Posted on 02/09/2004 12:42:13 PM PST by GailA
Wednesday January 28, 3:15 PM
http://asia.news.yahoo.com/040128/afp/040128071557people.html
John Kerry: forged in the fires of Vietnam
WASHINGTON (AFP) - John Kerry, after graduating from Yale University in 1966, enlisted in the US Navy and like tens of thousands of other young American men was sent to Vietnam.
It was to become a defining experience in the life of the 60-year-old US senator who has emerged as the front-runner for the 2004 Democratic nomination for president and an experience that he credits for putting him on the campaign trail for the White House.
"There's a sense after Vietnam that every other day is extra, that you have to do what is right," Kerry said in a television spot. "That's why I'm running for president."
Born December 11, 1943 in Denver, Colorado, John Forbes Kerry spent part of his childhood in Europe, where his father was a diplomat, and in the northeastern state of Massachusetts, which he has represented in the US Senate for the past two decades.
After leaving Yale, Kerry became an officer on a gunboat patrolling the Mekong Delta in Vietnam -- hazardous duty immortalized in the Francis Ford Coppola film "Apocalypse Now."
Lieutenant Kerry earned Silver and Bronze Stars for valor and three Purple Hearts for wounds, a distinguished military record which has served him well with veterans' groups.
On his return home, however, Kerry became a leader of the anti-war movement and threw away some of his medals. He co-founded Vietnam Veterans of America and was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
"I was an instrument of a foreign policy with no common sense. I was forced to carry an M-16 to serve that policy," he tells campaign rallies.
Kerry helped organize a huge anti-war protest outside Congress in Washington in 1971, appearing alongside Black Panther Angela Davis and earning a place on president Richard Nixon's notorious "enemies' list."
That same year, a 27-year-old Kerry testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, earning headlines with his remark "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
After a failed bid for the House of Representatives in 1972, Kerry went back to law school. He served as a prosecutor in Massachusetts and went into private practice before winning election as lieutenant governor of the New England state in 1982.
Two years later he was elected to the US Senate. He has been re-elected three times since, serving alongside his supporter and mentor, Ted Kennedy.
At 6 feet 4 inches (1.93m) with greying hair, a long face and an air of gravitas, Kerry bears a slight physical resemblance to Civil War president Abraham Lincoln. But he has more often been compared to another former president, John F. Kennedy, whose initials he shares.
His win on Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary moved Kerry a step closer to following in JFK's footsteps to the White House although he will have a formidable opponent in the Republican incumbent Bush in November.
With his war record and years of service on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry says he has the best qualifications to counter Bush on national security.
Although he voted for a congressional resolution which Bush used to justify the invasion of Iraq and toppling of Saddam Hussein, Kerry has been highly critical of the Bush administration since.
"I think this administration has run the most reckless, arrogant, inept, and ideological foreign policy in modern history," he said.
Kerry, who underwent a successful operation for prostate cancer last year, has two grown daughters, Vanessa and Alexandra, from his first marriage.
His wife, Teresa Heinz, is the heiress to a fortune estimated at some 500 million dollars from the Heinz ketchup family.
He wasn't forced to do anything! Has he conveniently forgotten that he enlisted? Forced would be if he was drafted against his will.
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