Notes from the Undergrad
CONTINETTI, MATTHEW
Notes from the Undergrad John Kerry was always a dove—starting in college. BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI IN 1965, JOHN KERRY, a junior at Yale and the newly appointed head of the Yale Political Union,...
...In the future," the Yale junior intoned, "the U.S...
...The Cold War's Manichaean dichotomy—"Us" (the free world) against "Them" (the Communists)—troubled him...
...In 1996, in one of his last interviews, Kerry's father Richard told the Globe that, while he always "thought [Vietnam] a serious policy mistake," his son's attitude early on was "gung ho: had to show the flag...
...So instead Kerry stayed up all night, writing and writing, "with a candle" providing the only light in the room, and then, as the night drew on, "rewriting and rewriting," until he had completed a new draft, which, he said, was the best expression of "what we were all thinking about": Vietnam...
...Wars like Vietnam were "self-defeating," Kerry said...
...withdrawal on the grounds that the South Vietnamese government had fallen into disarray, anti-Americanism pervaded Southeast Asia, the Johnson administration's policies were failing, and the domino theory was a myth...
...For Kerry, we are told, these were difficult conclusions to reach...
...We should concern ourselves less with other ideologies and attempt to apply a policy which is both sensitive and compatible with the expressed desires and cultures of the people involved," Kerry said...
...It was the same Kerry who opposed Ronald Reagan's 1983 invasion of Grenada, of which Kerry said at the time, "No substantial threat to U.S...
...He went with his best friend, David Thorne, whose sister, Julia, would one day be Kerry's first wife...
...He told the high school students that "he had originally supported a complete U.S...
...military service loomed...
...must fix goals which are tenable...
...Lawrence River in upstate New York, a Skull & Bones redoubt where he was vacationing with friends, Kerry had a revelation...
...And it was the same Kerry who, on January 19, 1991, took to the floor of the U.S...
...The oration is notable for its rejection of American exceptional-ism...
...But there were no easy answers...
...Senate to speak out against the first Gulf War...
...Kerry's name was announced on the loudspeaker...
...One Bonesman, named Alan Cross, tells an interesting story in John F. Kerry: "When Johnson had greatly increased the troops being sent into Vietnam," Cross said, "Kerry sort of made a spontaneous speech to the others of us in the audience decrying the implications of this political event and what this meant in terms of our engagement in Vietnam...
...Read it closely, however, and what strikes you most about the Yale speech isn't its pretension...
...He was pleased with how the question and answer session went as well...
...A feeling of certainty enveloped him...
...And again: What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism...
...His view of intervention was grim...
...interests existed and American lives were not endangered...
...And self-defeating conflicts led inexorably to imperial hubris...
...Are we ready for the changes this war will bring...
...the same Kerry who told the Los Angeles Times in 1985, "I said then [in 1971], and I still believe, that we can't be hamstrung about intervening everywhere...
...One night in June, on Deer Island in the St...
...He looked at his notes only rarely...
...A reporter from a Hartford radio station was there, too, for an interview with Kerry, who was all of 21 years old...
...Kerry was against it...
...The United States was acting "with more bravado than patience...
...Are we ready for another generation of amputees, paraplegics, burn victims...
...It was a call that Kerry sounded repeatedly...
...They are the same words and ideas, uttered again and again, at various times and places, over 30 years of public life...
...He talked about the war's shortcomings with his friends, often other members of the secret society Skull & Bones...
...It was the same Kerry who spoke out against Reagan's funding of the anti-Communist con-tras in the 1980s...
...It sounds like we are risking war for pride," he continued, "not vital interests...
...And this Vietnam War has found our policymakers forcing Americans into a strange corner . . . [so] that if victory escapes us, it would not be the fault of those who led, but of the doubters who stabbed them in the back—notions all too typical of an America that had to find Americans to blame for the takeover in China by the Communists, and then for the takeover in Cuba...
...Kerry "declined to offer any proposals for ending the conflict," writes Douglas Brinkley...
...When they arrived at Choate, Kerry and Thorne, accompanied by the school's administrators, were led on a VIP tour of the facilities...
...Indeed, he continued, "it is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism...
...It is notable for its rhetoric, which echoes, a bit amateurishly, that of the Kennedys, and which set the tone for Kerry's subsequent speeches...
...This was quite an honor...
...I hadn't any time to go over my speech at length before I gave it, and I was afraid that Matthew Continetti is a reporter at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...
...Yet it was unusual, Douglas Brinkley writes in Tour of Duty, his biography of Kerry, for a junior in college to be treated as a special guest speaker at a place like Choate...
...It is misleading to mention right and wrong in this issue," Kerry said, "for to every thinking man, the semantics of this contest often find the United States right in its wrong-ness and wrong in its rightness...
...In fact, he wrote, "I really was pleased to pieces and very encouraged by the whole visit...
...But when I got up there, I felt sharper and more confident than I have ever felt before...
...For Cross, Kerry's words expressed not so much outright opposition as concern: "I think he was alarmed by what we were doing," he told the Globe...
...In March 1965, he won the Ten Eyck Speech Prize, which came with a $125 award...
...Kerry said the United States was "grossly overextended" in "areas where we have no vital primary interest...
...But this narrative is incomplete...
...That doesn't mean we were opposed to what we were doing...
...Kerry was 22...
...It was the same Kerry who supported a nuclear freeze in his Democratic primary fight against James Shannon in 1984...
...There is a rush to war here," Kerry went on...
...The lesson, in other words, was that American involvement in Vietnam was a mistake...
...The talk "outlined the history of Vietnam, covering everything from French colonialism to the rise of Ho Chi Minh to the lessons of the 1954 Geneva Conference, which had partitioned the country into two uneasy nations," Brinkley continues...
...What's more, "these goals should recognize priorities," and those priorities should "correspond minutely with our best national interests...
...My recollection of that talk is that it was not so much a statement of opposition but was really a clarion" for action...
...Word of Kerry's debating skills, it seems, had spread...
...This first draft of the speech, Kerry said later, was "sophomoric...
...Over the last two weeks, of course, a group of anti-Kerry Vietnam veterans have run ads questioning John Kerry's service record and subsequent antiwar activities...
...where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not...
...The speech is notable, too, for its prefiguring of Kerry's current critique of the Bush administration: "Never in the last 20 years," Kerry said, "has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today...
...He was told he would give the address sometime in the spring, and a week before graduation he'd cobbled together a treacly address on "life after graduation...
...Over the next year, as the United States continued to entangle itself in Vietnam, the future senator's positions grew more strident...
...I would be too glued to my notes," Kerry wrote to Julia Thorne afterward...
...As John Kerry's antiwar stance developed, so did his profile at Yale...
...Kerry asked then...
...Yet the John Kerry who spoke on June 12, 1966, was the same John Kerry who, home from Vietnam, addressed the Fulbright Committee on April 22, 1971...
...BY MATTHEW CONTINETTI IN 1965, JOHN KERRY, a junior at Yale and the newly appointed head of the Yale Political Union, was invited to give a speech at Choate, the tony prep school known mainly for its famous alumni Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy...
...The invasion represented a bully's show of force against a weak Third World nation...
...This was for another speech on Vietnam...
...Kerry didn't limit his thoughts on the war to debate matches and public speeches...
...The topic was the war in Vietnam...
...And it should not be repeated...
...Richard Kerry scoffed and said, "He was quite immature in that direction...
...But things changed...
...Head of the Yale Political Union is a high-profile position, a launching pad for careers both literary (William F. Buckley Jr., for example) and political (think Joseph Lieber-man...
...Changes in sons and daughters who return from combat never the same...
...The war in Vietnam wasn't such...
...It is who he is...
...And he was nervous...
...Kerry was already against the war bef^^e he went to Vietnam...
...The speech—the snippets of it that survive, anyway—remains interesting, if only as a historical artifact...
...John Kerry's skepticism toward American intervention in foreign crises isn't a battle scar left from Vietnam...
...Hence, Brinkley says, Kerry felt the Johnson administration had two options in Indochina: "Score a military victory" or "negotiate a peace...
...As a senior," Richard Kerry said, John "matured considerably...
...where we should have been patient, it seems we were not...
...Kerry had expanded his thematic palette: "The theme of his competitive address," Brinkley writes, "billed as a search for a modern-day Prometheus—was the inherent danger of America's stretching itself too thin in its international commitments...
...According to the Boston Globe biography John F. Kerry, "as a student and later a senator, Kerry often internally debated an issue before making up his mind in a process that could take weeks...
...I decided that I couldn't give" the speech he'd drafted, he later told Joe Klein in the New Yorker...
...He saw this growing quagmire we were heading into with good intention and certain results," Cross went on...
...Look at the speech he gave at Choate that winter day in 1965...
...You are struck instead by the way in which it summarizes, so neatly and so early in his career, John Kerry's central critique of American foreign poli-cy—the way in which the speech enumerates the ideas Kerry used when he talked about foreign policy into the 1990s—when he first heard the distant siren song of presidential politics, and thus moderated his positions, supporting interventions in the Balkans and, most famously, in Iraq last year...
...Instead, he waxed historical...
...Like Yale, Choate is in Connecticut, so Kerry didn't have to travel far...
...Where we should have instructed," Kerry said, "it seems we did not...
...Kerry's class oration is notable for many reasons...
...Kerry's position on the conflict was—you guessed it—nuanced...
...Kerry's most famous college speech was on June 12, 1966, when he delivered the Yale class oration...
...On American power, Kerry continued, "the United States must . . . bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention"—meaning, intervention against commu-nism—"that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world...
...Kerry also understood "how important it remained for the United States not to lose face...
...Or its Ted Sorenson-like flourishes...
...Kerry, dressed in his "handsomest suit," his rhetoric polished, his gestures rehearsed, spoke to about 30 high school students for nearly an hour...
...soldiers continued to die in the rice paddies and dark jungles...
Vol. 9 • September 2004 • No. 48
