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Cincinatus' Wife Suddenly, the presidential race has devolved into a debate about young John Kerry's actions in Vietnam. First, Kerry made his military service the central theme of the Democratic convention. Now some anti-Kerry veterans have issued a book and television ads that impugn that record. In normal times, the Democrats' strong suit -- domestic policy -- counterbalances the GOP's advantage on national security issues. With the country at war, however, national security trumps. So Kerry promised a "more effective war on terror," and he labored to make the case, as columnist EJ Dionne put it, that he "was actually tougher than Bush." The detractors may only be playing into his hands by focusing on what he did or did not do on the Mekong 35 years ago. The more telling point is that nothing he has done since then sustains the claim that he would be an effective leader in the war we face today -- any more than George McGovern's 35 combat missions in World War II qualified him to lead us in the Cold War. The Cold War also provides our best measuring stick for estimating how Kerry might perform as commander in chief, and in that conflict Kerry's instincts were always awry. Had the country heeded his counsel, we might not yet have won it. Many leaders had a hand in Washington's Cold War triumph, but Ronald Reagan's contributions were pivotal, and Kerry opposed every one of them. Reagan's defense buildup disabused Soviet leaders of any hope that they could ultimately come out ahead of the United States. Kerry derided these military expenditures as "bloated" and "without any relevancy to the threat." In particular, Reagan's plan to seek a missile defense system against Soviet ICBMs and NATO's decision to station new missiles in Europe to counteract the new Soviet deployment there rendered futile the Kremlin's vast investment in nuclear supremacy. Instead of these measures, Kerry advocated that we adopt a one-sided "nuclear freeze." Reagan also showed the Soviets that history was not necessarily on their side by ousting the erratic communist regime in Grenada and arming anti-communist guerrillas to challenge the leftist oligarchs of Nicaragua. Kerry condemned the US action in Grenada as "a bully's show of force," and he opposed our support for guerrillas in Nicaragua as vociferously as anyone in the Senate, even traveling to Managua to try to cut a deal with Sandinista strongman Daniel Ortega to thwart Reagan's policy. Reagan also put the United States on the ideological offensive when he branded the Soviet Union an "evil empire." But Kerry's harshest words were reserved for our own country, which he accused -- during his years as an antiwar leader -- of "crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." Not only in the Cold War but also in other events that foreshadowed today's challenges, Kerry consistently got it wrong. In 1986, Reagan bombed Moammar Gadhafi's residence when intelligence intercepts showed that the Libyan dictator was behind the terrorist bombing of a nightclub full of American soldiers in Germany. Kerry denounced the US retaliatory strike as "not proportional." And when Saddam Hussein swallowed Kuwait in 1990, Kerry opposed using force to drive him out, calling instead for reliance on economic sanctions. All in all, in his 20 years in the Senate, Kerry ranks as one of the five most dovish or liberal members on foreign policy if you tally up the key votes selected by the liberal advocacy group, Americans for Democratic Action. Is it any wonder that Kerry is seeking to focus voters' attention on his courage as a Navy officer rather than his judgment as a political leader? Since 1972, when McGovern jettisoned the tradition of Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson and made the Democrats the party of dovishness, only two Democrats have won the White House. Both of them, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, presented themselves as more hawkish than their Republican opponents. In 1976, Carter targeted the detente policies of Gerald Ford. In 1992, Clinton lambasted George HW Bush's refusal to defend Bosnia or criticize Beijing. Once in office, each pursued softer foreign policies than the Republican he had defeated. That Kerry comes from Massachusetts -- the only state that opted for McGovern in 1972 -- makes his projection of hawkishness a harder sell. The military veterans with whom he surrounded himself at the convention, and the reminders of the honor with which he himself served, make the claim more plausible.
By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book, The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man. Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off Cape Cod. If he had any reasons for professional bitterness, they should have long since faded. The Star-Spangled Mirror is a critique of moralism in America's foreign policy -- and, more than that, it is a critique of America's national character. "Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the US as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of US moral superiority. Despite its blunt arguments, The Star-Spangled Mirror received little attention. Foreign Affairs greeted it with a 90-word summation in its review section. But the work of Richard Kerry, who passed away in 2000, will soon experience posthumous reconsideration. It won't be because of the renewed relevance of his arguments (although his book does read like a contemporary brief against neoconservatism). It will be because his son is a leading candidate to run US foreign policy. According to the conventional telling of John Kerry's biography, largely told by Kerry himself, his foreign policy views were forged in the Mekong Delta. During his disillusioning four-month combat stint on a Navy Swift Boat, the limits of US power were revealed to him. As Newsweek argued in a cover story last month, "Kerry's policy views, as well as his politics, were profoundly shaped by the war." But, for all the neatness this narrative provides, it overlooks an entire chapter in Kerry's intellectual history: his childhood. In fact, Kerry's foreign policy worldview, characterized by a steadfast belief in international institutions and a suspicion of US hard power, had fallen into place long before he ever enlisted. As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley, told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight from Richard Kerry." As a law student at Harvard in the late '30s, he read continental philosophers like Kierkegaard and histories about Bismarck and Metternich; he traveled to France, where he took sculpture classes and met his wife. Hoping to parlay his love of Europe into a career, he chose inte...
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