WP: John Kerry "perfectly happy" in the Senate fulfilling a "lifelong dream" being SFRC chairman

beachmom

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Mon Dec-08-08 05:18 PM
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WP: John Kerry "perfectly happy" in the Senate fulfilling a "lifelong dream" being SFRC chairman

Okay, I think this finally, finally puts all the gossip to rest. This little blurb at The Fix gets it right IMO. Kerry would have loved being SoS, but is also very happy being in the Senate. As in, he always had two great options.

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/12/out_of_the_cabinet_--_where_do.html?nav=rss_blog

John Kerry: It's no secret that Kerry, the party's 2004 presidential nominee, would have liked to be secretary of State. With that post going to Hillary Rodham Clinton, however, it appears that Kerry will spend the rest of his political life in the Senate. Those familiar with his thinking insist Kerry is perfectly happy in the Senate particularly given that he will assume the chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee at the start of the 111th Congress -- a lifelong dream. (Kerry famously testified before the committee in April 1971.)

Chris links to that testimony Kerry gave so long ago. It still gives me the chills reading it, and I think shows how important Kerry taking the chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009 (38 years later) is:

Mr. Kerry: Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to dies so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, "the first President to lose a war."

We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

...

We are also here to ask, and we are here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership? We are here to ask where are McNamara, Rostow, Bundy, Gilpatric and so many others. Where are they now that we, the men whom they sent off to war, have returned? These are commanders who have deserted their troops, and there is no more serious crime in the law of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded.

The Marines say they never leave even their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They have left the real stuff of their reputation bleaching behind them in the sun in this country.

...

Finally, this administration has done us the ultimate dishonor. They have attempted to disown us and the sacrifice we made for this country. In their blindness and fear they have tried to deny that we are veterans or that we served in Nam. We do not need their testimony. Our own scars and stumps of limbs are witnesses enough for others and for ourselves.

We wish that a merciful God could wipe away our own memories of that service as easily as this administration has wiped their memories of us. But all that they have done and all that they can do by this denial is to make more clear than ever our own determination to undertake one last mission, to search out and destroy the last vestige of this barbarous war, to pacify our own hearts, to conquer the hate and the fear that have driven this country these last 10 years and more and so when, in 30 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 pace where America finally turned and where soldiers like us helped it in the turning.