The
Democrats: John Kerry thought the nomination was his but didn't count
on Howard Dean. He made a hard charge for the finish line as Dean's
campaign imploded
Does Kerry have a passionate side, too?
Newsweek
Nov.
15 issue - John Kerry didn't want to get on his own campaign bus. It
was just after Labor Day 2003, and the day before, Kerry had formally
launched his candidacy with a forgettable speech, delivered while
standing in front of an aircraft carrier in Charleston, S.C. Now, as he
was preparing to leave a rally in Manchester, N.H., Kerry strongly
objected to the slogan plastered on the side of the bus: COURAGE EQUALS
KERRY. He was traveling with his Vietnam buddies, and combat veterans
didn't like advertising themselves that way, he protested. Real
warriors—men who have actually been shot at—don't care to brag, or even
much talk about it. Kerry was in a funk. He stood outside the bus,
refusing to get on while he complained about the posters advertising
his personal courage. "You have to get on the bus," quietly insisted
his top adviser, Bob Shrum. "I'll get on the staff bus," Kerry pouted.
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His
handlers had seen it before. Kerry did not like to play the brave war
hero. His pollster, Mark Mellman, had tested a theme line—"John Kerry
has the courage to do what's right for America"—and voters seemed to
like it. But Kerry didn't. He was uncomfortable with showy displays of
any kind, but especially ones that glorified his combat record. Jim
Margolis, his paid media man, was eager to make ads using the almost
three hours of film footage Kerry had shot with a handheld super-8
camera in Vietnam. The catch was that only about 15 seconds showed
Kerry. "Goddammit, John, didn't you want to send anything home to your
parents, for God's sake?" Margolis complained. Kerry answered, "No,
that isn't what I was trying to do." He had wanted to capture his
experiences—the countryside, the Vietnamese people, the ravages of war.
Not to show off himself.
Kerry
didn't want to talk about the war. And yet he seemed to talk about it
all the time, constantly reminding voters that he (unlike most other
politicians, including George W. Bush) had fought for his country.
Evoking his war record had been his trump card at critical moments in
his political career. (In his hotly contested '96 Senate re-election
campaign, his opponent, popular Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld,
criticized Kerry's opposition to the death penalty. Kerry gravely
intoned, "I know something about killing ...") Chris Heinz, Teresa
Heinz Kerry's 31-year-old son who enjoyed a teasing, macho relationship
with his stepfather, bluntly warned Kerry that the press was beginning
to view Kerry's frequent evocations of his Vietnam service as a tired
cliche. To some of Kerry's aides, the senator seemed almost bipolar
about his war record: on the one hand, the strong silent type; on the
other, living proof that the Vietnam War will never end.
To
show off—or not? To be proud—or humble? To strut—or self-deprecate?
Sometimes Kerry seemed torn by conflicting impulses, and not just about
his war record. Like every politician, he yearned to be noticed. The
wise guys of the Massachusetts media and political establishment made
fun of Kerry for hogging the limelight: they called him "Live Shot." As
a legislator he was not a backroom dealmaker. He liked to be out front,
conducting high-profile investigations of hot topics like allegations
of drugrunning by the CIA. And yet he was capable of small acts of
modesty and decency, of giving credit to others, and he often seemed
uneasy before a camera or a microphone.
Kerry's
ambivalence helps explain why he is not a natural politician. Kerry
cannot sit still. He must always be up and doing, and he has been
running for president, depending on whom you believe, since he was 14
years old, 18 at the latest. He was mocked for his ambition ("JFK," it
was said, stood for "Just For Kerry"). Yet his more perceptive
schoolmates always sensed that he was listening to some inner voice,
telling him not to give in to the siren song of self-promotion. It is
the same stern, patrician voice—preaching modesty, humility, duty—that
whispered into the ears of generations of privileged youth of the old
WASP ascendancy, including generations of Bushes. "I do not want to
hear the Great I Am," Dorothy Walker Bush, mother and grandmother of
presidents, had scolded her son George if he bragged too much about his
sporting triumphs as a schoolboy in the 1930s and 1940s.
Though
Kerry liked to play down his elitist side—his accent, pure Thurston
Howell III as a young man, became less plummy over time—he never shed
all the trappings of his social class, or tried to. To his classmates
Kerry had been a bit of an outsider, the fruit of some Brahmin seed (a
Winthrop and a Forbes on his mother's side, but he learned only late in
life that he was part Jewish on his father's side), and he was never as
well off as most of his classmates. They thought he tried a little too
hard to show that he really belonged and, by striving, betrayed his
insecurity. The WASP ascendancy was beginning its decline when Kerry
graduated from the poshest of the New England prep schools, St. Paul's,
in 1962, but its gentleman's code of muscular Christianity was still
strong. Episcopal Church schools like St. Paul's tried to teach the
virtue of humility, the sin of pride, the value of quiet service to
others ...
FREE VIDEO
• Behind the Bush Win NEWSWEEK's Editor Mark Whitaker discusses how the Republicans got the better of John Kerry (Courtesy of CNN)
NEWSWEEK
That
is, up to a point. Ruling-class sons were supposed to compete hard—but
not sweat too much. To get (or stay) ahead—but do so gracefully, even
effortlessly. To wear the mantle of wealth and power lightly, coolly.
The style had been set by an earlier generation of swells who had
fashioned certain unwritten, strict yet ambiguous rules of decorum. It
was all very complicated, a tricky, delicate business of flaunting it,
but subtly, and John Forbes Kerry, at least in the critical eyes of his
classmates, never seemed to get the balance right. While other preppies
had been perfecting their slouches on the greenswards of country clubs,
Kerry had been grimly learning a more Puritan code, like how to
navigate a small boat in the fog off the New England coast, doggedly
trying to please his dour and secretive father. His mother sweetly
preached the duty to serve and the old-time virtue of choosing the
harder right over the easier wrong. (Her last words to her son, says
Kerry, were "Integrity, integrity, integrity.") Their son was a good
boy at school, a striver and serious, delivering a speech on "The
Plight of the Negro" and founding a debating society. But he was too
earnest, too obvious for the cutups, who mocked the faint air of
superiority that Kerry wore, mostly as a defense.
Kerry's
revenge was to do better, to excel, to leave his detractors behind—but
not to boast! Never to gloat! Unless, of course, boasting was
absolutely necessary to get ahead. There was something a little
desperate, but admirable, about Kerry's determination. He would do what
it took to get where he wanted to go.
In New Hampshire that day after Labor Day 2003, he got on the bus.
HOW BUSH DID IT
NEWSWEEK's exclusive, behind-the-scenes account of the presidential campaign
Kerry
had been assured that the nomination was his, almost, as it were, by
right. A memo drafted by his campaign manager, Jim Jordan, in November
2002 assured him that he would be "the first one out of the box" in the
upcoming campaign and that he would raise the most money "because
you're the best candidate." He would establish himself as front runner,
soak up endorsements and contributions and march inexorably to the
nomination.
It was all myth. Former Vermont
governor Howard Dean, blunt and down to earth (especially in comparison
with the lordly Kerry), had burst from the pack with a grass-roots
Internet-fueled campaign and huge outdoor rallies on his Sleepless
Summer tour in August. The establishment press swooned over the
anti-establishment candidate. Kerry was deemed a hopeless stiff, his
campaign written off as moribund.
Kerry was
nonplused by it all, a little hurt that Dean had run as the "movement"
candidate against Kerry, the tool of the Washington status quo. Kerry
had been in the Senate for 20 years, but he still saw himself as the
reform-minded antiwar protester who had come from Vietnam, tossed away
his ribbons and defied the Nixon administration. (Dean had fun with
Kerry's self-righteousness; at his private debate prep, he would pose
as Kerry, sticking his nose up in the air and mimicking Kerry: "I was
in Vietnam; I don't take any PAC money.")
Kerry
didn't know what to do about Dean. His own advisers were divided. Most
of the pros, his paid political consultants and campaign manager,
wanted to go negative. The philosophy of Chris Lehane, one of his media
advisers, was "You either hit or you're being hit." The hawks wanted to
go at Dean from the left, to convince voters that Dean was not a true
liberal. "We didn't want to rip the guy's face off," said Jordan, "but
he wasn't going away, and we had to strip at least a third of his
liberal support away."
