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Massachusetts: Junior Senator Sen. John Kerry (D) Last Updated July 14, 2003
John Kerry has been a national political figure since he was one of the organizers of Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1971. He attracted attention then because of his background, unusual for a Vietnam veteran (he went to Yale, and his mother is from the Brahmin Forbes family) and because of his record of heroism in combat, for which he was awarded a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. ''How do you ask a man to be the last to die for a mistake?'' he asked in congressional testimony--a good question, and one that also suggested his future political ambitions. He condemned "war crimes committed in Southeast Asia"; he said they were "not isolated incidents, but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Kerry became well enough known to be featured in Doonesbury and plunged quickly into politics. He ran for Congress in 1972, after some widely observed district-shopping, and lost in a district carried by George McGovern. Chastened, he went to law school, worked for a prosecutor, was elected lieutenant governor on the Dukakis ticket in 1982, and ran for senator in 1984. In both races, he upset a favored rival for the Democratic nomination. In 1982, Kerry won the general as part of a ticket with Dukakis; in the 1984 general, he beat Raymond Shamie, a businessman and state Republican chairman, 55%-45%. His toughest race came in 1996, when he was opposed by Republican Governor William Weld, who had been reelected in 1994 with 71% of the vote. Earlier, the two had worked together on some state problems and emphasized the similarity of their views, but the campaign inevitably produced disagreements and some gentlemanly acrimony. Weld called Kerry a ''tax-and-spend liberal who is soft on crime.'' Kerry charged that Weld would vote for budget cuts that would hurt Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment. They held seven debates altogether, literate rounds of accusations and one-liners. They both spent liberally--Kerry, $12.6 million, the second highest of any Senate candidate that year; Weld, $8 million. It got more coverage than any other Senate race that year, but the outcome in retrospect was unsurprising: Democratic Massachusetts voted 52%-45% for its junior Democratic senator. Kerry got his biggest percentages in Boston and university towns like Cambridge and Amherst, and he carried--but not by large margins--old mill towns like Lowell and Lawrence. Kerry came to the Senate with a reputation as a strong liberal. He has a similar voting record to fellow Senator Edward Kennedy, but there have been differences of nuance and interest: Kerry has been more respectful of economic free markets and moved earlier than Kennedy toward supporting an expansive U.S. foreign and military policy. In the majority, Kerry made a name as an investigator, spending some time up blind alleys with klieg lights but also producing some important information. He used his Foreign Relations Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps, Narcotics and Terrorism Subcommittee chairmanship to investigate the infamous Bank of Credit & Commerce International scandal. He also brought forward evidence that Manuel Noriega of Panama was involved with drug-dealing. Kerry's other great investigation was as chairman of the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs, on whether Americans were left behind in Vietnamese hands in 1973. Kerry and Republican Bob Smith of New Hampshire went to Vietnam and attempted to turn up new evidence. He concluded that there is evidence ''that indicates the possibility of survival, at least for a small number,'' after 1973, but also said, ''There is at this time no compelling evidence that any American remains alive in captivity in southeast Asia.'' By May 1995, Kerry and fellow Vietnam veteran Senator John McCain were convinced that Hanoi was fully cooperating and, aware they had standing on this issue that Bill Clinton conspicuously lacked, they got him to normalize relations with Vietnam. Kerry has traveled a number of times to Vietnam, and he and McCain pushed successfully for the appointment of the first U.S. ambassador there. He was the lead negotiator with the State Department and the United Nations to create an international tribunal to hold hearings on genocide and war crimes in Cambodia. Kerry has remained close with McCain and other Vietnam veterans in the Senate. Like McCain, he spoke out strongly in favor of the bombing of Bosnia in April 1999. "One of the lessons of Vietnam is: If you are going to send American forces into harm's way, you don't do it in a limited way. You don't do it tying your hands behind your back ahead of time. You don't ask people to give their lives for something less than the prospect of success." He has also spoken out against the constitutional amendment to allow punishment for flag desecration, arguing that only countries like Iran, Iraq, Libya, and North Korea have such laws. When Bill Clinton was president, Kerry took some interesting positions on issues that put him at odds with Democratic interest groups. In June 1998, he decried the ''implosion'' of public education and said it was caused not just by overcrowded classrooms but also by the ''stifling bureaucracy'' of school systems. His list of reforms, co-sponsored with Oregon Republican Gordon Smith, included some strongly opposed by the teachers' unions--important backers of the Democratic Party--ending teacher tenure, changing certification requirements to end the education school monopoly and allow lateral entry into teaching. He worked with Missouri Republican Christopher Bond to allow direct grants to charities, including faith-based organizations, for early childhood education of at-risk children. He opposed unions by supporting expansion of H1-B visas. He urged the Clinton administration to lift export barriers on encryption and high performance computers. He favored PNTR with China and led the floor fight against the Thompson-Torricelli amendment, which would have required review of China's human rights practices. With George W. Bush in the White House, Kerry has spoken out little about education or faith-based charities and has turned to sharp-edged opposition to administration policy. The Bush tax cut, he said, was "unfair, unaffordable and unquestionably ineffective in growing our economy." He argued in 2002 that it should be replaced by middle-class tax cuts and an expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit; in December, he called for a tax holiday on payroll tax on the first $10,000 of wages--a $765 tax cut for every worker. "The plan would be paid for out of general revenues, so it wouldn't touch a dime slated for Social Security or Medicare," he said, though the payroll tax is explicitly tied to Social Security and Medicare. On the environment, he has been one of the most outspoken opponents of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and has threatened a filibuster on the issue. He has criticized the administration for its rejection of the Kyoto Protocol, although he was one of 95 senators who voted in 1997 to reject Kyoto so long as it exempted developing nations like China and India--a main feature of the document then and now. A harsh note is often apparent in Kerry's criticism of Bush's foreign policy too. In June 2002, he said it was a "catastrophic mistake" not to press the Israelis to negotiate with the Palestinians; he said at the same time he would not negotiate with Yasir Arafat but would not support the calls that he be removed. He interrupted Secretary of State Colin Powell at a July 2002 Foreign Relations Committee hearing and complained that the administration's nuclear arms agreement with Russia "neutered" previous arms control agreements and contained a "huge contradiction." He criticized the administration for letting Afghan troops take the lead in Tora Bora in late 2001 and said that may have allowed Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders to escape. "In some ways Al Qaeda is more dangerous today because we didn't take advantage of initiative, which is critical in war." Despite considerable criticism of administration policy on Iraq, he voted for the Iraq war resolution in October 2002 but said shortly afterward, "I'm going to keep asking tough questions to hold the President accountable for his promise to insist on arms inspections first, act multilaterally and only go to war as a last resort." It can be said with reasonable certainty that Kerry has long wanted to run for president. He has been known to speak in private with contempt not only of George W. Bush, but also of Bill Clinton, and if he does not share all of their strengths, he lacks their greatest faults. In February 1999, he announced he would not run for president in 2000, and in July 2000, he was in the running for the vice presidential nomination and must have been disappointed when it went to his fellow New Englander Joe Lieberman instead. If he comes across as arrogrant and aloof to some, he is also intelligent and hard-working. He has an interesting wife, Teresa Heinz, widow of Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, who inherited some $600 million when he died in a 1991 plane crash. In the past, Kerry and Heinz have said that he would not spend her money on his campaigns, and so far have not done so. In 1996, when Kerry was hard-pressed by Weld and by his practice of not taking PAC contributions, he borrowed $1.9 million against his own assets. He has said that he would spend her money only if "something dramatic takes place in some sort of underhanded, extraordinary way in which they would attack us personally." Kerry's liberal positions on most cultural and economic issues would obviously be an asset in most Democratic primaries but might not be in a general election. He would, after all, be the fourth Massachusetts Democrat to run for president in 24 years, and the other three lost. (In 1988, the elder George Bush made a practice of referring to Michael Dukakis as "the Governor of Massachusetts.") Kerry is opposed to gay marriage, but in favor of legal partnership rights for gay couples--a moderate position in Massachusetts, where the 2002 Democratic candidate for governor came out for gay marriage, but not perhaps in many other states. He is opposed to the death penalty in general, though said after September 11 he supported the death penalty for terrorist acts. In 1989, he voted against the death penalty for terrorists who kill Americans abroad. But Kerry was, as he often emphasizes, a decorated soldier in Vietnam and he was a prosecutor. As Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank puts it, "He's killed people and he's put people in prison. So it's tough for Republicans to say he's too soft somehow to be president. He is a very strong candidate." Yet a record of heroism in Vietnam may not be insulation against all attacks. As Kerry noted with dismay and anger after the election, Georgia Senator Max Cleland, who lost both legs and an arm in Vietnam, was defeated after being attacked for opposing the Bush version of the homeland security bill. There was no doubt that Kerry would be reelected in 2002: He was the first Massachusetts senator to have no major-party opposition since direct election of senators came in, and he won 80% of the vote against a Libertarian and a nuclear freeze organizer who ran a write-in campaign after Kerry voted for the Iraq resolution. He immediately made it clear that he was running for president and, after Al Gore's withdrawal, led in a poll of New Hampshire Democrats. In February 2003, Kerry underwent surgery for prostate cancer but he quickly returned to the Senate and the campaign trail.
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