Kerry's great Senate success: POW-MIA commission

[Feanorcurufinwe]

By Adam B. Kushner | Special to the Sentinel
Posted February 18, 2004

Republican opposition researchers here have been collecting dirt on John Kerry for a long time, and now that his candidacy is putting the heat on President Bush, conservatives have launched the first salvos of the November election. One of their fiercest and most persuasive charges is that, in 19 years as a senator, Kerry accomplished next to nothing.

They're wrong.

It's true that Kerry didn't author much legislation. He didn't rethink the tax structure or reshape American health care. But he does have some outsized triumphs to his name. He presided over several high-profile commissions of inquiry in the Senate that ferreted out Manuel Noriega as a drug dealer and led to the indictment of former Defense Secretary Clark Clifford, one of the Democratic Party's elder statesmen (despite howls from Senate Democrats), for his connections to a corrupt international bank.

But Kerry's greatest success was his commission in the early 1990s on POWs and MIAs in Vietnam. It went further, perhaps, than any other congressional work in cleansing the nation's spirit after a war whose divisions lingered on long past the fighting. When Kerry accepted Majority Leader George Mitchell's appointment to chair the commission, his staff unanimously warned against the controversial assignment that other senators declined. They counseled that it would not help his political career; defying his rap as an unscrupulous climber, Kerry took the job anyway.

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In his hearings, Kerry allowed witnesses to give voice to every conspiracy theory. He subpoenaed hundreds of people; pored over tens of thousands of documents and photographs; and heard testimony from veterans, former POWs, family members and intelligence officers. He even put Henry Kissinger under oath. Kerry was denounced as a traitor, sometimes by the same people he invited to testify. But he kept his equanimity throughout.

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But, for the most part, the authoritative report was cathartic; the issue receded quietly into collective memory. Surviving family members no longer agonize publicly about how soldiers languish in Vietnamese concentration camps. The POW "investigations" racket died. Vietnam ceased to be a divisive political issue.
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[David Dunham]

1. Kerry Is a Great Healer