Kerry and my sister

— 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.

I wonder - - whether possibly Kerry has always been on the fringes of being really in the super blueblood, royal echelon that he actually aspires to belong to. In the picture where he is just a teenage kid sitting on the boat in one of the occasional "meetings" with JFK, you can see the look of the awed outsider on his face. The feelings of inferiority, of being actually an "imposter" seemed to motivate him to behave socially in the snobby way all the "right" people thought one should behave - even when it involved treating a fellow human being shamefully. Even now, he doesn't actually make all that much money in the Senate and lives off a rich woman. If he were to be elevated to "king of the country", that is exactly how he will view it, and we would be the unwilling benefactors to a "let them eat cake" tyrant. I pray for the man to get a real life free of this bondage of raw ambition.

I think you're on to it. Kerry came from an impecunious branch of the Forbes family and had to rely on contributions from wealthy relatives to pay tuition at St. Paul's and Yale. He could "summer" on Naushon because his mother was a Forbes, hence the middle name. The island is owned by a trust set up by another Forbes a long time ago. He made a fortune in the China Trade, much of that trade being opium.

He can become what he thinks those around him want him to be. I saw it back in the seventies when he would do "coffees" at different people's homes. I arranged several for him in those days. His language would change, along with his positions on the issues of the time, according to what kind of people were at the gathering. If you listen to his affected pronunciations in his now-infamous testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971, you'll see what I mean. You can see it again today when he gives speeches in the heartland during which he drops the "g" while speaking. "As I was sayin' " or "are you talkin' to me?" He's trying to sound like one of the guys. He's always tried to do that.

This is an old story which is circulating among military people:

"I Never Sail on Anything Less Than 135 Feet"
The John Kerry Experience
By HAL CRANMER

I would like to add my two cents about my John Kerry experience. During my career as an Air Force pilot, I spent two years flying a small twin-engine prop plane around the Pacific from my base in Okinawa, Japan.

On one trip we had to fly Senator Kerry, his congressional aide, and a Navy Captain (Vietnam, A-4 fighter pilot) who was also in Kerry's party to various locations in Vietnam and Cambodia as part of the MIA/POW talks.

When I met him, he was wearing a shirt with a picture of his sailboat on it. I told him I had a small 27' sailboat in Okinawa, he remarked 'Oh I never sail on anything less than 135 feet'.

I laughed to myself and realized this guy was no sailor.

When we first flew him into Phnom Penh, he went to the back of the airplane and grabbed the pizza that was put aside for the crew and passed it around to his staff. He was never offered any pizza because they were supposed to have lunch with the Cambodian government once we landed. The pizza would have been our only meal that day. He just never cared to ask.

Then when we picked him up in Cambodia, he was an hour late getting to the airport. We could not start the engines and therefore the air conditioning until he arrived. Phnom Penh at that time was over 100 degrees with 95% humidity and we were basically sitting in a greenhouse behind the cockpit windows. When he finally did arrive, we were wringing out our clothes from the perspiration. He walks out of the air conditioned car, into the airplane and asks us 'Could you guys get the air conditioning running, I'm a little warm." The other pilot had to physically restrain me from going back there and picking a fight.

Then we took him into Noi Bai airfield in Hanoi. After we picked him up the next day (he stayed the night in Vietnam, we stayed in Bangkok) we taxied out, ran up the engines for takeoff, and noticed that our prop rpm was vibrating all over the place. We taxied off to the side to look at it, but there was a good possibility that there was an engine malfunction and the engine may fail if we took off with it.

Well, Mr. Senator sticks his head up in the cockpit and says 'this plane WILL take - off, I have a press conference in Bangkok in three hours!" (Maybe this is an indication of how he will run the FAA). We ran the engines again, and did not have the problem, so we took off and made it back.

During the flight, he told everyone how he had taken a Cessna (a small General aviation plane) up with a fighter pilot, and the fighter pilot remarked that Kerry was one of the best pilots he had ever seen. I don't know about other pilots out there, but it's hard to imagine a little, single-engine prop plane pilot being able to show the 'right stuff'.

After Kerry left the plane, the Navy Captain came up to us, apologized and said basically that he knows Kerry is a jerk and that we should be glad we don't have to deal with him every day....

Or will we?

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