Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, April 2004, pages 28, 68

Special Report

 

Senator John Kerry’s Moment to Shine

 

By Richard H. Curtiss

	Democratic presidential front-runner Sen. John Kerry (l) of Massachusetts greets supporters Feb. 10 at a polling station at Robinson High School in Fairfax, Virginia. Kerry won that day’s Virginia Democratic primary by a wide margin, in his first victory in a southern state (AFP photo/Stephen Jaffe).

FOLLOWING HIS victories in Iowa, New Hampshire and the February primaries, this is Sen. John F. Kerry’s moment to shine. It also provides a good opportunity to consider how Kerry’s views on the Middle East differ from Dr. Howard Dean’s. The latter is quite blunt in saying that the U.S. must take an even-handed approach if a just peace is ever to be established in Palestine and Israel. Dean’s campaign chairman, Steve Grossman, a former president of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), resigned on the eve of Dean’s third-place finish in the Wisconsin primary, and was expected to offer his services to Kerry. The Massachusetts senator has been much more cautious, saying that Israel must be supported at all costs. He has gone on to say, however, that most Americans and Israelis realize that Palestine must have a state of its own.

Along with his fellow Democratic senators John Edwards (NC) and Joseph Lieberman (CT), Kerry signed on to the war on Iraq. By contrast, Dean, Rev. Al Sharpton, Rep. Dennis Kucinich and Gen. J. Wesley Clark were against the war.

Senator Kerry voted to authorize President Bush’s use of military force against Iraq. He later voted against Bush’s $87 billion request to rebuild Iraq. Instead, Kerry would obtain a U.N. resolution to give the U.N. authority to rebuild Iraq and replace the Coalition Provisional Authority with a U.N. special representative.

For his part, Governor Dean opposed preemptive war in Iraq, and has proposed calling on NATO to maintain order. He advocates having Arab and Muslim countries and other allies share the costs of stabilizing Iraq, and has proposed transforming the U.N. Oil for Food program into an Oil for Recovery Program. This, he argues, would help pay part of the reconstruction and transition costs for a democratic transition to take place within 18 to 24 months, keeping our troops in for a longer period.

An important point, however, is that most Arab- and Muslim-Americans are deeply, deeply disappointed in President George W. Bush. They worked hard to back him in a very close race and now feel doubly betrayed that he has simply walked away from his campaign promises to do something about the Arab-Israeli dispute.

Until four years ago the Arab- and Muslim- American vote was about evenly divided between social conservatives and more liberal voters. Now all Arab Americans feel very strongly against Bush, and will vote for just about anyone from the Democrat Party. One can say with confidence that that is a given, and that almost nothing could change it.

With very few exceptions, Kerry and Dean have similar positions on Democratic issues. Kerry supports “preserving affirmative action” as a civil rights priority, and opposed efforts in the Senate to undermine or eliminate affirmative action programs.

He did, however, vote for the PATRIOT Act, and authored the law’s anti-money-laundering provisions. Kerry also proposes expanding surveillance powers, but repealing the “sneak and peak” features.

Arab-American voters have been gravely concerned by the Bush administration’s PATRIOT Act, which has greatly increased U.S. government surveillance and investigative powers. The law has been criticized by civil liberties organizations as far-reaching, unchecked and prone to abuse.

Dean has called for the rollback of the PATRIOT Act and the overly broad investigative and surveillance powers it gives to the government. The former Vermont governor urged Congress to reconsider aspects of the PATRIOT Act and other anti-terror tactics that lead to abuses. Dean also has challenged the FBI’s practice of gathering information on anti-war demonstrations.

 

From Slow-Starter to Front-Runner

Kerry got off to a slow start in the primary season, partly because he had to recuperate from prostate surgery in mid-summer. It also has taken him a while to get over speaking in Senate jargon. In a Newsweek article, Howard Fineman commented, “His audiences were anesthetized by his lordly demeanor, verbose style and aura of entitlement.”

On the campaign trail, his staff members noted that, instead of focusing his attention on one voter at a time as he shook hands with them, Kerry kept looking ahead to the next person in line. There are many stories of Kerry forgetting names of local figures, even after he had met them many times. Whether due to increased practice or his new campaign manager, Mary Beth Cahill, Sen. Ted Kennedy’s respected former chief of staff—or because “nothing succeeds like success”—Kerry now seems to be on a roll. He has stopped explaining matters at greater length than anyone wants to hear, and is learning instead to become a humble listener at meetings and town halls. When he meets fellow Vietnam veterans or a new supporter, he now embraces them.

His father, Richard, was a career foreign service officer, and the Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign policy seminar. As a child, the young John changed schools frequently, and at one point he was only one of three English-speaking boys in a strict Swiss boarding school. His father taught him to sail by having him blindfolded and then learning to navigate by listening to nearby sounds like foghorns and ringing buoys.

The future senator later attended St. Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire where, in addition to sailing, he played hockey. Some of his teammates complained that he “hogged the puck,” instead of passing it to other players. In general, Kerry tended to be aloof, or a little bit lonely. On the other hand, he was a guitarist and bass player, and played with a band called The Electras. “Everyone knew he wanted to be president of the United States,” one of his fellow band members said.

According to Newsweek writer Evan Thomas, “At Yale Kerry committed the cardinal sin of showing his ambition.” He excelled at everything: he was elected president of the Yale Political Union and was tapped by Skull and Bones—as was George W. Bush and his father, George H.W.

In Vietnam, in which he volunteered to serve, Kerry became a genuine war hero as a Swift riverboat commander, patrolling the rivers in the Mekong Delta. Because he was almost bilingual in French, he was able to use old colonial river maps to keep his ship out of shallow water or shoals.

Although some of his Navy colleagues found him a little too ambitious, Kerry’s own men greatly admired and almost worshipped him.

The best-known story of his combat heroism occurred when a shipmate was blown off the deck by a near-miss explosion. Under great peril, Kerry turned his boat around and scooped him up out of the river. Former Green Beret Jim Rassman credits Kerry with saving his life—and he turned up during the Iowa campaign. The recently retired California state trooper had looked up Kerry and offered to help him in any way he could.

Kerry has said that, very shortly after he got to Vietnam, he concluded that the war was all wrong. He has said that his time there taught him that he could be killed in an instant by an invisible sharpshooter on a riverbank, and that he had to live with that possibility but not become immobilized by it.

Ultimately, Kerry completely changed his stance on the legitimacy of the Vietnam War. By the time he returned home he had become an opponent of the war and a prominent member of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Along with other veterans, Kerry threw away his combat ribbons and became an outspoken protester. Because of his distinguished service, thoughtful demeanor, and his striking height and gravitas, he became one of the best known anti-war veterans in the country.

He eventually became a public prosecutor, then ran for Congress in Massachusetts in 1972 and lost. In 1984 he ran for the Senate and won.

John Kerry’s second wife is Teresa Heinz Kerry. Her late husband, Sen. John Heinz (R-PA), the Heinz ketchup company heir, died in 1991, when his plane collided with a helicopter. In addition to his wife, another key member of Kerry’s campaign is his brother Cameron.

Kerry says he does not take money from political action committees (PACs), but he does take contributions—lots of them, in fact—from individuals who work for or own the same companies that form PACs. Kerry insists the difference is crucial, but Newsweek’s Fineman calls the distinction “functionally meaningless.”

In a recent poll, Kerry was the only Democratic contender to best Bush—by a 49-46 percent margin—in a general-election test match-up. In response to another question, voters said a “Democratic president would do a better job than the incumbent Republican one.”

Declares Kerry, “I not only welcome that fight, I relish it.

“If that’s what they want,” he continues, “then I say to them, ‘Bring it on!’”

Richard H. Curtiss is executive editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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