Posted on 10/14/2004 1:22:48 PM PDT by David M. Brooks
— Many readers know me only as a conservative and are surprised to learn that I haven’t always been one. Seeing and hearing John Kerry several times a day is an almost constant reminder that I used to think quite differently when I worked for him back in 1972. I was more liberal then and Kerry was staging an unsuccessful run for congress in the fifth district of Massachusetts. Prior to that, he had been involved with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, and I had been fighting city hall in Lowell, the district’s biggest city. His campaign people contacted me and I went to work for them. Some friends and relatives came into the campaign as well, including two of my sisters, Jane and Elaine. When my daughter, Annie, got married last August, they came up for the wedding and we reminisced about those days.
After Kerry lost the election, I had no more contact with him. I had sensed a lack of passion in him and had come to see him as an empty suit. But Elaine and Jane had become friendly with Kerry’s first wife, Julia, and their association with Kerry went on for a few years. Both got to know his family fairly well when they babysat his daughters. Elaine watched them sometimes at the three-unit apartment house we had purchased together and they played with my daughters there. Jane was younger and still lived with our parents in nearby Tewksbury. In the summer, she would sometimes accompany the Kerrys to Naushon Island, the private, seven-mile-long summer retreat of the Forbes family, and help with the children.
My family has always been politically active. We were born Boston-Irish-Catholic-Democrats and politics is innate. During the 1960s and ‘70s, though, the Democrat Party veered left while the McLaughlin family veered right. Not one of the nine of us still living belongs to the party any more, and I’m sure even my father would have resigned if he had lived to see what’s happened to that once-venerable party.
The day after the wedding last August, we were all sipping wine and talking politics on the porch of my mother’s house in Lovell when Jane told a Kerry story I hadn’t heard before. We had been taking turns relating just when it was that each of us had come to dislike the man the Democrats have since nominated for president. Jane described how she was spending a week on Naushon. Unaware that she was on a nearby porch and within earshot, Kerry was telling Julia that he didn’t want Jane to eat dinner with the family that evening. When Julia asked why, Kerry explained that some dinner guests he had invited didn’t approve of the help eating with the family.
As Jane was telling the story 30 years later, she was still angry and it showed clearly on her face. She’s fully as much of a spitfire now as she was at 15 when the incident occurred, and it had been years since I’d seen that I angry look only she can display. She has a way of pursing her lips and knitting her brow when she’s mad that is unique to her and I had to laugh. “It wasn’t funny,” she said—again with the angry expression. “I was mortified.”
“So what happened?” I asked, trying to be serious. Jane went on to explain that Julia had put her foot down and told her husband she refused to explain that Kerry wanted her to eat in another room. With that, our would-be president backed off and Jane ate with the family as she usually did. I could picture her sitting at the dinner table, looking at Kerry and doing the slow burn as only Jane can.
“John Kerry—courageous man of the people,” I said.
“That’s when I came to hate him,” said Jane.
“Understandable,” I answered.
Eventually, the Kerrys sold their house in Lowell when he went to law school at Boston College. Then he served as Assistant District Attorney in Middlesex County, Mass. I finished school and moved north to the mountains to teach. Elaine and Jane married and moved to the suburbs. Kerry then ran for Lieutenant Governor under Michael Dukakis, then U.S. Senator. Reading snippets of what he was up to in the Boston papers, I was gradually moving from left to right on the political spectrum. Kerry, obviously, remains on the left—the most liberal member of the Senate. Seeing and hearing him every day is a continuous affirmation that I moved in the right direction.
Tom McLaughlin is a history teacher who lives in Lovell, Maine. He can be reached at tommclaughlin@pivot.net.
He was just a little ahead of the rest of the party leaders at the time. There's "leadership" and then there's "the rest" of the party. The rest is not equal to the leadership. This is why Berger, Clintons and Rather don't have the same line to toe as the commoner rest of the public.
How odd that the Jewish, Arabic, Black, Union and Hispanic voters haven't even perceived the dichotomy. They seem not to have a clue that they wouldn’t be acceptable at the same table with their vaunted party select because class standards have to be observed.
It’s not hard to wonder whether that perception has also made inroads into GOP thinking.
Could you for one minute imagine this happening in the Bush household?
What a test of character (or lack of it): what you say when you think that no one else can see or hear you.
Remember the story about Gore, when his family was traveling by car with their Nanny, and went in to eat and left the Nanny in the car.
BUMP for your consideration.
Algore would have remembered when some of his long ago relatives were also hired help...And he would have said, "But they were good people, even though they had to work for a living".
Kerry-Edwards:It's their country, the rest of us just work here
About 5 years ago, she and a small group of friends were skiing at Loon Mountain in N.H. down a trail called "Upper Walking Boss" when they came upon a group of four people, two men and two women. A young woman in the group had seriously hurt a leg, was extreme pain and they requested a sled be sent down.
My mother and her friends recognized that John Kerry was one of the two Men and that he obviously was involved with the injured woman some how. Kerry, seeing that he'd been recognized, said to his friend "I can't be seen here" and then skied away.
The best thing about Kerry's "ways" is that he came from a branch of the family that didn't have money. Imagine the burning that caused within him throughout his youth and early adult years, surrounded by the luxury of his relatives and only getting to enjoy it by their largess. It explains a lot about his character, attitudes and life choices.
Congressman Billybob
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Yep. It looks right in line with everything you've written.
Between wives, Kerry, chartered a sailboat in the Caribbean for a week for himself, his date and another couple.
It is custom and the charter service explains that the crew gets tipped at the end of the week.
At the end of the week, Kerry walked off the vessle, stiffing the captain and crew.
Well I guess they know who Kerry is....an elitist pig.
Good article.
Hi Tacis,
This is my first posting on Freerepublic. My sister Jane told me my column was posted on the site. This is exciting for someone living in Lovell, Maine, population 998.
I think Kerry went to Boston College Law School because it's kind of an "Irish Harvard." Kerry is astute enough to know that it helps to be perceived as Irish to get ahead in politics in the Bay State. He was just coming off a loss in the 5th district after everyone thought he was a shoe-in. The primary was thought to be the big contest back then. He won that in June and was cruising, only to be beaten in November by a Nixon Republican from nowhere. He had to re-group and pay his dues. That's why he did the Assistant DA thing with John Droney the DA, an old Irish Pol. He attended the St. Patrick's Day Breakfasts on Southie and tried to tell jokes. He ran for Lieutenant Governor, etc. Now he's in our faces every day. I sure hope he loses, because I won't be able to stand looking at him for four years.
Hope this helps.
Tom
Hi Tom,
Thanks for writing this, and a warm welcome to FreeRepublic.
(from a former Dem as well - but no more!)
Thank you bootless. It's nice to be here.
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