Free Republic

Heard of Watergate? Get ready for Lowellgate. On Sept. 18, 1972, the evening before the primary election during his second attempt for Congress, Kerry's brother Cameron and one Thomas Vallely, both part of his current campaign team, were arrested by Lowell police at 1:40 a.m. and charged with breaking and entering with the intent to commit larceny. The two were apprehended in the basement of a building whose door had been forced open, police said. It housed the headquarters of candidate DiFruscia. The Watergate scandal was making headlines at this time, and it was called the Lowell Watergate. "They wanted...

Top strategists with John Kerry's presidential campaign are blaming his crushing defeat last week on bad advice from Clinton operatives who took over the campaign after Labor Day. "When [James] Carville and [Stan] Greenberg tell reporters that the campaign was missing a defining narrative, they forget that they were the ones insisting we had to keep beating the domestic-issues drum," complained David Thorne on Thursday. Thorne - a brother-in-law from Kerry's first marriage to Julia Thorne - was one of Kerry's closest advisors throughout the campaign. Thorne told political gadfly Arianna Huffington that because of the misguided Carville-Greenberg strategy, "We...

Still reeling from his loss to President Bush on Tuesday, Senator John Kerry is being urged by top advisers and friends to take a high-profile role as the Democratic Party grapples with issues like selecting its next chairman and shaping its identity and course. Unlike Al Gore, who made a tortured exit from the public stage after his loss to Mr. Bush four years ago, Mr. Kerry has a Senate seat to return to and is under no pressure to disappear from view for the sake of national unity and the legitimacy of the presidency, his advisers say. They argue...

David Thorne, ex-brother-in-law to Sen. John Kerry, strongly denied late Monday that the Democratic presidential front-runner had any ties to anti-American actress "Hanoi" Jane Fonda, who adopted Kerry's group, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, as her pet cause in 1971. Asked if Kerry had any relationship whatsoever with Fonda, David Thorne told Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes," "No." But he immediately qualified the unequivocal denial, telling Alan Colmes that Kerry and "Hanoi" Jane had "met each other, they knew each other a little bit." Still, Thorne insisted, "John was never part of what Jane Fonda did." Mr. Thorne,...