The Battle of the Biographies

BRING IT ON! And there they stand, thumbs in their belts, snorting at each other from opposite corners--the Vietnam vet with three Purple Hearts and numerous medals, and the commander in chief, architect of two wars, with one bad guy's scalp on his belt. Are they tough? Are you kidding? But wait. Alter the slant of the light, and things appear more complex. In this corner is the decorated Vietnam vet who risked his life on the battlefield but turned into the ultimate risk-averse politician, carefully tending his political interests and force-averse when it comes to security issues. And in that one is the man whose service when young was adequate but not glorious, but who as president has taken one huge risk after another.

The first test of manhood for both of them came in the late 1960s near the playing fields of New Haven. John Kerry, Yale class of 1966, enlisted in the Navy and was sent to Vietnam the year after. On his first tour of duty, he was a deck officer on the USS Gridley. His second was commanding a Swift boat in the Mekong Delta, intercepting supplies and reinforcements sent down from the north. He was wounded three times, and won a Bronze Star when he risked his life to pull a shipmate out of the river during a firefight. He won a Silver Star when he steered his boat into enemy fire, beached it, and chased down, shot, and killed a Viet Cong guerrilla about to aim a rocket launcher at his men.

About the same time (May 1968), George W. Bush, Yale class of 1968, spoke to the commander of the 147th Fighter Group in Houston about joining the Texas National Guard. Known as the "Champagne Unit," the 147th was stocked to the gills with the children of Texas's prominent families: Among the recruits whom Bush palled around with were the children of two future secretaries of the Treasury: Lloyd Bentsen III, whose father would beat Bush's father in a Senate race in 1970, and John Connally III, son of the governor who had been shot and wounded alongside John Kennedy in 1963. It was also a place to wait out the war, with little prospect of fighting it. "It was an unofficial rule that most people joining the 147th in the mid-sixties would not be going to Vietnam," writes Bill Minutaglio, Bush's biographer. "Only 15,000 of the [U.S.] total of l,040,000 Guardsmen and reservists would be sent." Bush's pilot training was hardly risk-free. But the fact remains that Kerry had put himself in harm's way, and then performed bravely. Give Kerry round one.

In the late 1960s, then, Kerry won the first round in the great manhood sweepstakes, and he continued to win it for some years thereafter, partly because, as compared with George W., he simply looked more like a man. Kerry (like Bush's father) bloomed early and seemed to have always been old. Or older than most other people his age, and often more lonely and serious. As Evan Thomas writes, Kerry at St. Paul's, his New Hampshire prep school, was "stiff and somewhat joyless." He was, as a friend there put it, "born old." A hero at 25, he was a celebrity at 27, when he came home to lead the antiwar veterans, demonstrate on the Mall, and testify before Congress. He launched a nationwide speaking tour, became a hero to students, and was interviewed on "60 Minutes," where he was asked if he wished to be president. (His answer was "No.")

Bush by contrast was the perpetual prankster, a man who seemed always a boy. While Kerry was being elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982, and senator two years later, Bush was engaged in failed business ventures and drinking heavily. Inspired by his initials--JFK--Kerry decided on public life as a child. Bush, in his forties, was still wondering what he wanted to be when he grew up. In his book "All the Presidents' Children," Bush's friend Doug Wead puts a new slant on this story, seeing George W. Bush as having escaped by mere inches the fate of a great many sons of presidents (especially first sons and presidents' namesakes), who lived out their lives as perennial children, or tried and failed to match Dad, and cracked. What seems clear is that Bush was very much still his father's son in 1988 when that father was elected president; and it was only after his father had lost big in public that his own serious life could begin. "George is the family clown," one of his brothers told Wead in 1988, the year their father was elected president. No one ever called Kerry a clown, in or outside of his family. Give Kerry round two.

GEORGE W. BUSH, who avoided combat in Vietnam, was nonetheless turned by war into a combat politician, taking stark stands, making raids into unknown and perilous country, exposing his flanks to political enemies. At the same time, John Kerry, who in war had taken risks beyond measure, took extraordinary steps to shelter himself in his political life. Coming home as a hero in a war that was increasingly seen as a source of contention, he positioned himself on all sides of the question, giving every side something to cling to. His heroism established, he protested the war, becoming a hero to those who despised the armed forces. Having risked his life many times to save those around him, he accused the U.S. armed forces of terrible deeds. The signature event occurred in the April 1971 protest, when he threw another soldier's medals onto the steps of the Capitol. A self-centered nature, not seen on the battlefield, started to come to the fore. He became (in the Washington Post's paraphrase of his critics) "someone who votes one way and then describes those votes another way, . . . a politician who changes with the times."

Kerry's MO is to support something (or at least not attack it) and then attack people who act on his words. He attacks Bush for trashing the Kyoto Treaty, but did not support it when it came up in the Senate; voted for Bush's education program, and then savaged it; supported the Patriot Act, and savaged John Ashcroft when he carried it out. He was for a unilateral American foreign policy when proposed by Bill Clinton, against it when suggested by either George Bush. There is always an "out" built into his positions. "While trying to do the right thing, Kerry has always sought to make himself a thinner target," William Saletan observed in Slate. "He was for affirmative action, just not this affirmative action. He was for a drug war, just not this drug war. He was for an Iraq war, just not this Iraq war." He is for everything in the abstract but not in the particular, and never in the way it's carried out. He is for an ideal, but never in the form presented; for weapons systems, but not those actually proposed; for the use of force, but under no conditions that anybody can imagine or foresee. He voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, but said he was not against using force then, and he voted for the second Gulf War in 2002, but said he never imagined that force would be used. In 2002, 2003, and 2004, he attacked George Bush the younger for not having taken the route followed by George Bush the elder, which he hadn't supported at the time. In 1991, he accused the elder George Bush of a "rush into war" (does this sound familiar?) and derided his coalition as "bizarre new bedfellows" and "shadowy battlefield allies."

Thus, Kerry played up his support for the war when that appeared popular, and changed to attacking it when he faced an antiwar electorate in the primary states. When Howard Dean soared in early polling, Kerry assailed Bush from the left for having started the war. When Saddam was captured, Kerry trumpeted his support for the war, and attacked Dean from the right. Then the Kay report came out, and Kerry switched back again. (Look for a new switch when Osama bin Laden is captured; c'est la guerre.) Even the attack by his campaign on Bush as a "deserter" for his National Guard record is an unprincipled switch from Kerry's rhetoric in 1992, when the draft-dodging Bill Clinton was running for president: "I am saddened by the fact that Vietnam has yet again been inserted into the campaign. . . . We do not need to divide America over who served and how," he said then on the floor of the Senate.

To be fair, Kerry's shortage of spine does not stand out in his party. The Washington Post reported of the Iraq war vote in September 2002: "More than a dozen Democrats who requested anonymity have told the Post that many members who oppose the president's strategy . . . are going to nonetheless support it because they fear a backlash from voters." And ABC News's The Note speculated two months later that "if there were a secret-ballot vote, . . . Democrats in the House and Senate would vote overwhelmingly to repeal the Bush-Baucus tax cuts and to stop the president from going to war with Iraq." Slate's Saletan wrote that he remains "mystified at how a man who braved bullets can be so terrified at being pinned down on a political issue." So are the rest of us. Confronted with a monstrous attack on his country (and the prospect of new ones that would be even greater), Bush came up with a coherent and serious policy and staked his career and reputation on its outcome. While some Democrats, Joe Lieberman and the late Paul Wellstone among them, did vote on principle, there were numerous others--Kerry chief among them--who put their political interests uppermost. Give round three to Bush.

BETWEEN 1945 AND 1992, every president of the United States had served in the armed forces, and from 1952 to 1992, each had been a veteran of World War II. Three of these can be fairly described as war heroes: five star general Dwight David Eisenhower, supreme commander of the Allied forces in Europe, and two young naval officers of the next generation, John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush. In the 1990s, some other decorated veterans also rose to prominence as presidential candidates, notably Vietnam veterans John McCain, John Kerry, and Bob Kerrey. And World War II veteran Bob Dole enjoyed his last hurrah at the top of the Republican ticket in 1996. Of these, McCain endured six years in captivity, Kerrey lost a leg, Dole had one arm rendered practically useless, and Kerry won three Purple Hearts. George H.W. Bush and John Kennedy were not wounded, but each nearly was drowned in the Pacific Ocean in combat.

World War II was a war that swept up all classes, and that young men trooped to join. Vietnam was a war that many resisted, and went to great lengths to evade. Men who were young in the Vietnam War era tended to fall into three camps: those who served (McCain, Kerry, and Kerrey), those who ducked out completely (Howard Dean and Bill Clinton), and those who managed to serve in the technical sense, not bringing shame to their prominent families, while minimizing the risk to themselves. These included Al Gore, who went to Vietnam as a journalist in a greatly reduced tour of duty; and George W. Bush and Dan Quayle, among many others, who stayed stateside in the National Guard. Quayle's service in the National Guard was used as an issue against him in 1988 by the Democrats, who later discovered, when Bill Clinton ran against George Bush the elder and then Bob Dole, that military service was not that important, and surely not key as a measure of character. If Howard Dean, who spent a very good war skiing in Aspen, were now the candidate, you can be sure that the matter of George W. Bush's war service would not have been raised by the Democrats.

In itself, though, a record of being a war hero or veteran doesn't say much about someone's ability to make sound judgments on defense and security matters, much less run a government. George Washington was a good general and a great president. Dwight Eisenhower was a good general and a good president. Ulysses S. Grant was a great general, and one of the worst presidents the country has ever seen. War hero John McCain gets it about war and security. Former Georgia senator and Vietnam veteran Max Cleland didn't; he took Tom Daschle's bad advice to put union interests ahead of the president's ability to move people around in a crisis by voting against the homeland security bill.

War hero John Kennedy (the real JFK) got it, and was an aggressive cold warrior. War hero Bob Kerrey (the real Kerry) gets it, as in this interview he gave the New York Sun: "I think [Iraq] is going well. It breaks my heart whenever anybody dies, but we liberated 25 million people. . . . It puts us on the side of democracy in the Arab world. Twenty years from now, we'll be hard pressed to find anyone who says it wasn't worth the effort. . . . This is not just another democracy. This is a democracy in the Arab world." John Kerry, on the other hand, didn't get the Cold War and doesn't get the new war on terror. He complains still about Reagan's "illegal" war in Central America, which only looks better with each passing year. The nonexistent war record of Franklin D. Roosevelt was always a sore point with his Oyster Bay cousins, who suffered sorely in war, and won numerous medals. Theodore Roosevelt Jr. was one of the bravest soldiers who ever existed, but it was Franklin--who toured World War I sites in a limousine, and saw war itself from a very great distance--who had the guile and ruthlessness to be a wartime commander in chief. FDR's fan Ronald Reagan, who spent World War II in Hollywood, got the Cold War in ways Navy officer Jimmy Carter and bomber pilot George McGovern did not.

If it is hard to extrapolate from the frat boy he once was to the grim and driven President George W. Bush of the present, it is just as hard to project the self-protective, self-serving John Kerry from the daredevil hero who served in Vietnam. Lives do not always proceed in predictable patterns, and we may have a choice between a classic late bloomer who has just reached his powers, and a morning glory, who hit his peak early and has not matched it since. In the late 1960s, John Kerry was the better man, as well as the far more mature one. In 2004, in terms of political maturity and courage, the far better man is George W. Bush.

Kerry's MO is to support something (or at least not attack it) and then attack people who act on his words. He attacks Bush for trashing the Kyoto Treaty, but did not support it when it came up in the Senate; voted for Bush's education program, and then savaged it; supported the Patriot Act, and savaged John Ashcroft when he carried it out. He was for a unilateral American foreign policy when proposed by Bill Clinton, against it when suggested by either George Bush... "He was for affirmative action, just not this affirmative action. He was for a drug war, just not this drug war. He was for an Iraq war, just not this Iraq war." ...for weapons systems, but not those actually proposed; for the use of force, but under no conditions that anybody can imagine or foresee. He voted against the first Gulf War in 1991, but said he was not against using force then, and he voted for the second Gulf War in 2002, but said he never imagined that force would be used. In 2002, 2003, and 2004, he attacked George Bush the younger for not having taken the route followed by George Bush the elder, which he hadn't supported at the time. In 1991, he accused the elder George Bush of a "rush into war" (does this sound familiar?) and derided his coalition as "bizarre new bedfellows" and "shadowy battlefield allies."

Kerry reminds me of the outdoor harangue scene in the book "1984"...

Note: this topic is from 03/05/2004. Thanks RWR8189.

It was night, and the white faces and the scarlet banners were luridly floodlit. The square was packed with several thousand people, including a block of about a thousand schoolchildren in the uniform of the Spies. On a scarlet-draped platform an orator of the Inner Party, a small lean man with disproportionately long arms and a large bald skull over which a few lank locks straggled, was haranguing the crowd. A little Rumpelstiltskin figure, contorted with hatred, he gripped the neck of the microphone with one hand while the other, enormous at the end of a bony arm, clawed the air menacingly above his head. His voice, made metallic by the amplifiers, boomed forth an endless catalogue of atrocities, massacres, deportations, lootings, rapings, torture of prisoners, bombing of civilians, lying propaganda, unjust aggressions, broken treaties. It was almost impossible to listen to him without being first convinced and then maddened. At every few moments the fury of the crowd boiled over and the voice of the speaker was drowned by a wild beast-like roaring that rose uncontrollably from thousands of throats. The most savage yells of all came from the schoolchildren. The speech had been proceeding for perhaps twenty minutes when a messenger hurried on to the platform and a scrap of paper was slipped into the speaker's hand. He unrolled and read it without pausing in his speech. Nothing altered in his voice or manner, or in the content of what he was saying, but suddenly the names were different. Without words said, a wave of understanding rippled through the crowd. Oceania was at war with Eastasia! The next moment there was a tremendous commotion. The banners and posters with which the square was decorated were all wrong! Quite half of them had the wrong faces on them. It was sabotage! The agents of Goldstein had been at work! There was a riotous interlude while posters were ripped from the walls, banners torn to shreds and trampled underfoot. The Spies performed prodigies of activity in clambering over the rooftops and cutting the streamers that fluttered from the chimneys. But within two or three minutes it was all over. The orator, still gripping the neck of the microphone, his shoulders hunched forward, his free hand clawing at the air, had gone straight on with his speech. One minute more, and the feral roars of rage were again bursting from the crowd. The Hate continued exactly as before, except that the target had been changed.

The thing that impressed Winston in looking back was that the speaker had switched from one line to the other actually in midsentence, not only without a pause, but without even breaking the syntax.
-- George Orwell, "Nineteen Eighty-Four"

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