another Globe oped (local) on Kerry, Yale, Harvard, and ROTC

[MBS]

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/03/08/kerry_to_yale_go_harvard/

A lot of Harvard-Yale rivalry in-joke stuff (a local story here in New England), but JK comes off rather well, I think. Here's the beginning:

Last week, just before he took the shuttle up from Washington to join Harvard president Drew Faust at a ceremony welcoming ROTC back to the Cambridge campus, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus met a fellow Navy vet named John Forbes Kerry in the Pentagon mess hall. Over lunch, the senior senator from Massachusetts told Mabus he had just sent a letter to Yale president Richard Levin, urging Levin to do what Yale men find hardest: emulate Harvard.

Now, you can tell a Harvard man, but you can’t tell him much. It’s just as bad with the New Haven crowd, especially now that they have a good hockey team.
But given that he fought in it, Kerry had a little more credibility opposing the Vietnam War than the antiwar crowd that drove ROTC off the Ivy campuses. Besides, he’s a Yale man, and Yale men can tell other Yale men whatever they want.

Rest of the column at url, above.

[karynnj]

1. JK comes out incredibly well here

The comments on his own friends was really really wonderful.

Kerry told Levin that in his years at Yale, he was equally inspired by the activism of Allard Lowenstein, a Yale Law School grad who challenged privileged Yalies to care about civil rights, and the patriotism of his closest friends in college, including Dick Pershing and John White, killed in action in Vietnam.

Kerry’s point is that you can be a patriot or an activist or both, and you can be one, the other, or both even on a prestigious campus.

Kerry told me he thought of his Yale buddies when he wrote the letter. Not just Pershing and White, who never made it back, but David Thorne and Fred Smith, who did. Thorne, who followed him into the Navy, is US ambassador to Italy; Smith, a Marine, went on to found FedEx.

<snip>

Guys like Kerry and Thorne and Smith came back not as much scarred by their service as shaped by it. They went on to do great things, never forgetting friends like Pershing and White who made the ultimate sacrifice.

http://www.boston.com/news/education/higher/articles/2011/03/08/kerry_to_yale_go_harvard/