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http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?020204fr_archive03

Some excerpts:

Against the advice of his staff, who saw yet another committee as a political abyss, Kerry said yes when George Mitchell, the Senate Majority Leader, asked him to chair it. "It was not a politically rewarding thing for him to take on," Senator Kennedy told me. "And it turned out to be a true national service."

McCain, the former prisoner, was named to the committee. He had travelled to Vietnam for President Bush, in support of General Vessey's efforts. He had met with Vietnamese leaders. "They've never understood all these allegations about their keeping people behind," he recalls. "Time after time, they would say to me, 'Why would we keep them?' " McCain saw the difficulty of coaxing Vietnamese officials, for the sake of a few hundred long-missing Americans, to coöperate in the kind of investigative work that Hanoi would never be able to do for the hundreds of thousands of its own missing soldiers. He knew that Buddhists believe that an uninterred or improperly interred corpse condemns a soul to eternal wandering, so the fate of their own missing sons was far from insignificant to the Vietnamese.

"Before that committee convened, whatever harebrained and wild allegation or story came up had instant credence," McCain told me. "By the methodical work that John Kerry did . . . Americans were made much more aware of the realities." Kerry travelled to Vietnam eight times; he supervised the examination of thousands of documents and photographs; and he took testimony from family members, leaders of veterans' organizations, intelligence officials, and negotiators from the Paris peace talks. He subpoenaed several hundred people, and put under oath for the first time those who had run the war, including Henry Kissinger.

Kerry and McCain, by "pulling in the same harness," in the words of one staff member, were able to get the Vietnamese to turn over troves of P.O.W. evidence; one batch included McCain's old flight helmet. What was perhaps more amazing, they were able to get the Department of Defense to declassify a million pages of documents. Every conceivable theory was aired, every charge levelled, and every hope given expression. And what this investigation revealed, in the words of its final report—twelve hundred and twenty-three pages long—was that "while the Committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia."

...

"Listen," Kerry said to me, sitting forward in his chair at his Washington home. "I defended him in those hearings when some stupid-ass right-wing idiot accused him of being the Manchurian Candidate, that somehow the Vietnamese had brainwashed him. This is the most unbelievably callous, degrading, nonsensical piece of crap I've ever heard in my life, coming from some chicken hawk out there, to hurl at somebody who spent as long as he did being tortured and standing up for his country, and caring about it as much as he did. It's incredible that people would behave like that, absolutely stunning."

Sometimes McCain was attacked by his fellow-senators and sometimes by witnesses. He was the lightning rod. I was told by a member of the committee staff that when Kerry and McCain were sitting near each other on the senators' dais, Kerry would, at such moments, unobtrusively move his hand over to McCain and place it on his arm and leave it there, a quiet gesture of what was becoming absolute mutual support. I asked McCain if he had been aware of Kerry's touch. "Yes," he replied. "He did that several times, and I'm glad he did. I'm grateful to him."