http://portland.indymedia.org/en/2004/01/279420.shtml
Senator John Kerry as featured on Democracy Now:
Kerry's audacity cost him. Within weeks of taking office in 1985, he was off to Nicaragua, accompanied by reporters on a 36-hour, self-appointed fact-finding mission with another freshman, Democratic Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa.
Congressional Democrats had accused the White House of exaggerating the communist threat posed by the Sandinista regime. So the two senators were publicly castigated when -- just days after meeting with Daniel Ortega and other leaders of the regime -- the Sandinistas climbed aboard a plane to Moscow to cement their Soviet ties.
Secretary of State George Shultz declared that Kerry and Harkin had been "used" by the Nicaraguans, and he ridiculed them for their naivete in "dealing with the communists." Kerry was called "silly" in the Boston press.