But his communist sympathizing didn't end when the North Vietnamese overran the South in 1975. He has been soft on Fidel Castro's regime, voting against the Helms-Burton Act in 1996 to impose new sanctions on Cuba and backing a number of bills that would have loosened travel restrictions to Cuba. He supported the forced return of Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba after the boy was kidnapped from his relatives in Miami by Janet Reno's raiders on Easter weekend 2000. Castro learned at the knee of the same Moscow leaders who shaped the East German government of the 1950s.

In 1985, Sen. Kerry took up the cause of the communist Sandinistas of Nicaragua, sabotaging the Reagan administration's attempt to defeat Soviet-sponsored revolutionaries in the Americas. Working with the likes of Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., left-wing journalists and groups supported by the Sandinistas, Sen. Kerry made damaging and distorted allegations, accused his own government of sponsoring terrorism and compromised an FBI operation against Colombian cocaine smugglers.

So intent was he to preserve Daniel Ortega's regime that he traveled to Managua and negotiated, without constitutional authority, a treaty between the United States and the Sandinistas. "I share with this body the aide-mÃƒÂ©moire which was presented to us by President Ortega," he would tell the Senate. "Here is a guarantee of the security interest of the United States. ... My generation, a lot of us grew up with the phrase 'give peace a chance' as part of a song that captured a lot of people's imagination. I hope that the president of the United States will 'give peace a chance.'"

The day after Sen. Kerry returned from Nicaragua, Ortega declared martial law and departed for Moscow to secure more financial and military aid for his government.

There is no way to disprove Sen. Kerry's bicycle story. All the other actors are dead, and even if young John Kerry as he pedaled his way through East Berlin had been spotted by East German or Soviet guards who live to this day, there's no reason to expect they would remember such an obscure incident a half-century ago. Still, his story smells fishier than Boston Harbor.

I had the opportunity to go into East Berlin while my father was stationed in Germany. I'd have to check my passport to see how old I was, but it was before I was 10. I'll never forget that wall, the guards, obstacles, and little white crosses. I can remember sitting in a plaza at a fountain in front of a state store with my dad, waiting for mom and my brother to finish browsing the goods intended only for tourists. My father tried to simply say hello to a lady sitting at the fountain. She got up and left without making eye contact or saying a word. There were cameras on the roof of the store looking over the plaza. I remember all that and a lot more...

I wouldn't be too quick to call Kerry a liar about this one, not without checking to find out when he claims to have done it and how easy it was to move back and forth between the sectors at the time. In the 1950s I don't think it would have been too difficult to do; I believe people often lived and worked on opposite sides of the line. Now, how easy it would have been for an American *child* to cross over and back I don't know. If he had a black Diplomatic Passport it might not have been difficult at all. Not very smart, but maybe not hard.

update according to his military records he was in Germany from 9/54 to 6/56...

no employment until june 63 worked two months that summer left for trip ....next summer worked 3 months...before entering the Navy...must be nice...what has he done since then?

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