I remember seeing members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War at some of the peace demonstrations I attended on my undergraduate campus. The VVAW helped the morale of and lent credibility to the peace movement when it was being viciously attacked and harassed by the likes of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Spiro Agnew (the Vice President) and many others. I always admired these individuals, so for me this is a big plus for Kerry.

 

VVAW and the anti-war movement within the U.S. military were certainly a big plus for the anti-war movement as a whole, as Jerry Lembcke and H. Bruce Franklin, among others, have clearly demonstrated.  But John Kerry seems to have been much more interested in building his future political career than in building an effective anti-war movement.

 

Both MW and LL have presented a one-sided and incomplete picture of John Kerrys role in Vietnam Veterans against the War (VVAW) and his anti-war credentials in general.  Much of what has been written during the last few months about Kerry, whether by supporters or enemies, contain lots of lies and garbage, but what follows seems to be generally agreed upon as factual.

 

Kerry had political ambitions even before he went to Yale.  With his family pedigree (Forbes and Winthrop), he was a family friend of the Kennedys, and John F. Kennedy was his idol.  His enlistment in the Navy after his graduation from Yale in 1966 was a political decision consciously modeled on Kennedys war experience.  Kerry spent only months in Vietnam and then requested and got a transfer to become an aide to an admiral in New York.  He then obtained an early discharge from the Navy to run for Congress.  But the seat was held by anti-war Boston College Jesuit priest Father Robert Drinan, so Kerry soon dropped out of the race, temporarily delaying his political career.

 

Kerry apparently didnt become involved in the anti-war movement until the fall of 1969, when his anti-war sister Peggy asked him to help out with the Oct. 15 mass mobilization.  Later, in January, 1971, Kerry attended, but did not speak at, the Winter Soldier hearings in Detroit, where Vietnam veterans presented powerful personal testimony about the genocidal racist war they had participated in and witnessed in Vietnam.

 

Kerrys first public action with VVAW was his high profile speech before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, 1971.  His speech there was apparently written by former Bobby Kennedy speech writer Adam Walinsky, according to Republican Party sources.

 

Kerry was an anomaly in VVAW.  Most VVAW members were from more working class backgrounds, had not been to college, and had not been officers.  They were politically much more radical than Kerry, and many were anti-imperialist and revolutionary in their outlook.  Some evidently suspected that Kerry was a political opportunist who was using VVAW to grab media attention and launch his political career.  Others welcomed Kerrys ability to raise lots of money for VVAW.

 

Five months after become leader of VVAW Kerry quit the organization.  He increasingly distanced himself from VVAW and later stated,  I resigned and left [the VVAW] because the agenda of some of the folks within the veteransmovement ultimately became confused and went way beyond just trying to end the war. There was a lot of rhetoric about every social ill and evil there was.

 

What does this add up to?  I met more than a few people like John Kerry during the more than a decade I was active in the anti-war movement in the Boston area.  For example, one of my roommates during my first year in graduate school at Harvard was a law student who also had aspirations to become President some day.  He insisted that he was against the war, but when we began using our apartment for meetings, he went down to the FBI office in Boston to put on the record that he himself was taking no part in our activities.

 

Its not just that Kerry had his own selfish ambitions.  He also sought to misdirect the anti-war movement away from an anti-imperialist, pro-working class perspective.  He claimed that the war was a mistake that could be corrected by electing wiser leaders, not an imperialist war that grew directly out of the hegemonic U.S. strategy of containing and fighting against communism and national liberation movements everywhere.

 

Today Kerry claims to have a better strategy for consolidating U.S. control over Iraq and Afghanistan, and for waging the war on terror more effectively.  In a recent speech on Feb. 27 in Los Angeles, Kerry called for strengthening the Pentagon and the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and for adding 40,000 troops to the active duty military.  If you think that Kerry as President will significantly improve U.S. foreign policy, I advise you to read this speech and the Washington Post editorial about it.

 

Many of my friends, like MW and LL, have such fear and loathing of the Bushites that they will campaign and vote for Kerry, no matter what Kerry has done or said.  I empathize with those views; the Bush years have certainly brought the world closer to world war and fascism.  But that should not stop us from getting to know John Kerry and what he is likely to do if he becomes President.  Whether we believe in voting for Kerry or not, if he takes over the White House next January we will all have to spend the next four years organizing and fighting against his domestic and foreign policies.

 

Steve Rosenthal

No Blood For Oil Page