"After the 1984 election, the Doghunters had a black-tie dinner at my house, and the only thing we didn't drink was the Aqua Velva [aftershave]," John Marttila, a political consultant who has worked on every Kerry campaign, says. "They've had regular dinners ever since.
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The time Kerry spent with McCain - and, to a lesser extent, with Bob Kerrey and Chuck Robb - completed the transformation that the Doghunters had begun. He was no longer a political loner; he was, finally, part of a distinct, bipartisan, and emotionally intense group: the Vietnam combat veterans in the United States Senate. (Max Cleland, of Georgia, and Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska joined the group in 1996; Kerrey and Robb departed in 2000.) They took common positions on veterans' issues, and sometimes on questions of war and peace, but they were most passionately united when one or another of them was attacked.
Finding his place among comrades was Kerry's first step in from the political cold. There were two others, frequently cited by friends: his victory over William Weld in the 1996 Massachusetts Senate race and his improbable second marriage, to Teresa Heinz.
The notion that Kerry married Heinz for political reasons - specifically, to use her money to run for president - is put to rest within nanoseconds of meeting her: this is a flagrantly impolitic human being. The marriage is bursting with strong emotions and ill-concealed conflicts, and much too complicated for the facile armchair psychologising that goes on during a presidential campaign. It is not the sort of relationship that an ambitious politician, in his right mind, would want; it is likely to be a distraction for the press corps, an easy way to obscure the campaign's "message". One can only conclude, it must be love.
Heinz will not be censored. "John went on too long," she said the day I met her, after watching her husband deliver his Iraq speech in the Senate chamber on c-span [TV link]. "But that's what happens when he starts thinking about history."
John Hurley is the National Director of Veterans for Kerry and has been working full time as a volunteer in John Kerry’s presidential campaign for over a year. An attorney, Hurley is a Vietnam veteran who served with the U.S. Army in the Mekong Delta in 1967-1968. He was a Platoon Leader in Company B, 69th Engineer Battalion. He is 61 and lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts with his wife, Anne Goggin, and their three children, Caitlin, Conor, and Julia.