After his Senate testimony in Washington, he was featured on "60 Minutes," shared top billing with John Lennon at a peace rally in New York and was offered his own talk show by television executives who wanted to make him a voice for the '60s generation. (He turned the idea down as "too fluffy.")
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Page 348: During the "winter soldier investigation" in Detroit, Kerry "read Jonathan Schell's The Village of Ben Suc (1967), a brutal account of how a Vietnamese community was destroyed by U.S. armed forces."
Page 424: After losing a congressional race in '72, "Kerry read novels and built model airplanes and ships to distract himself from thinking about the immediate future. He also painted a little."
Page 54: Julia Thorne, who became Kerry's first wife, nicknamed him "Pterodactyl" at Yale "because his long face made him look like a dinosaur."
Page 166: Kerry's radio-call sign in Vietnam was "Rock Jaw."
Page 302: Bill Rood, another officer, called Kerry "Ichabod," as in Crane.
OK, so he was a little pompous:
Page 31: "He was only eighteen years old and he knew just about everything about politics, particularly civil rights," says Danny Barbiero, a fellow St. Paul's student and a lifelong Kerry friend. "That annoyed some people, no doubt about it."
Page 244: Before a particularly dangerous raid in Vietnam, Kerry in his journal "noted for posterity that in fact he felt optimistic, in the same sense that a young Winston Churchill did when he fought with Britain's Malakand Field Force in what is now northern Pakistan: 'Bullets—to a philosopher, my dear Mama—are not worth considering. Besides, I am so conceited I do not believe the gods would create so potent a being as myself for so prosaic an ending.' "
Or even aloof:
Page 299-300: Larry Thurlow, a Swift boat captain from Garden City, Kan.: "John was sharp as a tack. … But he came from a background most of us couldn't understand. … And he was both distant and foolhardy."
Page 157: James Wasser, one of the men on Kerry's boat, concedes: "Some people were suspicious of him because he would talk to himself into a tape recorder."