From the way he ran his campaign, it appears that John Kerry thought he could run in a tense political atmosphere, focused on national security, as a military veteran and something of a minor war hero. Perhaps he believed that nobody would remember his high-profile role in Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or his widely published statement before a congressional committee “We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this Administration has wiped away their memories of us.”
He didn’t have to run his campaign that way. He could have run proudly and honestly on his entire record.
Kerry was a veteran of honorable military service. The men who served under his command unanimously testified to that. (The self-styled Swift Vote Beterans for Truth served on other boats; they would have us believe they spent their time in combat peering through the darkness to take notes on how Kerry was performing, rather than engaging the enemy or paying attention to the duties of their own commands.)
Kerry was also an articulate and passionate leader in the anti-war movement.
Contradition? It didn’t have to be.
Looking at the quagmire George W. Bush had blithely led us into in Iraq, Kerry could have forthrightly told the country that he served honorably in Vietnam, that he saw from first hand experience that the mission on the ground was not worthy of the sacrifices of American service men and women, and that he had the courage to come home and say so.
American was still full of the glory of fighting for freedom and democracy in World War II, but shedding blood for Nguyen Van Thieu and Nguyen Cao Ky was rather like going to war on behalf of the Vichy government in France. Enough of the people of Vietnam were against us, and few enough for us, that soldiers were put in a position where survival, let alone hope of tactical victories, required committing acts that, on a calm, sane, thoughtful day, anyone would call atrocities.
And so, in 2004, led by a president who had never served in the military, had no idea what front line combat was, had bumbled into a war where we had no friends, where even those we were more or less fighting to keep in power were cynically using our troops until the day we would leave, Kerry could have said:
We need a president who understands what combat is, what the price of victory is, who has served on the front lines, who knows from experience what our troops are going through, who has shown the courage to come back from honorable service and proclaim that the Emperor Has No Clothes, who can define a strategic course that will extricate us from this new quagmire.
Too bad nobody on his campaign staff ever thought of that. Even worse, too bad John Kerry himself never thought to present himself that way.
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