Interesting story. "oppertunist" is an understatement.
" early February, Kerry's wife, Julia, bought a house in Worcester, where Kerry intended to take on Harold D. Donohue, a longtime Democratic incumbent, in a central Massachusetts district. They never moved in. Instead, the couple rented an apartment in Lowell late in March after learning that Representative F. Bradford Morse would be named undersecretary general of the United Nations. His departure would open up the Fifth District seat held by Republicans for generations.
Kerry had tenuous ties to the Fifth District that proved to be a flimsy shield against the withering assaults of critics. Leading the attack was The Sun, the conservative daily in Lowell, the old, parochial mill city that anchored the district.
Resentment poured from many of the other nine candidates, whom Kerry would leave in the dust of a freewheeling Democratic primary.
In the wait-your-turn political culture of Lowell and nearby Lawrence, Kerry was a carpetbagger trying to cherrypick a seat in Congress.
In the general election campaign, Kerry was lashed relentlessly by The Sun, which questioned his patriotism, his loyalty to the district, and his financial backers. He blew a huge lead and lost to the Republican nominee, Paul W. Cronin, a former state representative who had served on Morse's staff.
Suddenly, the fast track to political glory vanished beneath the feet of the war hero turned war protester. There would be no official soapbox in the nation's capital, not any time soon at least. Kerry's first campaign for elected office had failed. And he was unemployed.
In defeat, he retreated to the outskirts of politics. ``The years in exile'' is how Cameron F. Kerry describes the next decade of his older brother's life."
"To win the primary, the newcomer overcame the election eve arrest of his brother, Cameron, and campaign field director Thomas J. Vallely, both then 22, in the basement of a Lowell building that housed the headquarters of Kerry and another Democratic contender, state Representative Anthony R. DiFruscia of Lawrence. It was almost 2 a.m. - 30 hours before the polls opened - when the two were arrested on charges of breaking and entering with intent to commit larceny."
That day's Sun blared a memorable, double-deck headline: "Kerry brother arrested in Lowell `Watergate."' DiFruscia, getting some extra ink in the campaign's waning hours, had drawn the parallel to the break-in at Democratic headquarters in Washington three months earlier.
The Kerry camp declared it a setup, saying that the two responded to an anonymous phone call, minutes earlier, threatening to cut the campaign's 36 phone lines on the day before its get-out-the-vote effort. Lowell Police arrested the pair in an area near the trunk line for all of the building's phones."