John Kerry's New Deal

Forty years ago this spring, Navy Lt. John Kerry returned home from Vietnam. His first wife, Julia Thorne, told Kerry biographer Douglas Brinkley that when he stepped off the commercial flight from San Francisco to JFK in his dress blues and white hat, "He was bandaged, some of it was sticking out, and nobody was paying attention to him while I was sitting there going, 'Everybody stop and look at this man. Part the seas and say, This is your veteran coming home from serving his country.' But nobody cared. Nobody gave a goddamn. Nobody gave a damn at all. Nobody.''

For the next year, according to Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, he'd wake up screaming, thinking he was back on the Mekong Delta: "He was always in combat, in an emergency situation,'' said his former wife, who died in 2006. "He was saving men. It was never anything about him – it was saving the boat and saving the men.'' It was Kerry's growing conviction that his government was doing just the opposite -- cavalierly sending his buddies into situations they didn't survive for reasons they couldn't explain -- that led him, in 1971, to ask the Senate Foreign Relations committee, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?'' Kerry chairs the committee now, and according to his aides, last week was the first time since his own testimony all those years ago that rank-and-file fighting men and women had been invited to appear before it, to weigh in on the operations in which they'd risked everything and lost plenty. Kerry told the young veterans of our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that if we as a country learned nothing else from Vietnam, we do know now how wrong it was, disrespecting our soldiers and "confusing the war with the warriors.''

If some of us nonetheless continue to confuse protest with a want of patriotism, or diplomacy with a chronic case of the williwaws, well, that is no longer John Kerry's problem. Watching him running hearings day after day (Sudan, Sri Lanka and the global economy, all in a week's work) does tend to infuriate me, though. Not because he doesn't know his foreign-policy potatoes, but on the contrary because his tough-mindedness is so at odds with the priss-pot image of him sold to the public during his '04 presidential campaign that it's galling all over again. Unless, apparently, you happen to be John Kerry -- and having been involuntarily relieved of presidential ambition and passed over for secretary of state, find that you quite like your third-choice job handling oversight of American foreign policy in a time of two wars, a world-wide recession and a global terror threat.

Not that '04 is completely behind him emotionally; he arrives for an interview in his Senate hideaway grumbling about a Newsweek cover story I did on his wife Teresa Heinz that year. (The cover language, "Loose Cannon or Crazy Like a Fox,' hadn't worked for me either, as he already knew: Out-of-control or scheming were the only alternatives? Bad or worse? Woman = misfiring weapon or wild forest creature?)

And he doesn't buy the fallback, "ah well' rationalization that maybe this new role, rather than the presidency, was his destiny all along: "I don't accept that; that's sophism. No, I had some great plans. But most of what I wanted to do is being done'' by President Obama.

"Look, it's disappointing, and it's more disappointing to lose by 59,000 votes. But if you dwell on it, you're wasting your time, and I made a conscious decision that if I did that, that would be a double loss. So I really don't spend my time going there, and that's why I was able to get so passionately behind Barack Obama.''

The rock that's still in his boot, though, is the way his wife was treated: "If a man has ideas, he's a leader, if a woman does, she's opinionated...It hurt her a little bit, but she's a fighter. She doesn't stop either, but quietly'' – way more quietly, goes on doing her foundation work.

It's kind of ironic, given that we in the media did not exactly exhaust ourselves batting down the Swiftboat lies of '04, that in his role heading a Commerce subcommittee, Kerry has scheduled hearings on whether government might safeguard democracy by stepping in to prop up the newspaper business. "So you're going to save newspapers?'' I ask him. "I'm going to see if they're savable,'' he answers. "What's happening is scary.''

When I ask about the state of his relationship with his old friend John McCain, he isn't much interested in my own shock and dismay that the McCain of '08 wasn't the guy I thought I knew in 2000. In fact, he plausibly suggests that with the ranks of military vets in Congress dwindling, their bond as Navy men might even go beyond politics, at least some of the time: "I like John, I still admire him, and I really didn't think of it as being against John McCain'' during the '08 campaign.

He certainly regrets, he says, that there are fewer military veterans in their line of work these days: "Here's what I've found: Can they be passionate without ever having served? Yes. But it really hones the questions you ask. You see things other people don't see, and find the right people to talk to. I value it in a resume, and think we ought to have recruiters on all the college campuses.''

He's just back from a trip to Pakistan, where the Taliban is growing stronger by the day, and remarks that the situation there is even worse than he'd expected: "This is going to be a very significant lift, to deal with the underlying problems fueling the insurgency, and it's not principally military. I mean, you're going to have to use the military – not ours, theirs – but the border issues with India have to be defused before we can deal with the insurgency,'' and the government has to be able to provide people with basic security and services. "It's not that people want to be Taliban or live that way, but the door's shutting pretty fast'' on offering Pakistanis viable alternatives, "and I was surprised by the absence of government,'' and lack of any concrete plan. "There's no assuaging'' the insurgents, he said. But by the same token, would-be recruits have to see real-world alternatives to extremism.

On Sudan, where he also stopped on this most recent trip, he says he is hopeful that French and British negotiators might be able to persuade President Omar Hassan al-Bashir to allow humanitarian aid agencies back into the country. (Those talks have since failed, and agencies expelled last month, after Bashir was named in an international arrest warrant for war crimes, still have not been allowed to resume their work.) "Is there violence today?'' in the Darfur region where 300,000 have already died and some 2.5 million more people driven from their homes. "Yes, but not to the levels'' of '03 and '04, he said. Which might not be too comforting if you're the girl sent out to gather firewood, at risk of getting raped or killed en route. "It's a wild-ass place,'' he says. "But there is an opening.''

After nearly an hour of conversation cut in two by a vote, Kerry checks his BlackBerry for the time and apologizes for having to dash off for dinner with King Abdullah of Jordan. When he calls two days later to finish the talk, I ask who was more fun, the king or Dick Holbrooke, with whom he'd dined the previous evening, and there follows a long pause.

"I don't know where you get your information,'' he says finally, and laughs. "More fun? The king was fun.'' And he didn't bow or anything, right? To that, no laugh. Asked whether President Obama might want to cool it with the effusive greetings – not just to monarchs, but to oh, say, Hugo Chavez – he says absolutely not: "A guy walks up to him who is the democratically elected leader of his country and he was polite on behalf of our country and that's just what he ought to have been. If that's the best the Republicans can grab on to, they're really desperate. To be rating a smile is just ridiculous, and I feel sorry for them.''

He's also pleased with the president's handling of our Cuba policy, he says. Though when I ask how on earth we're supposed to make a dent in the terrible violence in Mexico without going after assault weapons – Obama has effectively backed off his campaign promise to do that -- he says he does disagree with the president's reluctance: "I'm against that, personally,'' he says of Obama's inaction on that front. "There's no rationale for hunters'' or anyone else to have such weapons. He also would have preferred a larger stimulus package than the one the president proposed, he says, and unlike Obama, strongly favors a bipartisan, 9/11-style truth commission on torture. Yet overall, in his view, Obama "has done very well leading under circumstances more difficult than any president in modern times.''

On gays in the military, what does he think of the Pentagon's slow-walking of the plan to overturn the failed 'don't ask, don't tell' policy? "I've said universal service is universal service; people have contributed significantly to our national security who have subsequently been found to be gay.'' Yes, but what should the timing be? "Timing is subject to a lot of variables, to be honest,'' he allows. "I wouldn't want to just jam it through in a way that hasn't been thought through.''

When I ask about what it's like, having the chance to invite the new generation of John Kerrys to testify before his committee, he is downright effusive: "What do you call that? Irony? Serendipity? Kismet? Karma? Amazing?''

Almost since the moment he testified in 1971, people have been asking why he hasn't shown that fire more often, but could the passionate young guy who came to national prominence then have ever been elected to anything? "That guy did get elected,'' he says quietly.

And for that guy, foreign policy in the Obama era boils down to "an appropriate combination of American idealism and values and appropriate realism, with a respect for international institutions but a priority on security and a willingness to act accordingly.'' Not, in other words, simply holding hands and hoping for the best, as the cartoon Kerry would have. Which, I'm sorry to say, makes me mad all over again.

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