Friday fun thread -- your favorite Kerry article (pics optional)

[beachmom]

A variation on the Friday pic thread is sharing an article about Kerry you loved from any stage of his career.

This week, I happened to be enamored with the Windsurfer article, one of the best about him. Since he has a book coming out with Teresa about the environment, I thought I'd excerpt his talking about the environment. This is from 1997:

http://www.americanwindsurfer.com/mag/back/issue5.5/kerry2.html

AW: If you look back in your life there have been a lot of forces that you've caught and that you were attuned with and . . .

JK: Sometimes I was in tune and sometimes I was out of sync with them. I mean, I've had it both ways. I lost a race back in 1972. First of all, we were in the middle of a war at that time and it was very, very contentious. We were kids and we didn't know very much. We didn't know how to respond to some of the attacks and there were a lot of them, so I suffered a loss.

I learned a lot from that. Those things are painful but then on the other hand, you should really learn something positive from it. I learned a lot about myself, about life, about mistakes, a whole bunch of things.

But I was also trying to offer leadership out of the war. I was trying to end the war. I came back from Vietnam determined that I could make a difference in ending the war, and I felt passionate about doing that because of the lives I saw being lost over there. I thought it would just go on and on-even after the voices speaking up and stepping in and suggesting otherwise. It was very contentious. It was a difficult time. There was great divisiveness that came out with people taking positions.

Back then the war and environment were my focus. I have been deeply involved in environmental issues all my life. I was involved in the earliest Earth Day. Involved as the New England Coordinator of Earth Day for the region for the 20th anniversary, and in fact, that has spilled over significantly into my work with the Senate, where I have been a leader on fishing issues, rewriting the National Fisheries Act to establish our fishing policies. Helping take the lead with Senator Ted Stevens, trying to ban drift nets and push that in the United Nations so we could seek that ban.

I rewrote the Ocean Pollution Control measures and the Marine Mammal Protection Act. I was deeply involved in the global warming issue as well as the Clean Air Act and acid rain a number of years ago.

These are things I have cared about a lot and I think I offered leadership on each of them. I've also offered leadership on other areas in national, international affairs, on the Philippines, on helping to push for democracies in Asia, in helping to normalize our relations with Vietnam and so forth. Also on issues that affect children and crime. I helped lead the fight for 100,000 police officers on the streets of America, and so I think I consider myself somebody who has prepared to take risks and will come out and fight for change and try to make things happen .

I'm not somebody who is passive about these kinds of things, I tend to be proactive and I push the envelope on something because I think that's the job, that's what I'm in it to do. It is exciting and very rewarding when you see some of these things pass and you get things done.

AW: You mention passion, I see that you have a lot of passion in everything you do...

JK: I love life. I'm excited by it. It's fun! It's exhilarating! I don't need anything extra to get me feeling very excited and challenged by every single day's offerings. I think one of the things that I've learned from Vietnam is the sense-there but for the grace of God go I - when you look at those names on the wall.
A lot of my friends share the same feelings. We were so close to being killed so many times that for those of us who came back, every day since is an extra one. It gives you a certain exuberance and capacity to soak in the days to come, as a consequence of that. That's something I've felt very, very strongly since then.

And on spirituality (also shows in my view why he is better equipped than most with his insatiable curiosity to understand the differences between Shi'ites and Sunnis and help them come to a compromise to avoid further bloodshed):

AW: You mentioned spirituality with windsurfing. Tell me your views on that.

JK: Spirituality is a fundamental for us. I mean, it's the-it is the overpowering, driving foundation of most of the struggles that we go through here on earth, in my judgement. I am a believer in the Supreme Being, in God. I believe, without any question in this force that is so much larger and more powerful than anything human beings can conceivably define.

I think the more we learn about the universe, the more we learn about black holes and the expansion of the universe and the more we learn what we don't know about: our beginnings and-not just of us, but the universe itself, the more I find that people believe in this supreme being. I'm a Catholic and I practice but at the same time I have an open-mindedness to many other expressions of spirituality that come through different religions. I'm very respectful and am interested-I find it intriguing.

I went to Jerusalem a number of years ago on an official journey to Israel and I was absolutely fascinated by the 32 or so different branches of Catholicism that were there. That's before you even get to the conflict between Arabs and Jews. I have spent a lot of time since then trying to understand these fundamental differences between religions in order to really better understand the politics that grow out of them. So much of the conflict on the face of this planet is rooted in religions and the belief systems they give rise to. The fundamentalism of one entity or another.

So I really wanted to try to learn more. I've spent some time reading and thinking about it and trying to study it and I've arrived at not so much a sense of the differences but a sense of the similarities in so many ways; the value system roots and the linkages between the Torah, the Koran and the Bible and the fundamental story that runs through all of this, that connects us-and really connects all of us.

And so I've also always been fascinated by the Transcendentalists and the Pantheists and others who found these great connections just in nature, in trees, the ponds, the ripples of the wind on the pond, the great feast of nature itself. I think it's all an expression that grows out of this profound respect people have for those forces that human beings struggle to define and to explain. It's all a matter of spirituality.

I find that even - even atheists and agnostics wind up with some kind of spirituality, maybe begrudgingly acknowledging it here and there, but it's there. I think it's really intriguing. For instance, thinking about China, the people and their policy-how do we respond to their view of us? And how do they arrive at that view of us and of the world and of life choices? I think we have to think about those things in the context of the spiritual to completely understand where they are coming from. So here are a people who, you know, by and large, have a nation that has no theory of creationism. Well, that has to effect how you approach things. And until we think through how that might effect how you approach things, it's hard to figure out where you could find a meeting of the minds when approaching certain kinds of issues.

So, the exploration of all these things I find intriguing. Notwithstanding our separation between church and state, it is an essential ingredient of trying to piece together an approach to some of the great vexing questions we have internationally.

[TayTay]

1. There are so many. I like this Oliphant one from 1996

A GENERATION AGO, KERRY LED A REVOLUTION

Author(s): Thomas Oliphant, Globe Staff Date: April 28, 1996

WASHINGTON With no public notice -- appropriately -- a few dozen unique veterans got together last Monday evening at the home of Sen. John Kerry. Most of them had not just fought, some heroically, in the Vietnam War; they had also fought in this country to end it while the bombs were still dropping and people were still dying.

"One last mission," their leader had called it 25 years ago last week, trying to walk a trying line between pride in honorable service and revulsion at the foundation of official lies on which this godawful war rested and then toppled.

"It doesn't haunt me, it really doesn't," Kerry said as we walked a deserted Capitol hallway a few evenings later. "But a day doesn't go by when a lesson from that time doesn't appear."

For one amazing week in a brilliant, 1971 spring, Kerry and a couple of thousand young men grabbed America by the throat as the war's two fronts were joined for the only time in the eight years it raged in Indochina and the United States.

You could agree or disagree, as Americans did vehemently in those days, but what everyone did that week was pay close, at times stunned, attention. Six years into the war, protest was nothing new here; what was different was that these guys had been there and now called themselves Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

Without an official permit, they camped out on the Mall that sprawls between the Capitol and the Washington Monument, under the watchful eyes of Richard Nixon's sick White House.

Many were in wheelchairs, including a battered vet -- still battling indescribable demons -- named Ron Kovic, a Long Islander who was born on the Fourth of July. Many had deep physical and mental wounds; all of them were profoundly angry.

They had been shunned as they drifted home when their tours ended. Those who acted on the conviction that the war was an abomination were even shunned by leaders of the antiwar movement.

As the third week of April began, no one knew what to expect, the vets included. The atmosphere, initially, was chaotic and combustible. It could have turned ugly; it could have turned violent; it could have been pointless.

What John Kerry did was supply the power and restraint of dignity. By maintaining order on the Mall as well as a principled refusal to disperse, he made the vets themselves and their stories the focus of the country's increasingly rapt attention. All these years later, it remains one of the most astonishing feats of public leadership I have ever witnessed.

On the first day, they marched silently in a long line across the Potomac to Arlington National Cemetery.

On the third day, as their lawyers tried and failed, all the way into Supreme Court, to get official sanction for their presence, they resolved to remain and face arrest. All through that night they waited for police who never came; Nixon wasn't stupid.

On the fourth day, Kerry spoke for all of them in a riveting speech to the late J. William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Experts had made this forum famous for years, but nothing like Kerry's unique perpsective had ever been offered before.

And on the fifth day, all day long, each vet stepped up to a hastily erected fence in front of the Capitol, identified himself and his former unit, and tossed medals into the empty space before a branch of government that to that moment had still not voted one way or the other on the war. Some wept; some screamed in fury; some, like Kerry, were barely audible.

Some flung all their medals. Some -- including Kerry -- threw other veterans' medals but kept their own. Kerry's medals included his Silver Star for his heroism as a swift boat commander. Big deal.

The protest was fixed in that time. What many forget is that what these guys did was the beginning of America's belated acceptance of the Vietnam veteran. It wasn't the government and it wasn't the service organizations; it was these guys who started the first outreach clincs, who pressed for extended GI Bill benefits, who first raised the issue of Agent Orange's poisonous impact, whose activism was central to the creation of this city's most moving memorial.

The hardest edges of Kerry's anger have long since dulled, but even as a politician he remains remarkably the same person -- a skeptic but not a cynic; a Democrat to be sure, but not a partisan; a pol with an ego and ambition, but also with reserve and a certain apartness.

His reelection campaign is a topic for another day, but it has always intrigued me that Kerry's zeal is most notable when he is trying to hold people and government accountable (from Oliver North to the government of Vietnam) and when he is seeking reconciliation (with Vietnam and as a coalition-inclined senator).

Politics aside, he is grounded by the pain of real life, not easy to know but worth the effort. That was dramatically evident on the Mall a generation ago. It is quietly so today.

I think things like the above are why LTTE like this were printed from time to time:

VETS TRADE IN IDEAS, VALUES

Date: March 22, 2004 Page: A11 Section: Op-Ed

AS A Vietnam veteran I found Glen Johnson's claim that John Kerry is trying to inoculate himself by surrounding himself with veterans a cheap shot and an insult to John Kerry and to all veterans ("Kerry, Cheney trade charges on leadership," Page A1).

The simple fact is that John Kerry has been surrounded by veterans since the day he came home from Vietnam. He has been surrounded by them not because of any wish to inoculate himself. If anything, Kerry has exposed himself to fire by taking on issues such as Agent Orange and POW-MIAs. Veterans surround Kerry because he shares in their causes and concerns. There is more to being a veteran than trading stories. Veterans trade in ideas, values, and a living knowledge of history, things this country needs now more than ever.

K B

[MH1]

2. You just have to love the introduction to that AW article

The first time I came across John Kerry's name was at my desk. A written gift subscription card for "Senator John Kerry" was mailed in from a person by the name of T. Heinz. There was a little note of compliment to the magazine on the side of this card, which was naturally brought to my attention. At the time, our Premier Issue had just been launched and any recognition was a welcome boost.

A few years went by and I saw the headline in a Boston paper describing the marriage of a Senator John Kerry to a wealthy Republican woman by the name of Teresa Heinz. While it had been three years since the gift subscription, I thought a letter acknowledging the kind note might bring about an interesting story on the couple. (After all, wouldn't you be dying to know whether that gift subscription to American Windsurfer was the arrow that caught the Senator's heart?)

Awww... :D

[karynnj]

3. That is sooo cute.

that must have been near the time they were first together.