Kerry Redefined by Post-Vietnam Efforts

It had been nearly 20 years since the war, so the helicopter that swept down on the village held no menace. Indeed, the children were so curious that they swarmed around the big chopper. And when the tall American with the deeply lined face emerged from inside, they clamored to get closer.

“Hello, hello. Hey, you No. 1 man,” the children called in pidgin to the stranger, tugging at his sleeve and reaching to hold his hand.

Sen. John F. Kerry and the other Americans visiting Vietnam soon were asking the children and their elders a crucial question: Had they seen any other Americans, in recent years?

“You could tell by their expressions,” Kerry recalled recently, “it was like, ‘Where is this question coming from?’ ”

It is other landings in Vietnam that have come to dominate the Kerry biography -- dangerous river forays as commander of a Navy swift boat. Those stories recount the young lieutenant’s willingness to charge enemy positions; the daring and courage that brought him the Bronze and Silver Stars. And, then, on coming home, the turnabout that made him into an outspoken opponent of the war.

But those close to Kerry say the man running for the Democratic presidential nomination is more precisely defined by his return visits to Vietnam in the 1990s and, especially, the year he spent leading a Senate committee in the wrenching task of pursuing answers to the question: Were American soldiers left behind as captives in Vietnam?

Kerry doggedly questioned onetime enemies, visited once supersecure prisons and fought for consensus on a deeply divided investigative committee.

His willingness to take on that thankless task helped pave the way for the normalization of U.S. relations with Vietnam in 1995.

His work also earned the junior senator from Massachusetts, whose obsession with television publicity once led critics to dub him “live shot,” new respect in the Senate for his bipartisanship and his diplomacy.

“This is when he becomes a peacemaker, not just an antiwar advocate,” says Thomas Vallely, director of the Vietnam Program at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “He switches gears and says, ‘I am not going to be just against something. I am going to deal with the people who are against me and I am going to work this out.’ ”

Kerry was born into a blue-blood family, and from his earliest days he seemed to invite high expectations. He impressed friends at Yale as so substantial that they ruminated about who among them might serve in his Cabinet, as they fantasized that he one day would become president.

Many in his orbit were finding ways to avoid Vietnam, but Kerry volunteered in 1966 for the Navy. He returned from the war with multiple honors, including three Purple Hearts for his wounds. But he also lost some of his best friends to the fighting and came to deeply distrust American policy. He returned to lead protests with Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

A 1972 bid for a House seat in Lowell, Mass., failed, pushing Kerry toward a law degree and a job as a county prosecutor, specializing in drug and domestic violence cases. In 1982, he bucked the political establishment by running for Massachusetts lieutenant governor -- and won. Two years later, he claimed the U.S. Senate seat he has held for two decades.

His prosecutorial fervor has distinguished him through much of his two decades in the Senate. Kerry did not hold back, despite pleas from other Democrats, when his review of the scandal involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International sullied the reputation of Clark Clifford, a party elder statesman. And the liberal Kerry sided with archconservative Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) in making an early call for ousting drug-dealing Panamanian President Manuel A. Noriega.

When Senate Majority Leader George J. Mitchell (D-Maine) offered Kerry the POW committee chairmanship in 1992, his staff urged him to say no. They believed the assignment was a “tar baby,” with no possibility of filling the aching emotional void felt by families of the missing men.

“It was a loser politically from just about every kind of possible point of view,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), a Kerry ally.

But Kerry had been attending town hall meetings around Massachusetts, and had repeatedly heard from families wanting to know what had become of their sons and brothers.

“I bumped into enough of that that I said to myself, ‘Somebody has got to find answers for these people,’ ” Kerry recalled. “And that’s when I started to look at Vietnam.”

Although the U.S. had pulled its last troops out of Vietnam in 1973, and obtained the release of 591 prisoners from North Vietnamese prisons, 2,264 men remained unaccounted for when the committee began its work in 1992.

Over time, some families became increasingly certain that their loved ones had been left behind in Southeast Asia by a U.S. government determined to wash its hands of an unpopular war.

In the early 1990s, a photo of three men who were supposedly American captives made the cover of Newsweek. The Senate responded with a resolution by Sen. Robert Smith (R-N.H.) that created the Select Committee on POW/MIA Affairs. (The picture was later proven to be of Russian farmers, not POWs.)

Kerry had the moral authority of someone who had served in Vietnam. He also had the benefit of a budding friendship with Sen. John McCain, the Arizona Republican who had been tortured during a 5 1/2-year imprisonment in North Vietnam.

McCain had once disdained Kerry and others who returned home to protest the Vietnam War -- demonstrations he learned about by way of messages that fellow prisoners tapped on his cell wall.

But on a fact-finding mission after the first Gulf War, the two senators were trapped on a long, trans-Atlantic flight together. They began to share their war experiences. The relationship began to thaw.

Together, Kerry and McCain urged President George H.W. Bush to make the U.S. military the sole group responsible for investigating the hundreds of reports of “live sightings” of Westerners in Vietnam. Previously, family members had taken their appeals to other branches of government or to freelance POW hunters.

The empowerment of military investigators proved crucial because it brought more rigor to the search and helped defuse some of the enormous emotion that swirled around the issue, said Vallely, the Kennedy School expert and a Vietnam veteran.

Maintaining working relationships on the POW committee proved more challenging.

Committee founder Smith was convinced that Americans had been left in Laos and Vietnam, and he also tended to believe that some might still be alive there. Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) also was open to the families who presented their own evidence of American survivors in Southeast Asia. But the blunt-spoken McCain had no patience for the families’ conspiracy theories; he thought it made no sense for the Vietnamese to continue holding Americans decades after the war.

And he became a lightning rod for the anger of bereft relatives who would not give up hope. From the back of the committee room, one activist shouted at McCain that he was the “Manchurian Candidate” -- a brainwashed war hero who was betraying his onetime comrades.

Those barbs infuriated McCain. On such occasions, Kerry would lean over and lay a hand on his friend’s arm.

“It was like, ‘Just stay calm,’ ” McCain recalled. “He kept me from saying or doing something that probably would have been inappropriate. And I appreciated it, very much.”

The pressure built on the committee staff as well. “I cried twice and threatened to quit twice,” recalled Frances Zwenig, Kerry’s chief of staff at the time.

Kerry said the committee would pursue every lead that it could, no matter how implausible it might seem.

When some claimed that Americans might still be imprisoned in the catacombs beneath the tomb of Vietnamese Communist Party founder Ho Chi Minh, Kerry insisted that he be allowed inside, and that he be able to bring Smith along.

The Vietnamese blanched at the visit to the sacred shrine. To them, as one committee member explained it later, it was like “another country asking if they could take a look around under [President] Kennedy’s tomb, to see if there were something down there.”

But Kerry talked his way in with the promise -- among other things -- that the visit would not be publicly disclosed. Kerry and Smith, the committee’s leading Republican, found no evidence that Americans had been held beneath the tomb. (Kerry recently confirmed the secret tour only when it became clear that others already had described the incident.)

Kerry also agreed to question Robert Garwood, a former American Marine who had been court-martialed for collaborating with the Viet Cong.

In McCain’s view, which he expressed privately, Garwood was lucky he hadn’t been shot for disloyalty, a committee source said. But Smith insisted that the committee talk to Garwood.

So Garwood was allowed to testify that he saw what he believed were U.S. prisoners of war in northern Vietnam after the war ended in 1975.

“Kerry always made a point of bringing calm and order and civility to the room,” said Virginia Foote, president of the U.S.-Vietnam Trade Council.

Kerry’s chairmanship of the committee came to be characterized by a willingness to take quick action.

The committee had negotiated permission to drop in on any prison with little notice, to assure that there would be no time to move Americans or hide evidence. At the very first prison drop-in, however, the warden had not gotten word of the policy. American senators and a bevy of journalists were stranded outside.

“Anybody who wanted to build a conspiracy would have said, ‘See, they are hiding something,’ if we hadn’t gotten it cleared up rapidly,” Kerry said.

He called Vietnam’s foreign minister and, after a half-hour negotiation, got the prison doors opened.

“It wound up becoming a benefit [because] it was so patently clear they didn’t know we were coming,” Kerry said. “They were surprised. And not only did we go in where we had been authorized, we went everywhere.”

The same sort of diplomacy was needed on a subsequent trip, when jailers weren’t going to let McCain down a hallway to see the cell where he had been held at Hao Lo, the infamous “Hanoi Hilton.”

Again, Kerry talked his way past the guards. “He is just really a good diplomat,” said Mark Salter, McCain’s chief of staff, who was on the trip.

In front of the bare cement enclosure where McCain had been held, the two former combatants shared a moment, as others on the trip hung back.

“It just sort of bowled me over with a sense of awe about the human spirit, how strong it can be and how strong he and all those other guys were,” Kerry recalled.

The committee’s hearings, however, were far from a love- fest.

One particularly difficult exchange occurred when Smith’s staff tried to present its own research on what it called the “cluster theory.” This theory held that the high number of reported sightings of Westerners, particularly around known Vietnamese prisons, indicated Americans probably were still being held there.

But Kerry, McCain and others thought the theory was weak, because many of the sightings had been discounted and others were echoes of a single, explainable sighting of other Westerners.

Kerry did not allow the report on “clusters” to be presented in open session, and he had the copies shredded. Smith staffers and some MIA families accused Kerry of a cover-up.

Dolores Apodaca-Alfond, president of the National Alliance of Families and sister of an Air Force major shot down in Vietnam in 1967, said she believed Kerry’s feelings of guilt over the war made him willing to close the books on missing-persons cases that deserved more attention.

“Kerry had only one goal, and that was to normalize relations with Vietnam,” Apodaca-Alfond said. “My objection was that we had given away the store to Vietnam before we received anything really in hand.”

Apodaca-Alfond and others still blame Kerry, and McCain in particular, for not completing the accounting of the Vietnam missing. But Kerry says the effort that was put into searching for the 2,264 was “unprecedented.” (About 78,000 Americans were unaccounted for after World War II, and 8,000 after the Korean War.)

Some doubts about U.S. pronouncements on the missing in Vietnam proved to be well-founded.

After a year of investigation, the Kerry committee uncovered evidence that the Nixon administration prematurely closed the books on as many as 133 servicemen who could have been alive and in captivity after “Operation Homecoming” in 1973. Kerry said at the time that “valid questions” remained about 43 of them.

The trick, then, became writing a final report to summarize the conflicting findings. Staying up into the wee hours, Kerry helped draw up a document that Republicans and Democrats could agree on unanimously.

The 1,223-page report, released in January 1993, concluded that “while the Committee has some evidence suggesting the possibility a POW may have survived to the present, and while some information remains yet to be investigated, there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.”

The studied wording won approval even from Smith, although he later said he did not agree with all of its conclusions.

“It was John Kerry’s work that got it done,” McCain said.

Some family members continue to hold Kerry and McCain in low regard, insisting that they gave short shrift to any evidence that pointed toward Americans remaining in captivity.

But Tom Blanton, executive director of the National Security Archive, said that by releasing millions of pages of previously classified information, Kerry and McCain helped “suck the poison out” of America’s relationship with Vietnam.

The two senators also helped establish a joint task force with the Vietnamese that occasionally returns American remains. Blanton said that the duo, therefore, deserves some of the credit for the recent recovery of what are believed to be the remains of Charles Dean. The younger brother of presidential candidate Howard Dean was kidnapped and slain while traveling through Laos with a friend in 1974 .

All those advances paved the way, in 1995, for President Bill Clinton to extend diplomatic recognition to the Communist government of Vietnam. The two decorated veterans, Kerry and McCain, stood at Clinton’s side, lending their credibility to a president who was criticized as having had avoided the war.

For Kerry, the moment marked a personal, as well as political, renewal.

“I think he’s more comfortable in his own skin and less worrying about how he looks to other people,” said Jack Blum, a former Kerry staffer. “There is more a sense of self and accomplishment.”

Vanessa Kerry went to Vietnam with her father when she was 14 and now -- as a 27-year-old medical student at Harvard University -- recalls the return to the country as a chance for her father “to heal the pain.”

“It made me understand why he had been haunted by it,” she said, “and why he put so much time and effort into trying to bring peace there. It was as much personal as trying to bring peace to the families and to the country.”

Next week: Joe Lieberman

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

John F. Kerry

Personal

Born: Dec. 11, 1943, in Denver

Hometown: Boston

Family: Married, Teresa Heinz Kerry. Two daughters, Vanessa, 27, and Alexandra, 30. Three stepsons, John, Andre and Christopher

Education: Yale University, bachelor of arts in political science, 1966. Boston College Law School, 1976

Career: Navy, 1966-1970. Organizer, Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Assistant district attorney, Middlesex County, Mass., 1976-1981. Practicing attorney, 1981-1982. Lieutenant governor under Gov. Michael S. Dukakis, 1983-1984. U.S. Senate, 1985-present

By the numbers

3

Number of Purple Hearts that Kerry was awarded in Vietnam

$600 million

Amount of wife Teresa Heinz Kerry’s inheritance upon her husband Sen. John Heinz’s death

$6 million

Amount Kerry lent himself this year to help fund his campaign

$28.5 million

Approximate amount Kerry raised in 2003

80%

Kerry’s share of the vote in his 2002 Senate race, in which he had no major-party opposition

20

Number of chili feeds Kerry has attended across New Hampshire in the last two months

8,000

Number of bowls of chili Kerry’s New Hampshire staff estimates the campaign has dished out

27

Kerry’s age when he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War

A closer look

* Kerry has several connections to the Kennedy clan. Also a Boston Brahmin, Kerry went sailing with John F. Kennedy in his youth and once dated Jacqueline Kennedy’s half sister Janet Auchincloss in college. He now represents Massachusetts in the Senate alongside Sen. Edward M. Kennedy.

* Kerry, a hockey player and skier, loves motorcycles and rides a Harley; he made his entrance on Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” atop a chopper, sporting a black leather jacket and black helmet.

* Kerry is a close friend of George Butler, the documentarian behind the 1977 Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Pumping Iron.”

The lowdown

A public figure for more than 30 years, dating from his time as a Vietnam War hero-turned-protest leader, Kerry started out the contest as the closest thing to a consensus frontrunner. But his stiff manner on the stump turned off voters, as did his equivocal statements about supporting the war in Iraq. Lately, Kerry has become a much better campaigner and has gained momentum in Iowa. A strong showing in Monday’s caucuses is needed to lift Kerry in the follow-up primary in New Hampshire -- a neighboring state he once took for granted.

Analysis by Mark Z. Barabak

Sources: Almanac of American Politics, National Journal, New York Times, www.johnkerry.com

Los Angeles Times