VOTE THE WAR CRIMINAL?:

Arms and the Man: John Kerry in Vietnam: a review of Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War by Douglas Brinkley (Andrew Ferguson, 02/09/2004, Weekly Standard)

The pattern that runs through Kerry's political life was ... established from the moment he left the service: He is expert at having it both ways. He got hero points for bravely fighting in the war and sensitivity points for believing that the war he bravely fought in was barbaric. He has slid from one side of this formula to the other as the situation requires, and only a few of his hostile fellow veterans have been so crude as to point out that, by his own logic, he is a war criminal.

"I never wanted to be a professional veteran," he protested to a reporter during one of his early political campaigns. But of course that's what he's been, unavoidably. In his public presentation, he is a dour, pompous, and unlikable man. His political career--and his success during this presidential campaign, when his fellow Democrats ache for a candidate who will appear strong on "national security"--is unimaginable without his extraordinary service in Vietnam.

God knows, and experience proves, that he won't shut up about it. It has become his own personal bloody shirt. Kerry's eagerness to bring up his military service at every opening strikes many people, including all Republicans, as opportunism, as just one more instance of an ambition that will exploit anything on the path to its own fulfillment. But there are other possibilities, if we can briefly extend him the benefit of the doubt. It might also be the way a reflective man responds to an experience he's never quite been able to get over. And because he can't quite get over it, he doesn't want us to either. This may be narcissism, but it's not opportunism, necessarily, and in any case it's perfectly understandable, and probably not worth criticizing.

BRINKLEY WRITES at great length about Kerry's antiwar activism and only a bit less about his later political career. For anyone interested in these phases of the story, however, "Tour of Duty" is nearly worthless. His devotion to Kerry is simply too large. Brinkley spends a single paragraph on the medal-throwing, for example, and though he dedicates many pages to Kerry's courtship of his first wife, he mentions their divorce in a single phrase. All the less commendable events of the post-Vietnam career are ignored or smoothed over.

This is, as we've seen, a professional hazard common to "presidential historians." Yet the same reticence is shared also by two generations of Americans, who have never seen combat themselves, or indeed any kind of life-threatening struggle, and who puzzle over what they might do if they did. In a country like ours, where life is generally so soft and easeful, heroism is a special kind of conversation-stopper. What are we to do when confronted with a veteran like Kerry, who charged when we might have run, whose courage came out when the stakes were highest?

We look at our shoes and shuffle our feet. We don't ask too many questions. We shut up. We let him go on and on about his "life of service to our country." As we should.

It may be uncomfortable-making, but you can't let someone off the hook for their career-long moral cowardice just because they've also displayed physical courage.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 3, 2004 8:44 PM