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Who Is The Real John Kerry?

By S. Brian Willson

Listening to John Kerry's eloquent remarks presented before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during Dewey Canyon III in April 1971, helped validate my own Vietnam experiences. His final words still ring true: "When thirty years from now our brothers go down the street without a leg, without an arm, or a face, and small boys ask why, we will be able to say 'Vietnam' and not mean a desert, not a filthy obscene memory, but mean instead the place where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning."

While serving as director of a Massachusetts veterans' outreach center in 1983 I worked in concert with John Kerry after his election as lieutenant governor, crafting programmatic responses to the increasing problems exhibited by Vietnam veterans. John chose to run in 1984 for the U.S. Senate. I became one of a dozen or so Vietnam veterans, called "Kerry's Doghunters," supporting his progressive advocacy for cuts in military spending with corresponding increases in domestic programs. I subsequently served John on his senatorial veterans' advisory committee.

Though John revealed early promise as an independent-thinking U.S. senator, he began to typically conform to Washington groupthink when support for aggressive foreign policy began to creep into his language.

John Kerry, the wealthiest of all 100 senators, is one of the leading recipients of special interest money even as he condemns that money. His unquestioning support for Bush II's "War on Terror" without examining causes, and his support of the draconian Patriot Act and the unconstitutional delegation of authority to wage "preventive" war as Bush II decides, have made Kerry's presidential candidacy disturbing and untrustworthy. That Bush II needs to be banished, even impeached, is a no-brainer. But that our corrupt electoral system offers only two oligarchic candidates, each of whom espouses continued empire through lawless means, demands a more radical "people power" approach. Electing one of two oligarchs simply continues support for our corrupt system, rather than shaking it up.

I plead with veterans of conscience to continue to work for the "turning" of our country!