He is currently Director of the Vietnam Program at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.
photo at: http://www.fetp.edu.vn/Events/eventshow.cfm?eventid=66
He found Rood for Kerry.
found at:
http://new.blackvoices.com/news/chi-0408230193aug23,0,2305872.story?coll=bv-news-black-headlines From the Chicago Tribune
Sniping escalates on war service
By Rick Pearson and Frank James, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune political reporter Rick Pearson reported from Texas, and Tribune national correspondent Frank James reported from Boston
August 23, 2004
..snip..
The first-person account by Vietnam veteran Rood in Sunday's Tribune came about after he was contacted by a supporter of Kerry named Thomas Vallely, a Marine during the Vietnam War and a former Massachusetts lawmaker who is director of the Vietnam program at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government.
Last week, with Kerry taking a pounding from the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, Kerry told Vallely: "`We need to find Billy Rood.' He called him Billy," Vallely said in an interview. "It was Kerry's idea" to contact Rood in the hope that he might support Kerry's account.
So Vallely "Googled" Rood.
"I called the place we thought he was working, a suburban chain of newspapers in Chicago. He didn't work there anymore. Then I `Verizoned' up his home phone number and I called his house and I asked if this was Mr. Bill Rood's home, someone said yes and gave me the number for the Chicago Tribune."
Vallely said he never had heard Rood's name before Kerry asked him to find him.
A call from Kerry
"I basically said, `Would you talk to Sen. Kerry?' Then we had a little bit of a private conversation, then John Kerry called him. This all took place within 15 minutes, maybe a half an hour. [Kerry] called me a half an hour later. He was talking to Bill Rood."
Vallely added: "John Kerry mentioned to me, `They're going to make their own decision about how to do this.' That was fine with him."
"They" referred to the crew of Rood's swift boat. "We had no idea what they were going to do," Vallely said. "They never showed their hand to us."
Vallely recalled that Rood provided him the name of Jerry Leeds, who was the senior enlisted man on Rood's boat. He said Rood indicated that Leeds and other members of his crew had been following the swift boat controversy.
..snip..
He was the "field director" for Kerry's 1972 primary run.
"At about 2 a.m. on the day before the primary, police arrested Kerry's brother Cameron and field director Thomas Vallely were arrested for breaking and entering the basement of the building that housed campaign offices for both Kerry and DiFruscia. The two were discovered near the building's phone lines.
Vallely said the campaign had received threatening calls from someone saying they were going to cut the phone lines."
found at:
http://wbz1030.com/massnews/MA--KerrysOnlyLoss-gn/resources_news_html In a hardscrabble town, Kerry learned tough political lessons
Saturday August 21, 2004
By STEVE LeBLANC
Associated Press Writer
BOSTON (AP) In 1972, it seemed nothing could stop John Kerry's rocket ride to political fame.
His box office looks, Kennedyesque accent and dual role as war hero and war dissenter made Kerry a hero of the anti-war movement and toast of the left-leaning intelligentsia.
But Kerry's rocket would crash in a down-on-its heels New England mill town when the novice politician ran up against an electorate suspicious of outsiders and a local newspaper editor fiercely critical of his race for the 5th Congressional District.
He would walk away from the wreckage of the race wounded but wiser. The lessons he learned during the summer and fall of that year in Lowell would serve him throughout his political career.
Kerry's troubles began even before he formally announced his plan to run for the seat, which then encompassed 24 communities in the Merrimack Valley and suburbs north of Boston.
After returning from Vietnam, he made little secret of his desire to run for office. The only question was where. After spending the early part of his life shuttling among boarding schools here and abroad, there was no one place to call home.
In 1970, he briefly considered challenging an aging Democratic incumbent in the state's 3rd Congressional District. Two years later, he was on the move again, weighing a challenge to a Democratic incumbent in yet another district.
After learning that the Republican incumbent in the 5th District, F. Bradford Morse, would not be running for re-election, Kerry switched again, moving to Lowell, an old mill town about 30 miles north of Boston, and launched his campaign.
The district-hopping led to charges of ``Kerrymandering'' and set his image as a carpetbagger.
At first it seemed an awkward fit the lanky patrician and the hardscrabble mill town. But he brought in a state-of-the-art telephone banking system to contact voters, raised hundreds of thousands of dollars and published slick campaign ads and brochures.
Bob Kennedy, then a Lowell city councilor, was among those in a Democratic primary crowded with politicians who had toiled at the local level and were hoping to make the leap to the big leagues.
``In the '60s and '70s, Lowell looked a lot like Berlin after World War II. There was high unemployment, young people were leaving and people were without hope. John Kerry showed up like a carpetbagger or a 'blow-in' and bought a beautiful home,'' he said. ``He wasn't the instant winner from our perspective. We didn't see how he was going to win.''
Another one of Kerry's rivals that year, then-state Rep. Tony DiFruscia was more blunt, saying Kerry would tailor his message to depending on which part of the district he was speaking, the conservative urban areas like Lowell and its sister city Lawrence or the more liberal suburbs.
``He was a faker,'' DiFruscia said. ``In (suburban) Concord on abortion he would defend a right to choose. In the basement of a Catholic church, he said he is personally opposed to abortion, but the law's the law.''
Kerry himself at times seemed to dig himself a deeper hole as he defended his decision to choose the 5th District.
``I considered several areas, no doubt about it. I'm not ducking that at all. I was very fortunate. People came to me from California and offered me five districts out there,'' Kerry said during the campaign. ``I turned them all down because Massachusetts is my home.''
Kerry would soon find himself saddled with one more charge to rebut.
At about 2 a.m. on the day before the primary, police arrested Kerry's brother Cameron and field director Thomas Vallely were arrested for breaking and entering the basement of the building that housed campaign offices for both Kerry and DiFruscia. The two were discovered near the building's phone lines.
Vallely said the campaign had received threatening calls from someone saying they were going to cut the phone lines.
``I break the door down, Cam follows and a minute later the Lowell police show up,'' Vallely said. ``We were probably a little paranoid about it.'' The charges were later dropped.
Winning the primary was not the shoe-in that it might have meant in other districts. The heavily Democratic district hadn't elected a Democrat to Congress in over a century and Kerry still had to overcome the carpetbagger label.
The arrests appeared to have no lasting effect on his campaign, and Kerry easily won by a comfortable seven point victory over his closest Democratic rival. Still, the Lowell Sun newspaper pounced on it.
``Kerry brother arrested in Lowell 'Watergate''' the banner headline screamed.
It was a sign of the rocky relationship between Kerry and Clement Costello, then-editor of the Lowell Sun. Costello, who indulged a penchant for silk shirts, French Gauloises cigarettes and berets and capes, was pro-war and pro-Nixon and, to him, Kerry's anti-war efforts verged on the unpatriotic.
Costello penned a series of blistering front page editorials blasting Kerry that were often accompanied by mocking cartoons. In one, he labeled Kerry a ``radical leftist war agitator'' and in another compared him to protesters who ``all but wipe their noses with (the American flag).''
Kendall Wallace, now the paper's publisher, was the city editor then.
``This paper just brutalized the Kerry campaign. Anything negative it could find, it threw at Kerry,'' he said. ``Clem was a tough old editor. He believed strongly in the newspaper having a hard voice. He felt very strongly that Kerry was wrong for this district. At the same time, he never interfered in the news side.''
The attacks drew blood. But Kerry chose to ignore the editorials, a decision he would regret.
While Kerry made some missteps of his own the initial district-shopping, his inability to rally his Democratic rivals during the general election campaign, and his image as a wealthy outsider his supporters put the blame for his November loss to Republican Paul Cronin squarely on Costello's shoulders.
``There's no other issue that takes hold against Kerry except Clem Costello painting him to be something that he wasn't, which was un-American,'' Vallely said.
Others say Kerry was his own worst enemy and credit Cronin with running a solid race.
``Kerry came off as an elite snob,'' said Republican analyst Charley Manning. ``Paul Cronin was a terrific candidate, he only served one term because he got taken out in the post-Watergate, anti-Republican tide.''
But the race was ultimately a referendum on Kerry, according to Lou DiNatale, a University of Massachusetts-Boston political science professor.
``It wasn't about Cronin. It was about Kerry. Cronin was 'anybody but Kerry,''' DiNatale said.
Kerry took the loss hard. He remained defiant in his concession speech, addressing Costello by name and defending his decision to oppose the war. (Costello died in 1987.)
A short time after his loss, he invited Wallace and a Lowell Sun reporter to his house for lunch. When it was time to eat, he opened up a can of Franco-American spaghetti.
``That was our lunch and ultimately his revenge,'' Wallace said.
Kerry went to law school and spent the next decade working as an assistant district attorney and private lawyer before he would launch another bid at public office, this time winning a much lower profile contest for Massachusetts lieutenant governor.
Those who have watched Kerry closely over the year said his experience in Lowell taught him critical political lessons: never make voters feel like an afterthought; don't rely on star power; and do the hard work on building a constituency.
``I think he learned that you have to build a base. He learned how to campaign. He learned how to embrace people. He learned that you can't demand support, you have to earn support,'' Wallace said.
But most of all, observers said, Kerry learned the most important lesson of modern politics never let any attack go unanswered. It's a lesson Kerry has referred to during this year's campaign for president.
``In the first race I ever ran I came under withering attack, and it was the first time that negative advertising had taken place and even negative attacks from newspapers,'' he said during a debate in Iowa this year. ``I made the great mistake of thinking you didn't have to defend yourself. I have learned now and I will never, ever make that mistake again.''
found at:
http://www.ksg.harvard.edu/cbg/peopleQtoZ.html#Vallely Thomas J. Vallely is the director of the Vietnam Program and a research associate at the Center for Business and Government. He is responsible for directing the Program's research efforts into Vietnam's economy, as well as its teaching and exchange programs, both in the United States and Vietnam. He helped to establish the Fulbright Economics Teaching Program in Ho Chi Minh City. In addition, Vallely conducts research on specific aspects of Vietnam's development for the United Nations Development Programme, the World Bank, and the Japanese Ministry of Finance. Prior to becoming director of the Vietnam Program, Vallely served with the US Marine Corps in Vietnam and was a Senior Research Fellow at the Kennedy School, where he worked on strategic and military issues in East and Southeast Asia. He has worked as a political consultant and was elected to the Massachusetts House of Representatives in 1980, serving until 1987. Vallely received a bachelor's degree from the University of Massachusetts and an M.P.A. from the Kennedy School of Government.
found at:
http://vallely.com/tomvallely.html reprinted from Kennedy School of Government-- Harvard
The first time I went to Vietnam, I prayed to go home," says Thomas J. Vallely (MPA '83) who was 18 years old when he was sent to fight in the Vietnam War. A member of the U.S. Marine Corps infantry, Vallely was stationed at the coastal city of Danang, a strategic center dominated by Communist forces. "The second time, I went and never really came back."
Tom Vallely with Charlene Barshefsky, former U.S. Trade Representative in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.
Vallely returned to Vietnam in 1985 as a Massachusetts State Representative, invited by Senator John Kerry as part of a goodwill delegation. The trip marked the beginning of Vallely's commitment to fostering exchange between the two countries. Awarded a scholarship to the Kennedy School, the Newton, Mass. native gave a cash donation to the School to help a Vietnamese student as a way of thanking his hosts. While his generosity ultimately aided a Chinese student, the seed for what would become the Vietnam Program had been planted.
Established in 1988, the Vietnam Program at the Kennedy School's Center for Business and Government serves as a central organizing point for a variety of research, teaching, and policy advising activities with the dual goal of promoting U.S.-Vietnamese understanding and enabling Vietnam to integrate successfully into the global economy.
As director, Vallely coordinates a public policy program at the University of Economics of Ho Chi Minh City, as well as a Fulbright Exchange Program, which selects qualified Vietnamese professionals to study at U.S. graduate programs. "We were lucky enough to be in the human capital business early on," remarks Vallely, noting that the program's launch established its presence several years before the U.S. and Vietnam resumed diplomatic relations.
"These are people who want Vietnam to be a modern country. They don't want it to be a mere image of the U.S., either -- they have their own understanding of what that means," he says.
Cao Duc Phat (MPA2 '95) is a particularly dramatic example of how program graduates can effect change in their native country, notes Vallely. Phat returned to Vietnam as Vice Minister of Agriculture and eliminated the state's monopoly on selling farm products to the world market, increasing rural income by one-third.
Phat's success won the approval of colleagues, but importing new concepts from the U.S. is not always easy, Vallely observes. "There's a fear that the ideas one learns here will change the country too quickly. On the positive side, Vietnam has the right framework in place to be a successful member of the global economy."
"Vietnam is a big part of American history," he continues. "I was lucky enough to come home from the war in one piece, go to school, and be involved public life before I realized I wanted to think more about the country and its issues. Now I want to continue doing that. My best friends in the world live in Vietnam."