Revealed: How 'War Hero' Kerry Tried To Put Off Vietnam Military Duty

Senator John Kerry, the presumed Democratic presidential candidate who is trading on his Vietnam war record to campaign against President George W Bush, tried to defer his military service for a year, according to a newly rediscovered article in a Harvard University newspaper.

He wrote to his local recruitment board seeking permission to spend a further 12 months studying in Paris, after completing his degree course at Yale University in the mid-1960s.

The revelation appears to undercut Sen Kerry's carefully-cultivated image as a man who willingly served his country in a dangerous war - in supposed contrast to President Bush, who served in the Texas National Guard and thus avoided being sent to Vietnam.

The Harvard Crimson newspaper followed a youthful Mr Kerry in Boston as he campaigned for Congress for the first time in 1970. In the course of a lengthy article, "John Kerry: A Navy Dove Runs for Congress", published on February 18, the paper reported: "When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy."

Samuel Goldhaber, the article's author who is now a cardiologist attached to the Harvard School of Medicine, spent 11 hours trailing Mr Kerry and still remembers that the subject of the Paris deferment came up during long conversations about Vietnam.

"I stand by my story," he told The Telegraph. "It was a long time ago, and I was 19 at the time, so it is hard to remember every detail. But I do know this: at no point did Kerry contact either me or the Crimson to dispute anything I had written."

Sen Kerry's campaign headquarters in Washington refused an opportunity to deny the report. Despite repeated telephone calls from The Telegraph, a spokesman refused to comment. Another Democrat official said merely: "In Vietnam, John Kerry proved his patriotism beyond question. Everyone knows that."

A senior Republican strategist, who asked not to be named, said: "I've not heard this before. This undercuts Kerry's complaints about Bush and it continues to pose questions as to his credibility among ordinary Vietnam veterans."

He said it would fuel concerns over the way Sen Kerry made a name for himself by leading anti-war protests in Washington and Boston in the late 1960s and early 1970s after he had completed his service in the US Navy, even while his former comrades continued to fight and die.

A newly-published biography of Sen Kerry by Douglas Brinkley, A Tour of Duty, makes no mention of the requested deferment or planned year in Paris. At the time, it was still unclear just how long America would remain in Vietnam, and it might have seemed that a year's deferral of service could render enlistment unnecessary.

According to the Democratic Party's version of Sen Kerry's military history, he joined the Reserve Officer Training Corps at Harvard through eagerness to do his duty, and sailed with the Navy for combat as soon as he graduated in 1966.

Sen Kerry won a gallantry medal for his service as a gunboat captain on the Mekong Delta, and was honorably discharged with three "purple heart" medals after sustaining three wounds. He has consistently presented himself as a leader who argued against the war only after fulfilling his duty in the field. Supporters argue that his war record makes him a more trustworthy leader than President Bush, who served sporadically in the National Guard at home.

"This means that Kerry didn't jump into all that heroic service until he was pushed, and it is a very nice piece of information," said Lucianne Goldberg, a prominent Republican campaigner.

Republican strategists for President Bush were already investigating Sen Kerry's record of three wounds sustained in Vietnam. "We find that he had only one day off sick - with three wounds? What exactly were these wounds?" she asked.

Mr Goldhaber recalled that, during a day spent with Sen Kerry and one assistant during his congressional campaign, he had described his involvement, service and decision to oppose the war in great detail.

"I am not at all surprised that he wants to be president, because he exuded ambition from the word go," said Dr Goldhaber. "At the time, the idea that he tried to persuade the draft board to let him spend a year in Paris was just a detail."

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best***From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism, especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular intervention -- the Gulf war -- and opposed a 1995 resolution that would have allowed the arming of Bosnians.

There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry. Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not, even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the administration's "high-handed treatment of our European allies, on everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just deeply felt; they're in his blood.*** [The main text of the article (linked above) outlines John Kerry's fathers political sympathies - very informative.]

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