I had a lot of regret over the apparent difficulties last summer in this friendship. I liked the fact that Kerry and McCain had collaborated over the years on so many things. It's the sort of thing that Senators, mature, forward thinking and patriotic Senators are supposed to do for the good of the country they serve: get together and hammer out compromises that work for a varied constituency.
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?050530fr_archive01In 1984, thirteen years after that protest at the Capitol, John McCain, by then a United States representative from Arizona, went to Massachusetts to campaign against Kerry, a first-time Senate candidate. At a rally in the North End of Boston, McCain spoke in support of the Republican candidate, a businessman named Ray Shamie. "I hadn't met John Kerry," McCain told me. In Boston, conservative opponents had tagged Kerry as Ho Chi Minh's candidate. McCain, in his appearance for Shamie, talked about the events of April, 1971. "I said he shouldn't have thrown his medals on the steps, and that I heard about it while I was in prison."
John McCain has never changed his mind about Kerry's participation in that antiwar demonstration, but he has changed his mind about the man. Much sets the two apart. Kerry is tall and lean, with carefully coiffed dark hair, a sharp nose and chin, and a mouth that seems small for his face, which perhaps explains why his expression falls into a smile only with reluctance. He could be cast in any movie as the patrician senator. McCain looks more like a senator's friendly appliance repairman. He is stocky, with washed-out white hair and the slightly pasty skin of a man who has been through something. But a smile comes into McCain's face like a boat into its slip. McCain is the son and grandson of admirals, while Kerry's mother was a Boston Brahmin and his father a Foreign Service officer. Kerry, a liberal Democrat, is at ease in the role of Senator Edward Kennedy's junior partner; McCain is proud to hold Barry Goldwater's Senate seat. Kerry came out of Vietnam as a leading critic of the war, McCain as one of its few true heroes.
Nevertheless, their names have become linked, both through their surprising friendship and through their work together on the Select Committee. "Kerry-McCain" is said as if it were one word. It describes legislation they have co-sponsored, and defines an unusual place in the political landscape. This past June, for example, a Kerry-McCain measure provided millions of dollars in compensation for the "lost commandos"covert agents from South Vietnam whom the C.I.A. had long ago cut loose. "Our relationship is now so easy," McCain told me, "this latest, on the commandos . . . was a two-minute conversation. We didn't have to explore each other's views or anything like that. We both thought alike, and we just did it." Last month, when a CNBC talk show wanted comments on the United States missile attacks against Iraq, Kerry and McCain appeared as a duo. Across the boundaries of ideology, the men have formed a potent bipartisan partnership, grounded in a common, if rarely articulated, experience of the loss, grief, and bitterness that marked the generation of Americans who fought the war in Vietnam and fought against it.
McCain has long since eaten the words he uttered for Ray Shamie in 1984, and it is a good thing for John Kerry that he has. This year, Kerry, up for relection, is being challenged by Massachusetts' popular Republican governor, William Weld. After two terms, Kerry has an impressive record nationally and locally, but in Massachusetts politics he is always overshadowed by Ted Kennedy, and now the contrast between his hyper-formality and Weld's self-mocking frivolitythis summer, Weld leaped into the Charles River fully clothedhas him in trouble: he is in a dead heat with Weld in the polls. Kerry's refusalor inabilityto play the role either of the breezy backslapper or of the sincere self-revealer seems to leave Clinton-era voters cold. At a time when the values of the sitcom and the soap opera prevail, Kerry's reserve may mean that his best hope for November is pinned to the President's coattails.
And from another New Yorker article (My favorite ever written on Kerry, btw)
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?040126fr_archive02I wasnt very close to John before that, John McCain recalls. I thought he was standoffish and pedantic. Actually, noI was the standoffish one, because I didnt agree with what hed done, the protest where they threw away their medals. In fact, McCain had campaigned against Kerry during the general election of 1984. But I gained a great deal of respect, and affection, for John during those P.O.W.-M.I.A. hearings. He was a lot more mature, a lot more patient than I was. Kerry was especially helpful when some of the more extreme P.O.W.-movement types testified before the committee. Id see the way some of these guys were exploiting the families of those missing in action, and Id begin to get angry, McCain went on, and John would sense it and put his hand on my arm to calm me down before Id loseMcCain paused and smiledmy effectiveness.
Kerry and McCain went to Vietnam together; they visited the cell where McCain had been held as a prisoner of war. Just to stand there alone in this tiny cell with McCain, just to look at this guy who was now a United States senator, and my friend, in the very place where hed been tortured, and kept for so many years, not knowing if he might live, Kerry began a sentence one day, sitting in his Capitol officeand then he seemed unable to finish the thought, unwilling to break through his public reserve. We found this common ground in this far-off place.
After more than a year of research and eight trips to Vietnam, Kerry managed to cajole a unanimous vote from his committeeincluding two Republicans, Bob Smith, of New Hampshire, and Chuck Grassley, of Iowa, who had been banging the P.O.W. drum the loudestin favor of a report saying it was very unlikely that any Americans had been left behind in Vietnam. It was the sort of labor-intensive, quietly useful work that other senators notice and respect. The committees unanimity made it possible for Bill Clinton to normalize relations with Vietnam, in 1995. In a practical way, Kerry had at last brought an end to the war that had dominated so much of his adult life.
There was a personal consequence as well. The time Kerry spent with McCainand, to a lesser extent, with Bob Kerrey and Chuck Robbcompleted the transformation that the Doghunters had begun. He was no longer a political loner; he was, finally, part of a distinct, bipartisan, and emotionally intense group: the Vietnam combat veterans in the United States Senate. (Max Cleland, of Georgia, and Chuck Hagel, of Nebraska joined the group in 1996; Kerrey and Robb departed in 2000.) They took common positions on veterans issues, and sometimes on questions of war and peace, but they were most passionately united when one or another of them was attacked.
Yeah, I am glad that have reconciled. This was, actually, a great story. And it was, and I hope will be, good for the nation.
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