Posted on 08/11/2004 3:23:54 PM PDT by FireTrack
WELL, TEMPUS CERTAINLY FUGIT. And the passage of years doesn't always change things for the better. In 1971 a Macmillan editor sent a copy of John Kerry's pro-Hanoi book The New Soldier (complete with its cover photograph of grubby radicals mocking the famous Iwo Jima statue, but with an upside-down American Flag) to West Virginia Senator Robert Byrd. Asked for his reaction to the Derry screed, Senator Byrd wrote back to the publishing house: I say most respectfully to you, I threw it in the wastebasket after leafing through it.
Fifteen years later, in order to lock up his own post as Senate Majority Leader, the same Robert Byrd most respectfully offered up to Massachusetts Senator John Kerry the position of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee for the next election cycle. John Forbes Kerry, now age 43 and with an earned reputation as an overweening opportunist, accepted. Ambition was never made of sterner stuff. John Kerry is today as far to the left as he was when he appeared on the national scene as a disaffected veteran making excuses for the Vietcong. Last year, for example, the National Journal ranked the junior Massachusetts Democrat as the second most liberal member of the U.S. senate, behind only George McGovern's old campaign manager Gary Hart. Indeed, just one thing about John Kerry has changed over the intervening years. He had cosmetic surgery to shorten and prettify his lantern jaw through there is still something about it that resembles the weapon with which Samson slew all the Philistines.
Highborn Gentry, Son of a Foreign Service Officer who has served on Dean Acheson's legal staff and (on his mother's side) of the wealthy China-trading Forbes family. John is not your typical Boston Irish Catholic. More Forbes than Kerry has been the frequent observation of him. As his former roommate, former campaign manager, and former brother-in-law (twin of Senator Kerry's divorced wife) put it: This is not an Irish family. Which is something that never escaped those in the working-class areas that rejected Kerry as a congressional candidate in the Seventies. Childhood summers spent in Europe, and handing on the words of houseguests such as Earl Warren, the ultra-liberal Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, are not a background that computes among hoi polloi with lunch pails. John Forbes Kerry was a product of elitism's most exclusive academies: Fressenden, St. Paul's School, and Yale (class of 1966) where he was a member of Scull and Bones.
Real life intruded when the Draft Board uncharitably turned down John's plan to study in Europe after graduating from the Ivy League and he had to join the military lest he be inducted like a commoner. After officers candidate school, Kerry served with the Navy in Vietnam where he was awarded Silver and Bronze Stars and three amazingly quick Purple Hearts all of which he treated as trash the minute there seemed to be the slightest political advantage to it. Because of his Purple Hearts, reported the New York Times, Kerry was able to take advantage of a Navy regulation that allowed him to return to duty in the United States. Mr. Kerry left Vietnam in March 1969 and took a job as an admiral's aide in New York City. He married a socialite from another patrician family. Then, the Times went on, He asked for and was given an early release from the Navy so he could run for Congress on an antiwar platform. Ownership of a house in the old factory town of Waltham, Massachusetts, and four weeks of campaigning, were not enough to deliver victory. He came in third in the caucus behind the eventual winner at low Vietnik, the radical priest Drinan.
By 1971 it was the scabrous Vietnam Veterans Against the War that was Kerry's bandwagon. Aided by a ghost from the Kennedy family brain trust, the former lieutenant (j.g.) gave a well-publicized speech as testimony before Senator William Fulbright's August Foreign Relations Committee. Accusing American soldiers of rape and torture was then popular in some quarters (the Communist Daily World was beside itself), and Kerry spat his poison to the hosannas of the usual Communists, kooks, and America Lasters. Surrender would even be cheap: He told the Senators that no more than 3,000 South Vietnamese would face recrimination if the U.S. would just cut and run. And Kerry soon went back to Yale to declare that U.S. policy in Vietnam was tantamount to genocide. On Meet the Press he asserted that our soldiers (including himself) were guilty of all kinds of atrocities in this war of the people, and claimed (in his defense) to have refused to obey orders in an operation against the Vietcong to the point where he and others were brought to the rear. The 27-year-old rich kid now branded America's leaders as war criminals. Along with a well-publicized mob of radicalized veterans and pretenders, Kerry then tossed away what were supposed to be his medals from the Vietnam War. When he decided a decade or later that it would be better politically to deny having done so, he actually claimed that he threw away another man's awards at his request. There apparently being no honor among turncoats, Senator John Kerry now displays copies of the decorations he trashed.
MORE ELECTIONEERING
Questioned bout the involvement of so many Communists in his pro-Hanoi anti-war activities, Kerry said that was not relevant. The Angered wives of American Prisoners of War accused John Kerry of using the P.O.W. issue to further his political ambitions. And they were right.
Having now become a left-wing celebrity, Kerry went District shopping in 1972, bought a house at Worcester in anticipation of running there, and when a congressional vacancy was created in yet a third District because of a U.N. appointment, he rented an apartment there. Former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, with whom Kerry worked in the Red-led peace action in 1971, came all the way back from North Vietnam to help the Kerry effort. Though he heavily outspent his primary rivals to reach the November contest, the Vietnik carpetbagger was defeated in the general election even in a Commonwealth of Massachusetts where George (crawl on your knees to Hanoi) McGovern carried the top of the ticket. True, during the campaign, Kerry's infamous pro-Hanoi book had some how become unavailable and was ignored by the liberal news media. But it hadn t helped matters than in September 1972 Kerry's brother and another Kerry campaign aide (the son of Superior Court judge) were arrested in a night-time break-in at the Lowell headquarters of his main Democratic opponent. Kerry stonewalled the press, but reportedly told his (then) brother-in-law that it will take 10 years to recover from that Watergate-style affair. That it did but now this milltown Watergater is running the national Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee without so much as a word of complaint by the liberal page.
After losing his second try for Congress, John went to law school and became a county assistant district attorney under the man who had dismissed the charges of breaking and entering against Kerry's brother and the judge's son(later himself a Massachusetts state representative and congressional candidate). The Boston Globe quotes a lawyer familiar with these matters: Along the way Kerry infuriated some of his colleagues. There are cops who still hate him. They remember when [local radio audiences] would hear about a raid before they did. Ten years after the Kerry campaign break-in, John Forbes Kerry won the most undemanding statewide elective office in Massachusetts, that of lieutenant governor under Michael Dukakis; he promised he would not use it as a stepping stone, but true to his character he began almost immediately to run for a seat in the United States Senate.
SENATE CANDIDATE
When Senator Paul Tsongas announced he was leaving office because of ill health, a seat was magically available for Kerry in 1984. But with no legislative record, he needed first to get by a more experienced liberal Democrat in the primary, youthful U.S. Representative James Shannon. To do this he ludicrously branded his rival a back-room politician and played at being the anti-Establishment candidate running untarnished from all the evil emanating from Washington. A mini-scandal about a tax-break was used by a local underground paper to smear Shannon, and Kerry had the edge he needed, holding on for 41 percent of the vote and a three-point victory in the four-man primary.
There was not much to choose from ideologically among Massachusetts Democrats that year, but Kerry proved that no one would be allowed to his left. The founding organizer of Vietnam Veterans Against the War now came out for negotiating to reestablish diplomatic relations with Communist Cuba; for federal legislation to create homosexual rights, against the death penalty, and for slashing America's defense even at the cost of Massachusetts jobs (Kerry proposed a $200 billion cut in the military over three years). John Kerry listed the absurd and divisive Equal Rights Amendment as one of his top two priorities; he was for comprehensive socialized medicine; against private possession of handguns; for national Dead Man voter registration by mail; and against any Constitutional Amendments which would prohibit forced busing for racial purposes, allow voluntary prayer in public schools, or require a balanced Federal Budget. This election, after all, was being contested in the People's Republic of Massachusetts.
How far out of the mainstream is John Forbes Kerry? While telling the American Civil Liberties Union he opposed the death penalty for even the worst offenders because it cheapens life, Kerry also came out not only for killing the innocent unborn but for providing federal funding to do so, saying he would vote against any restriction of age, consent requirements, funding restrictions, or any law to limit access to abortion. This has been my publicity stated position since before Roe V. Wade. One can hardly wait till 198888888 when Democratic candidates for the U.S. Senate will be asked to compare their own views to those of their national Senatorial campaign chairman.
Astonishingly, John Kerry is even more dovish than Teddy Kennedy, and came out variously in 1984 against more than two-dozen weapons systems. His military position paper that year called for cancellation of sixteen weapons programs then current, eleven of which were supported even by the hero of Chappaquddick. When conservative businessman Ray Shamie was picked as the G.O.P. nominee against Kerry, having defeated Establishment liberal Elliot Richardson, the left became widely alarmed and began to smear Shamie. Kerry was sneering about Mr. Shamie being an extremist on the night of his primary win, and the race became heated as the liberal media competed to do Kerry's dirty work. Retired Maj. General George S. Patton III, who commanded troops with distinction in Vietnam, is one who became enraged at what was occurring. General Patton charged that he had experienced proof in the field that Kerry's actions had given aid and comfort to the enemy, just as had those of Ramsey Clark and Jane Fonda. Mr. Kerry, said George Patton, probably caused some of my guys to get killed. And I don t like that. There is no soap ever invented that can wash that blood off his hands. All of which was true, but. But as the liberal press went into fits, some of Shamie's advisors panicked. Instead of simply saying that in any fight for our country he would sooner have the company of George Patton than John Kerry, Shamie was persuaded to ask Patton to resign as head of his veteran's committee, let up on the attack, and lost a race he might have won.
Kerry was thus allowed to downplay his anti-war activities. The same John Kerry who had admitted to war atrocities on network television now said simply: No I ve never committed any war atrocities, and got by with it. The medals thrown away in Washington, D.C. Kerry claimed were not really his despite more than a decade of pretense to the contrary. Kerry went so far as to film campaign advertising before the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington even after members of his campaign staff were made aware that it was forbidden and were chased from the area by a park ranger. Antiwar activist Kerry had promised that if American cut and ran there would be few recriminations. After at least 700,000 were interned by Hanoi in re-education camps, with perhaps a million boat people escaping under desperate circumstances, and at least a third of the people of Cambodia murdered by the Communists after all of this John Forbes Kerry was treated by the press as gently as Eleanor Roosevelt at a fund-raising tea for Soviet War Bonds.
There were glorifying exceptions. Boston Herald columnist Don Feder flayed Kerry for still characterizing the Vietnam conflict as a civil war declaring: The real enemy, Kerry insists, was oppression, poverty, and disease. This naive analysis notwithstanding, South Vietnam was not conquered by an army of beggars or a ravaging epidemic, but by a massive war machine from the North,, well lubricated by its Soviet patron. Feder reported that before the 1984 election, John Kerry had been a stalwart apologist for the North Vietnamese and advocated policies guaranteed to assure a Communist victory. He slandered his country and all Americans who fought in Vietnam. Atrocities weren t isolated incidents, said he, but deliberate U.S. policy. Among other dispassionate observations, he maintained that we re committing 10 My Lais a day from the air. While charging that U.S. soldiers were war criminals, he had nothing but praise for the Communists. He typically termed the conflict a war of the people. fought by indigenous peasant reformers (currently his characterization of El Salvador's Marxist terrorists).
When columnist Feder kept up this criticism, Kerry tried to intimidate him in person, going to Feder's office to declare his hatred of communism. Recalling the incident to this reporter, the Herald man laughed at the memory of what must have been the most ludicrous performance since Truman Capote tried to sing Stouthearted Men.
But Kerry was out to promise whatever the traffic would bear. An analysis of eleven specific Kerry campaign proposals indicated that would result in a minimum of $803 billion in new federal spending. The National Education Association sold Kerry on the idea of increasing federal spending on education by 413 percent. The Boston Herald editorialized about other such programs and promises: For instance, Kerry supports an $80 billion public works program. He also endorses national industrial policy (government tinkering with the economy of a monumental scale). Mr. Kerry favors an expansion of legal services and wants to increase the budget of the Environmental Protection Agency by a whopping $32 billion.
And so it went. During the primary, candidate Kerry spoke of the inevitability of a tax increase then pretended in the general election that he would not vote for new taxes to fund all the boondoggles he had proposed. Kerry said he would cut $55 billion from defense in one year to reduce the deficit, then said that same $55 billion should be spent on new programs for the people.
Reducing tax expenditures, said candidate Kerry in lafferesque language, would result in more revenues. Then he had the gall to pretend of the Administration's tax-rate cut. The Reagan economic plan is a hoax and a failure. The candidate's reversals were a dizzying round of Can You Top This. For instance, this great opponent of Political Action Committee took all the money from the P.A.C.s that he could get disguising what he was doing by laundering it through the Democratic National Committee in Washington until he was caught.
MANAGUA'S SENATOR
In both the primary election and the general (which he won by a margin of ten percent), John Forbes Kerry promised that if elected he would deal with issues touching Massachusetts and leave the foreign policy to the more experienced Senator Kennedy. The man's word means nothing. Less than four months, a Senator Kerry flew into Nicaragua and returned with a transparent cease-fire proposal to try to derail U..S. aid to the Freedom Fighters. This junket was intended to add substance to style, for as the Senator had acknowledged,; The perception of me as a showboat has persisted by virtue of the strong image people have of the 1971 and 1072, which was proven to be indelible. As soon as the House of Representatives killed the Contra aid package in response to the Kerry pilgrimage, Nicaragua's dictator jetted off to Moscow to ask for more military aid to finish the Freedom Fighters and attack his neighbors. And dependable John Kerry as dependable for the Sandinistas as he had been for the Vietcong responded by blaming the United States for rejecting his peace plan and for driving President Ortega to have no alternative but to turn to the Soviet Union. When Senator Barry Goldwater (R-Arizona) and the White house said Kerry had broken the Logan Act by privately negotiating with the Communists, they had a far more respectable case than the one being made against Lt. Colonel Oliver North.
John Kerry went further than even the most febrile of his fellow Massachusetts Democrats in fronting for the Nicaraguan Communists. He asked for public statements of support from his governor, from his primary opponent Jim Shannon, and from former Senator Paul Tsongas. But no statements were issued. Undaunted, Kerry's aggressive staff also called for members of the Massachusetts delegation to the U.S. House, reported Peter Lucas in the Boston Herald, asking them to speak out in the House in praise of Kerry's trip and meeting with Ortega. All those contacted turned him down. Kerry got such a rude reception that he dropped that idea, one House source said. And for a good reason. Daniel Ortega soon made Kerry look like a total fool for believing him, but what else is new? Columnists in both major Boston papers started to refer to Kerry as the Senator from Nicaragua.
Meanwhile, John Kerry's opposition to the Reagan Foreign policy whether the issue is Star Wars, anti-satellite testing, or shipbuilding has been costing Massachusetts thousands of jobs. But Kerry did say that wouldn't bother him. The Massachusetts Senator has not only served as the mouthpiece of Managua but of Moscow as well. Speaking of our own strategic defense protecting Americans from nuclear attack, which is not yet being done Kerry claims than any nuclear weapon that is being developed for defense can be used for offense exactly as the Soviets feared, exactly as Mr. Gorbachev expressed to President Reagan at the summit. That is, he takes exactly the Soviet line. And the moratorium that Kerry favors on antisatellite weapons would freeze the Soviet advantage into a permanent status quo. In like vein, John Forbes Kerry was one of only eight U.S. Senators who would have placed the United States at the mercy of a World Court, fat with judges from hostile powers including Poland and the U.S.S.R. that has already backed Communist Nicaragua against us and attacked our aid to the Freedom Fighters.
The Kerry position on such matters is utterly predictable. Senator Kerry is of course all for those economic sanctions against South Africa, where the Communist led African National Congress wants to translate its terrorism into Communist control. But in roll-call votes, Kerry would not add sanctions against those found to be in gross violations of the Helsinki Agreements, or a dozen Communist countries with human-rights records worse than South Africa, or even those which have directed terrorism against these United States.
What John Forbes Kerry hopes to get in the new Senate lineup where he sits on the same Foreign Relations Committee before which he made his reputation by slandering his country is subpoena power to allow him to charge anti-Communist Nicaraguans with some such crime as drug-running. The fact is that the U.S. Customs Service and other official investigators have proved that is the Communist regime in Managua itself that is doing this sort of dealing in the narcotics business but you can bet Kerry doesn't want to hear that. One awaits his latest fantasies with a mixture of horror and conviction that the most certain way to finish John Kerry is to give the whole country a televised look at him in action.
The flap involving the White House and its funding of the Contras, says David Nyhan of the Boston Globe, is the hottest patch in politics. Kerry, he notes, is the lead senator on investigating the ripest stink to hit Washington since Watergate. And the liberal Globe reports reporter is not alone in expecting that John Forbes Kerry, with his totally telegenic personality, will do his best to make the most of it. After all, writes fellow liberal Nyhan, Kerry is undeniably one of the biggest media hounds in Washington. If it's 11 o clock, you know where your senator is: He's on the Capitol steps, adjusting his necktie, waiting for [an interview on] the nightly news. Yes, stay tuned.
At the same time, John Kerry will be trying to pick up chits from fellow Democrats as national chairman for their 1988 reelection efforts. And says he wants to stop the meanness of negative campaigning. You can bet your boots and save your socks for Sunday about that! Kerry says he objects to attacks that deal with character, and imply a lack of patriotism. One can certainly see why he would fear that.
Good reading, a real blast from the past.
Bump for later.
Good reading....tear that phony facade of a 'Combat Record' out from under him
Then expose his lack of character...problem with the truth and reality and his other weakness....lack of any real Senate record....
good read. ol' "sheets" byrd didn't like the book.
This is a damning article against Kerry.
Flips this way, flops that way...
Like the French, he loves to surrender...
Swats at little kids...
And has the limpest power fist you ever saw...
Can't even do a strong power fist with two hands...
Or when he's holding his stomach...
He's so boring, even the press photogs are reduced to shooting Kerry's shadow for entertainment...
Now I ask you, what's peculiar about that?! [snicker]
He hasn't changed at all.
No he hasn't and is using what worked for him in the past. He also doesn't seem to be hindered by any loyalties or conscience. Scary...
This author needs to get up to speed on Kerry's REAL background. He is as Irish as a blintz although for years "Kerry" tried to pass himself off as Irish.
He is very much Jewish. His father changed the family name and most of his relatives died in the holocaust.
His far-left, out-of-the-mainstream positions and record is beyond dispute. Only in a year with something like Iraq acting as a drag on the incumbent could a person like John Kerry have a chance to win. For now anyway, I mean in a decade or so demography will probably favor liberals over conservatives, but we're not there yet.
Actually his grandfather changed his name from Kohn to Kerry. BTW, I have an interesting theory about why his grandfather committed suicide in a Boston hotel in the early 1920s. His grandfather was in the shoe business. It is not unlikely that he might have met with Joe Kennedy who was a prominent banker back then and asked for a business loan. What is known about Joe Kennedy, I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if Kennedy heard the supposed Kerry speak and became enraged at the distinctly NON-Irish accent he heard. Most likely he would have cussed out grandpa "Kerry" who became so demoralized that he committed suicide.
So it would be extremely ironic if Teddy's father killed Ketchup Boy's grandfather. Something to think about.
memory bump
Ooops, my mistake. You're correct and I suspect a Kennedy connection as well somewhere. I've also suspect there is a Kennedy connection with the birth of William Jefferson Clinton. I believe Kennedy patriarchs visited the track at Hot Springs, AR.
Thanks!
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