The Last Democratic Hero
Barnes, Fred
Fred Barnes The Last Democratic Hero As he proved in Vietnam, Sen. Bob Kerrey of Nebraska would rather fight for what he believes than quit. Is that why his party seems to have so little use for...
...The fellow and Peterson had been in the same prison, this high official told Peterson, except he escaped his French captors and Peterson didn't his Vietnamese ones...
...Kerrey, 52, is what Clinton claims to be but isn't: a different kind of Democrat...
...The truth is Kerrey took the measure of Clinton, perhaps when they were governors (1982-86), perhaps later, and decided he's an empty suit...
...It arrived there several years ago...
...In his autobiography, Fortunate Son, Puller expressed amazement at Kerrey's refusal to take pain shots...
...They all agreed on normalization...
...Or why he's my favorite Democrat, which means his future in the party can't be bright...
...T he most extraordinary shift in Kerrey's thinking since his presidential bid has been on health care...
...Kerrey bristles at the idea of putting Vietnam behind us...
...He certainly gets negative feedback...
...His only bigwig adviser is billionaire Warren Buffett, a Democrat who lives a few blocks from Kerrey in Omaha...
...In 1995, he'd love to draft a health care program with conservative Republican Bob Bennett of Utah...
...The moment of complete reversal came during the POW-MIA Committee deliberations [in 1992], when I spent a week going through National Security Council documents, and I just saw a human being who made terrible mistakes...
...McCain, among others, sensed the bad vibes between Clinton and Kerrey...
...So did his two votes, again as the only Democrat, to ban organizations that receive federal money from lobbying for more federal spending...
...He cited Kerrey's aggressively by an administrative assistant to a House member from Nebraska, who characterized Kerrey as a phony who votes liberal but talks conservative...
...She and Warren Buffett jointly sponsored a fundraiser for Kerrey's 1994 campaign for a second Senate term...
...He gets credit for what he's not, namely a reactionary liberal like most skewering of pathetic rightwing militias and hostility to Republican tax cutting...
...McCain was on another trip to Vietnam at the time...
...I mean they can ruin our life...
...His proposal to curb entitlements sparked sharp criticism from three of the most influential pressure groups in the Democratic coalition: the American Association of Retired Persons, the AFL-CIO, and the NAACP...
...The certificate was signed by Navy Secretary John Chafee, now a Senate colleague of Kerrey...
...Thus there's an edge, a rawness, when Kerrey criticizes Clinton's personal style...
...As a consequence, he loathed Nixon for more than twenty years...
...Also, Kerrey has emerged as the strongest Democratic voice in Washington against Clinton...
...Stoney won the debate, but Kerrey bucked the anti-Clinton tide to win 55 percent to 45 percent on November 8. Now, had Kerrey moved right for the sole purpose of winning re-election to a second term, that would be one thing...
...Lars-Erik Nelson of Newsday praised the same speech, adding an accolade for Kerrey's defense of a minimum wage increase...
...The American Spectator October 1995 27 "He gets people to do things for him because they feel sorry for him," Kerrey told me...
...Are you in Washington to support what Bill Clinton and his administration want, or are you in Washington to support what Nebraskans want...
...The day before, they'd had a less than chummy talk on the phone...
...It was "unnerving," Puller wrote...
...His only bigwig adviser is billionaire Warren Buffett, a Democrat who lives a few blocks from Kerrey in Omaha...
...K errey is in an odd position as the Senate Democrat responsible for defeating Republicans...
...His four votes in May to help slow Medicare's growth—he was the lone Democrat on board—produced more heartburn...
...The Clinton plan, he maintains, was "coercive...
...think not...
...171 Since his Navy days, his network of close friends and advisers has included many former Seals...
...Savings would be exempted from taxation...
...Now, he calls it "an irrational hatred...
...K errey's Vietnam tour lasted three months...
...That leaves one other option: years of frustration and thwarted ambition, followed by premature retirement...
...Kerrey now describes his own presidential campaign as "pitiful...
...Government is often an obstacle to wealth creation by millions of Americans...
...White House aides attribute it to Kerrey's resentment over losing to Clinton in the 1992 primaries, but that plays no more than a small part in the conflict...
...My prior favorite was Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey, who's quitting the Senate out of frustration and thwarted ambition...
...They became wealthy...
...It was an awkward session for Clinton...
...He arrived in Vietnam in December 1968...
...Peterson asked...
...In The Agenda, Bob Woodward immortalized their squabble over the 1993 budget, in which Clinton once snapped at Kerrey, "F--- you...
...I don't mean to say that government's bad, but boy, if it's not watched carefully, it can shut you down in a hurry...
...And that includes Democrats like Senator 26 The American Spectator October 1995 Richard Shelby of Alabama, who switched to the GOP...
...Running as a nonliberal is fine, so long as you govern reflexively as a liberal...
...Is that why his party seems to have so little use for him...
...He is the fifth Medal of Honor winner to reach Congress, the other four having fought in the Civil War...
...Republican Senator John McCain of Arizona, who endured seven years of torture as a POW in Hanoi, told of his return to Vietnam on a Senate fact-finding trip in 1993...
...Then, he was the nation's foremost champion of a single-payer system like Canada's...
...He's good at it...
...And on close votes—the 1993 budget, regulatory reform, the balanced budget amendment—he's often dragooned into voting with Clinton and liberal Democrats...
...Kerrey got this idea from Buffett...
...Most of his substantive work in Congress is with Republicans...
...Republican Jan Stoney, the woman who ran .an impressive but unsuccessful race against Kerrey in Nebraska last year, often pointed out he voted with Clinton 92 percent of the time in 1994 and 80 percent in 1993...
...One enemy soldier dropped a grenade right in front of Kerrey, and though rocks blunted some of the blast, it tore into his leg...
...The official he questioned about bodies of POWs and MIAs, McCain said, turned out to be the same official who'd interrogated him twenty years earlier after his Navy jet was shot down...
...We wanted to see him more comfortable and to have our view confirmed that morphine was indispensable to recovery...
...Since 1992, when Clinton easily dispatched Kerrey's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, Kerrey has changed ideologically more than any other Democrat in Washington...
...The Seal team climbed a cliff and found the first group sleeping...
...Kerrey says, "I would have sworn at him if he weren't president...
...His tenure is best remembered for the weeks Debra Winger spent with Kerrey, who's divorced with two kids, in the governor's mansion...
...Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, who likes Kerrey, says, "He's not with us philosophically...
...We ought to go in with our heads held high and our chests out and proud for what we did, saying, 'We're the United States of America and we're here to try to extend freedom in this country.' " In 1990, Kerrey conferred in Hanoi with Vietnam's foreign minister...
...involvement...
...In 1982, as a political neophyte but well-known war hero, he was elected governor (he left after one term in 1986...
...And last July, Kerrey watched a rerun of David Frost's 1974 televised interview of Nixon...
...But they don't quite capture where Kerrey stands or explain why he's probably doomed to years of frustration and thwarted ambition...
...She'd come to Nebraska to film Terms of Endearment...
...Kerrey voted for Nixon...
...Pete Peterson of Florida, also a former POW, recalled a session with the Vietnamese Communist Party chief on his return...
...His migration to the right has accelerated since last November, even though he's now part of the Senate Democratic leadership as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee...
...out of Vietnam...
...I got the impression Clinton is uncomfortable around Bob," says McCain...
...Kerrey warned the president against "any hint of apology" in his announcement, any suggestion that the American intervention in Vietnam had been less than a noble undertaking...
...If we treat the poor as if they are economic victims, we are off to a bad start...
...Fred Barnes is executive editor of the Weekly Standard...
...Democrats ought to say to Republicans: 'You've got the right idea, but you're not going far enough.' " Kerrey prefers privatization through vouchers for everyone in government health-care programs...
...Shelby's views were already conservative...
...In 1975 he and his brother-in-law opened a restaurant...
...Liberal Democrats have been pulling that stunt for decades...
...That's the bottom line...
...As long as Clinton is president, Kerrey will be a highly visible antagonist...
...Why didn't you leave your map...
...In 1992, he campaigned in Arizona for McCain's Democratic foe, Claire Sargent...
...He was, in Kerrey's words, "listening...
...In fact, Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle says he picked Kerrey as campaign chief because of "the Kerrey message" that "government has limits...
...Clinton, with his charm and incessant networking with useful people, moved from Georgetown, Yale Law School, and Oxford, directly into the upper reaches of American politics...
...Even in his National Press Club speech last April, explaining how Democrats can regain Senate control, he had kind words for Republicans: "They are making it possible to prune the accretions of the federal bureaucracies and 'As it happens, Buffett's father, Howard Homan Buffett, was a Republican House member from Omaha in the 1940s...
...Stoney played on this theme in the first of two televised debates with Kerrey last October...
...Kerrey looked dumbstruck, and his response was lame...
...They swapped war stories...
...Because they can own what they produce...
...Humorless Hanoi officials thought his complaint was serious...
...When he jogged with Clinton in 1993, he wore a "Hillary Knows Best" T-shirt, not to boost the first lady but to nettle the president...
...Kerrey warned the president against "any hint of apology" in his announcement, any suggestion that American intervention in Vietnam had been less than a noble undertaking...
...On health care, he endorsed Rhode Island Republican John Chafee's plan last year...
...Instead Bob asked for a fungo bat with which to beat back the phantom pains in his missing limb...
...It is never a mistake to fight for somebody else's freedom," he declared after Clinton announced normalization...
...0 n July 11, the day President Clinton normalized relations with the Communist government of Vietnam, a group of Vietnam vets in Congress, along with General John Vessey, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, met with the president in the Oval Office before the formal announcement...
...Democratic Rep...
...Kerrey actually goes beyond that message...
...That view of government has changed, too...
...Buffett, by the way, has been a Democrat for thirty years, but says, "If Bob were a Republican, I'd vote for him...
...Since his Navy days, his network of close friends and advisers has included many former Seals...
...He flirted with the antiwar movement, quitting when he found it "anti-veteran...
...Bill Bradley came to the end of that path in August, and Sam Nunn may soon...
...As ranking Democratic member, he plays a large role because the chairman, Arlen Specter, is often absent, campaigning for president...
...He gathered his men and left immediately...
...Were it not for Nixon, Kerrey might have become a Republican in the early 1970s...
...Far better to encourage the poor to acquire the habits needed to generate wealth," he told the press club...
...Or maybe he'll revert back...
...Says Kerrey: "I was afraid that it was going to be one of those biting of the lip things, [where Clinton says] 'Gee, we did a terrible thing so let's put it behind us.' " Kerrey told the president he'd stalk out of the East Room if Clinton trashed U.S...
...Kerrey and former GOP Senator John Danforth of Missouri headed an entitlements commission in 1993 and agreed on sweeping reforms (example: raise the Social Security retirement age to 70), all of which Clinton ignored...
...Not surprisingly, he's also in sync with Republicans on Medicare reform...
...I know from experience...
...Veterans are going to have the opportunity in a normal relation to discover that the people of Vietnam are grateful, that they recognize that we cared enough about their freedom to put 58,000 names on a wall...
...Kerrey gets slack a Republican wouldn't...
...Maybe Kerrey can lure the Democratic Party from reactionary liberalism...
...In 1946, he was offered a vacant seat on the Un-American Activities Committee...
...The Democratic Leadership Council...
...It may be the thing you have to watch the most in Washington...
...The American Spectator October 1995 29...
...Kerrey's have shifted that way...
...In March 1969, he learned from two deserters that two enemy squads were camped on a nearby island from which attacks on American facilities had been launched...
...This year, when Clinton refused to cut spending or endorse a balanced budget, Kerrey declared him irrelevant on fiscal policy...
...28 The American Spectator October 1995 scrape the barnacles that have formed on our great ship of state...
...Let the private payers and providers negotiate the price," he says...
...Still, my guess is he won't save his party or succumb to it...
...He was working as a pharmacist in Sioux City, Iowa, wearing a white coat, when he joined the Navy (he'd loved reading The Caine Mutiny...
...True, he hasn't changed entirely...
...In 1967 he finished OCS and signed up for Seal training, the most dangerous specialty in the Navy...
...He's on the Agriculture and Appropriations committees, but his chief interest is the Intelligence committee...
...They now own ten restaurants and four health clubs...
...His criticism, however, will be on-again, off-again, just as Newt Gingrich's was when a Republican, George Bush, was in the White House...
...If I'd not been so green, we probably would have said, `Let's just stop the operation,— Kerrey told Rolling Stone in 1991...
...Later, his leg was amputated just below the knee...
...In 1970 Kerrey was awarded the Medal of Honor by President Nixon, an honor he had initially refused...
...At a gathering of mostly Republican congressional aides in August, I gingerly praised him, only to be challenged congressional Democrats...
...Kerrey should know...
...M any Republicans, notably those in Nebraska, go crazy when you say nice things about Kerrey...
...We need money to develop our economy," the official told Kerrey...
...The fight continues, he insists, "in a peaceful fashion...
...He essentially agrees with Ronald Reagan that it was a noble cause, though he feels the effort "got corrupted" by supporting "a military dictatorship" in South Vietnam...
...Then, in June, he praised Clinton for producing a balanced budget, but said the White House claim that its budget numbers are more accurate than the Congressional Budget Office's is "pure hogwash...
...That's how Clinton got him to vote for the White House's budget and tax hike in 1993...
...When Kerrey taught a class on the Vietnam war at UC Santa Barbara in 1987, Nixon "became more human to me...
...There's not much of a constituency in the party for anything but standard-issue liberalism...
...No, what you need is freedom," Kerrey says he answered...
...He's not a supply-sider, but he does insist the paramount task of government ought to be helping people "create wealth...
...In 1991 and 1992, Kerrey stressed the benevolence of government, citing the months of medical treatment he received after Vietnam...
...This was also the point of "What About Bob," a 333-page compilation by the Nebraska GOP of Kerrey's liberal votes and flip-flops...
...There wasn't a good comfort level...
...This story provoked a burst of laughter in the Oval Office, especially from Democratic Senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, winner of the Congressional Medal of Honor as a Navy Seal in Vietnam...
...Clinton wasn't laughing...
...But maybe I'm wrong this time...
...He's an iconoclastic liberal and probably always will be...
...When I spent a day with him in Nebraska in July, he pulled his punches in an address to the Omaha AARP chapter...
...who emerge from time to time with a thoughtful, sensible view of life and then promptly submerge again...
...He really disliked Nixon because of the war," says Senator McCain...
...If conservatives don't give Kerrey credit when he lurches in their direction, no one will...
...Zinged her...
...He declined, and the seat was grabbed by an ambitious freshman from California, Richard Nixon...
...Look what happened to the 1.5 million Vietnamese when they left Vietnam and came to the U.S...
...They can put a family out of business...
...A number of Democratic senators complained noisily when he voted in June for the Republican budget resolution that slashed spending deeply and cleared the way for a balanced budget in seven years...
...There was no epiphany," he says...
...Clinton didn't...
...Now he says, "The remarkable thing in health care in the last three years is the market has moved to a point where it controls costs a lot better than the government...
...In a TV spot during his Senate race, he said: "The government is the most formidable enemy of all some times...
...When Stoney lambasted him for it ("Think what the impact on Nebraska would have been"), he responded weakly that it was a work in progress...
...Clinton and Kerrey come from different worlds...
...A s good as all this sounds, it may be fatal to Kerrey's future as a Democrat...
...But Kerrey didn't do that...
...That, however, is only a fraction of what sets him apart...
...Now we can use the forces of the market" Kerrey still favors some form of universal coverage, but not government-set minimum benefits, employer mandates, or price controls...
...chief of the Chicago Tribune, wrote that Kerrey's speech to the National Press Club reminded him of a performance of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya in which George C. Scott stepped out of character and upbraided a noisy member of the audience...
...More important, Kerrey's relentless talk about generating wealth is alien to liberal Democrats, who care mainly about redistributing wealth and preserving every government entity outside the Pentagon...
...As for Warren Buffett, he quit the Republican Party in 1964, angry at conservatives who opposed the Civil Rights Act...
...And the tension was particularly palpable between Clinton and Kerrey...
...Nelson dubbed Kerrey "one of those American political leaders...
...Instead he led an attack on the second group, which lay in wait...
...But Kerrey and the others were war heroes, Clinton a draft evader...
...There won't be, ever...
...So let's be clear about the yardstick for judging him...
...You'll never hear Teddy Kennedy or David Bonior say that...
...Kerrey went to pharmacy school at the University of Nebraska...
...Kerrey and Winger remain friends...
...Still, he's not close to being a conservative...
...Using a headband for a tourniquet, Kerrey tied off the wound and directed his troops for hours until they finally subdued the Vietcong outfit...
...In the media, Kerrey gets positive reinforcement for liberal utterances...
...Kerrey's low regard for Clinton is both personal and political...
...He spent a year studying at UC Berkeley...
...Kerrey's most passionate—and unconventional—views are on Vietnam...
...James Warren, the flaky Washington bureau The day before, they'd had a less than chummy talk on the phone...
...When Sargent attacked him for ignoring more serious matters at home, Kerrey turned on her...
...McCain didn't mention that on the same return trip he twitted the Vietnamese about bird droppings on the statue of him in Hanoi, commemorating the day he was downed...
...Kerrey also wants to replace the federal income tax with the consumption tax proposed by Senators Pete Domenici of New Mexico and Sam Nunn of Georgia...
...I don't even have a clear recollection of it...
...Kerrey doesn't...
...I mean, there was no story he could tell...
...Kerrey believed Nixon when, in the 1968 presidential campaign, he indicated he would quickly get the U.S...
...After Vietnam, Kerrey was at loose ends...
...He and Republican Alan Simpson of Wyoming are now promoting entitlement reform, including an innovation that would allow workers to put a portion of their payroll taxes into a private IRA...
...I put a flamethrower on her...
...And his fights with the president irritate Democrats...
...That counts for something, too...
...One of his fellow patients was Lewis Puller, a Marine who'd lost both legs and part of his torso...
...Kerrey became a Democrat in 1978...
...Kerrey spent nine months in Philadelphia Naval Hospital, where he was a legendary stoic...
...There's a well-worn path in the Democratic party for folks like Kerrey, a path to political oblivion, not the presidency...
...I felt it was a hard promise to end the war, and it didn't happen," says Kerrey...
...It's impossible to watch him and not admire him," Kerrey says...
...Kerrey didn't dispute the percentages...
...She confronted him with this zinger: "Bob Kerrey, if you voted in Washington the way you talk in Nebraska, I wouldn't be here tonight...
Vol. 28 • October 1995 • No. 10
