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Last Updated June 22, 2005
John Kerry, the Democratic nominee for president in 2004, has been a figure in national politics going back to 1971. The son of a Foreign Service officer, he grew up in many places and at one point attended boarding school in Switzerland. He graduated from Yale in 1966 and, after exploring alternatives, enlisted in the Navy. He served on a swift boat in Vietnam--hazardous duty--and was awarded a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. He attended the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit in April 1971 which veterans testified (some of them falsely, it turned out) about atrocities and became one of the leaders in Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He attracted much attention for his articulateness and for his background, unusual for a Vietnam veteran, when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. ''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," which, he said, 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 familiar enough 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 as top aide to the Middlesex County district attorney, was elected lieutenant governor on a ticket with Michael Dukakis in 1982, and ran for senator in 1984. In both races, he upset a favored rival for the Democratic nomination; in the 1984 general election he beat Republican state chairman Raymond Shamie 55%-45%. Kerry came to the Senate with a reputation as a strong liberal. He has had 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 more inclined in some cases to support an expansive U.S. foreign and military policy. In his first 20 years in the Senate Kerry was not a visibly active legislator--during the 2004 campaign factcheck.org said that only 11 of his bills became law--but was arguably more influential behind the scenes. One reason may have been his senior colleague: Edward Kennedy has been active on many legislative issues, as well as Massachusetts causes, and did not invite junior colleagues to play on his turf. Kerry made his name more 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. 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 convinced him to normalize relations with Vietnam. 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 Serbia in April 1999. 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. They held eight 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. When Bill Clinton was president, Kerry took some interesting positions on issues that put him at odds with Democratic interest groups. He supported the balanced budget amendment and voted for the welfare act of 1996. 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 favored normal trade relations with China and led the floor fight against the Thompson-Torricelli amendment, which would have required review of China's human rights practices. After George W. Bush became president, Kerry spoke out little about education or faith-based charities and turned to sharp-edged opposition to administration policy. The Bush tax cut, he said, was "unfair, unaffordable and unquestionably ineffective in growing our economy." On the environment, he was one of the most outspoken opponents of oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and threatened a filibuster on the issue. He 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 treaty then and now. On foreign policy, 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 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. 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." Many senators want to run for president; Kerry's peers have felt he had presidential ambitions since he was in prep school. He did not run in 1988, in his first term in the Senate. He did not run in 1992, presumably because he felt his vote against the Gulf war resolution in January 1991 would be a fatal liability. With Bill Clinton in office there was no opening in 1996. In February 1999, with Clinton obviously smoothing the way for his choice, Al Gore, Kerry announced he would not run in 2000. There were no such obstacles in his way to running in 2004. He had an additional advantage: money. His wife Teresa Heinz Kerry, inherited $600 million when her first husband, Pennsylvania Republican Senator John Heinz, died in a 1991 plane crash. Her net worth in 2004 was estimated at around $1 billion, making Kerry the richest member of Congress according to Roll Call. 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 and his wife's joint assets. In December 2003, when he was trailing Howard Dean in the polls, Kerry borrowed $6.4 million against his share of their Beacon Hill townhouse (Heinz Kerry owns four other houses, in Georgetown, Nantucket, Sun Valley and the Pittsburgh suburb of Fox Chapel). Kerry entered the presidential race in 2003 as the favorite to win the nomination. But by July 2003 he was trailing in the polls far behind Dean, whose outspoken opposition to the Iraq war attracted the left half of the Democratic electorate and whose innovative use of the Internet generated an unprecedented amount of small contributions. Kerry, who had voted for the war, began to criticize Bush's conduct of it, often in harsh terms. But at year's end he was still behind. Then, in mid-January, Dean's poll numbers in Iowa and New Hampshire started dropping. Kerry, well organized in Iowa and well known in New Hampshire, was the Democrat best positioned to fill the vacuum. His record in Vietnam, he suggested, would protect him against criticisms that he was too soft on foreign and military policy. "Bring it on!" he said at the end of his speeches. He won a solid though not overwhelming victory in the Iowa caucuses and, eight days later, an impressive victory in New Hampshire, the one state where primary turnout zoomed upward. Kerry won all the primaries but three (John Edwards won his native South Carolina, Howard Dean his adopted Vermont and Wesley Clark won in Oklahoma, where he made his last stand) and clinched the Democratic nomination on March 2, exactly seven months before the general election. As early as May pollster John Zogby said the election was "Kerry's to lose." The Kerry campaign raised far more money than anyone expected; it was helped as well by billionaire-funded 527 organizations which spent more than $200 million to defeat Bush. Bush's job approval hovered under 50% and he trailed Kerry in polls for much of the seven-month campaign. Kerry performed well in debates, being judged the winner in snap polls in all three. Yet he lost. One reason may have been encapsulated by his March 16 defense of his November 2003 vote against the supplemental appropriation for Iraq: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." The Bush campaign painted Kerry as a flip-flopper, and in fact he has a propensity, common in politicians, to try to please those on all sides of an issue. More important, he was trying to rally a Democratic party split between fiercely anti-war Bush haters on the one hand and, on the other, more moderate Democrats who hoped for the best in Iraq but preferred a Democrat to Bush on the issues. Second, the credential which the Kerry campaign emphasized at the Democratic National Convention, his decorated service in Vietnam, was undermined by the ads and book sponsored by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. Although old-line media declined at first to cover their charges, they were relayed over talk radio, Fox News Channel and conservative blogs; despite dismissals by the likes of The New York Times there was at least something to them. Kerry had claimed, in the Boston Herald in 1979, on the Senate floor in 1986 and to the Associated Press in 1992 to have served on secret missions in Cambodia in Christmas season 1968. But those claims were withdrawn by his campaign in August, and no one, including the boat mates who supported him, came forward to corroborate his claim to have served in Cambodia in later months. Finally, Kerry was vulnerable to attack as a Massachusetts liberal. The Bush campaign highlighted his rating by National Journal as the number one liberal in the Senate in 2003--arguably unfairly, since he skipped most roll call votes that year while campaigning for president. But over his 20-year Senate career the National Journal rated him as the 11th most liberal senator--well to the left of midpoint. And the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court's legalization in May 2004 of same-sex marriage provided a vivid illustration of the difference between elite opinion in Massachusetts and majority opinion in the rest of the country. Democratic voter turnout efforts were successful; Kerry won 59 million votes, 16% more than Al Gore, and the second-highest total in American history. But Republican voter turnout efforts were even more successful; George W. Bush won 62 million votes, 23% more than he had four years before, and won the popular vote 51%-48%. Kerry returned to Washington the week after the election and promised to be active legislatively and politically. Some Democrats criticized him when they learned that he ended the campaign with $15 million in his campaign treasury but he held the door open for another presidential race. "Sometimes God tests you. I'm a fighter, and I've come back before," he said at a post-election rally. When asked about running again in 2008, he noted: "What I've said is I'm not opening any doors, I'm not shutting any doors." But a post-election poll in Massachusetts showed 59% saying he should not run for president again and only 33% saying he should. His hold on his Senate seat surely remains solid. He was reelected in 2002 with 80% of the vote against a Libertarian and a nuclear freeze organizer unhappy with his vote on the Iraq war resolution. His seat comes up again in 2008; with Massachusetts's late primary and filing date, he probably could take his chances in the presidential primaries and, if unsuccessful, run for reelection to the Senate.
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