Sunday, December 28, 2003

By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

CLAREMONT, N.H. -- It's the morning after Vice President Al Gore has endorsed Sen. John F. Kerry's archrival, Howard Dean, and effectively told the other eight Democratic candidates to drop out. Kerry is way behind Dean in the New Hampshire polls and running about third in Iowa, but he is not giving anybody the impression that he's ready to accept second place.

Tim Hynds, Sioux City Journal via AP JOHN FORBES KERRY Age: 60 Political Experience: Spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, 1971-72; prosecutor, District Attorney's Office, Middlesex County, Mass., 1976-1979; Mass.; co-founder Vietnam Veterans of America, 1980; Lieutenant governor. 1982-1984, U.S. Senator, D-Mass. 1984-present. Marital Status: Divorced, Remarried to Teresa Heinz Kerry in 1995. Military Experience: Naval Officer in Vietnam 1966-1969 (Silver Star, Bronze Star, three Purple Hearts. Education: B.A., Yale University, 1966; in political science; law degree, Boston College Law School, 1976. Children: Two daughters Alexandra and Vanessa; three stepsons John, Andre, and Christopher Heinz. Money Raised: $20 million (Oct. 15 report) Signature Issues: Improve relations with other nations post-Iraq conflict; Increase environmental protections and energy independence; Preserve tax cuts for the middle class while repealing those for wealthiest Americans Quote: "If George Bush wants to make this election about national security, I have three words for him he'll understand: Bring. It. On." Web site: www.johnkerry.com Index to all Democratic candidate profiles

On his campaign bus, "The Real Deal Express," Kerry grabs a megaphone on one of the seats.

"OK, Real Deal warriors!" he booms through the megaphone to the gang of red-shirted Kerry volunteers. "We are going to win because this administration is in the pocket of special interests, powerful moneyed interests. And everyone is going to learn that I've been the one standing up and fighting against those folks."

Kerry can't resist bringing up his recent and somewhat controversial comments in a Rolling Stone magazine interview that he didn't expect President Bush "to [expletive] up" the invasion and reconstruction of Iraq "as badly as he did."

The president's chief of staff, Andrew H. Card Jr., tore into Kerry on the Sunday news shows, saying that the remarks were "beneath" him and out of character. But Kerry wants his people to know that he's not backing down.

"I might have used the word 'lied,' " Kerry said into the megaphone. "I might have used the word 'screwed up' or any number of things, but then I went to the thesaurus and looked it up and I think I pretty well described exactly what they did in Iraq," he said.

The supporters love the fighting words from the Massachusetts senator who often has been denigrated as too highbrow. David Woody, a former Navy flight engineer and Kerry volunteer from Exeter, N.H., says moments like this show the real and passionate Kerry that his volunteers see all the time.

But among other voters in New Hampshire, Kerry continues to struggle with the entrenched image of the proud and privileged Washington politician. Terrence L. Dostie, a Democrat from North Hampton, N.H., says he's still turned off by what he sees as Kerry's stiffness and a sense of entitlement.

"I don't want a mannequin as president, and that's what he is, a perfectly coifed mannequin," said Dostie, a social studies teacher.

Kerry's slide from presumed front-runner was baffling to many of his supporters, who saw this as the moment he'd primed for his entire life, with a checklist of credentials to match his ambition.

Kerry was born in December 1943 to Richard Kerry, an Army Air Corps pilot, and Rosemary Forbes Kerry. Through his father's work as a diplomat, Kerry saw much of the world as a boy, experiencing the aftermath of World War II, for example, as he rode his bicycle through the streets of West Berlin. The family's dinner table conversations revolved around politics, and Kerry says he developed a deep sense of duty to his country through his parents.

Kerry's world view was sharpened at St. Paul's School in Concord, N.H., where he was known as a gifted orator, and later at Yale University. His St. Paul's classmate, Daniel P. Barbiero, said Kerry also stood out in the exclusive environment of the school by seeking friends who weren't always in the "in-crowd."

"It was a very, very difficult, cliquish atmosphere, and he really would have no part of that," Barbiero recalls. "He was much more prone to ignore that whole sarcastic, cliquish part of the prep school environment."

By high school, Kerry's friends believed he was headed toward politics.

Kerry said he felt his first strong pull in that direction at age 17, while on a routine trip to the dentist in Boston. He happened to pass John F. Kennedy's wind-up rally for the 1960 election and was moved by Kennedy's sense of purpose.

At Yale, Kerry's then-roommate Barbiero remembers watching television with him after the Kennedy assassination and being astonished that he could name nearly every Cabinet member and legislator.

Alan W. Cross, a Yale classmate, said Kerry often steered conversations toward more serious matters, including the Vietnam War.

"When we were all worried about where the party was going to be tonight, he was concerned about why we were sending so many troops toward Vietnam," Cross said. "We didn't see the larger political picture in the way that he was capable of seeing it."

Kerry enlisted in the Navy in February 1966 and entered the service after graduation that spring.

"I just had a sense of service and responsibility," he said in a recent interview. "You have an opportunity to exercise much more responsibility than you would in any other place and I found that challenging and exciting."

Kerry began raising deep concerns about the futility of the conflict early in his service. After the death of a close friend from Yale in early 1968, he wrote of his frustration in a letter to his future wife, Julia Thorne.

"If I do nothing else in my life, I will never stop trying to bring people to the conviction of how wasteful and asinine is a human expenditure of this kind," Kerry wrote in a letter published recently in The Atlantic Monthly.

Kerry later became a commander of a Swift boat, which patrolled the rivers of Vietnam's Mekong Delta. He received the Silver Star, the Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

When Kerry returned, he ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress, but it was his stint as spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War that raised his profile.

At 27, he helped organize an April 1971 march in Washington of Vietnam War veterans. He was the group's voice before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In a moving speech, he asked the committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

In a New York Times article April 2, 1971, Kerry described himself as a moderate. "I'm not a radical in any sense of the word. I guess I'm just an angry young man," he said.

Not long after, the TV show "60 Minutes" did a profile of Kerry, and correspondent Morley Safer noted that he was a man "clearly marked for politics."

Kerry went to Boston College Law School and later worked for the district attorney's office of Middlesex County.

"He immediately just had an aura. He was very competent and very sure," said his Middlesex County colleague, lawyer J. William Codinha. "He never second- guesses himself." Kerry also helped take down Massachusetts mob boss Howie Winter, who had escaped conviction for two decades, despite his involvement in drug running and prostitution.

Between 1982 and 1984, he served as lieutenant governor under Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis. And he moved onto the national stage again when U.S. Sen. Paul E. Tsongas decided not to run for re-election for the Senate.

Kerry ran as a Washington "outsider" but not without scorn. Before the election, Boston Globe columnist Mike Barnicle wrote that Kerry "looks like the kind of guy who wrote a game plan for life when he was still sitting in a sandbox." But Kerry was elected to the Senate in 1984 and is serving his fourth term.

Kerry's zeal as a prosecutor immediately translated to his Senate career. He led a number of high-profile investigations which collided head-on with the Republican administrations. In the mid-1980s, he headed one of the initial investigations into illegal gun-running and narcotics trafficking by the Contras, Nicaraguan rebels supported by the U.S. government to assist in the overthrow of the Sandinista government.

Kerry's office spent three years investigating the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), which exposed a network of international money laundering and bribery of top officials around the world.

He also took a leading role on numerous environmental initiatives. In an interview, he said he was most proud of the fact that he has "written or rewritten many of the environmental laws of the country," including marine mammal protections, acid rain legislation and fisheries laws.

Through all his successes and his campaigns, Kerry has tried to refute allegations that he is driven by ambition and has a thirst to hit the headlines.

Barbiero, who has remained a close friend since their days at St. Paul's, says what drives Kerry is a desire to challenge himself.

"I think the thing he loves most is competition and winning," Barbiero said. "He likes the struggle. ... When you have a person like that who has incredible energy, who is untiring, well-spoken, and has some lofty ideals, I think people scratch their heads. They can't believe he's for real."

Friends also say Kerry has been softened by his second marriage, to Teresa Heinz in 1995. One friend said Heinz Kerry's familiarity with the rigors of the campaign trail and of life in politics had made it easier for Kerry.

"He's certainly mellowed," said his brother, Cameron Kerry. "And there's a sentimental and goofy side of him that you see only glimpses on the campaign trail."

For now, Kerry is almost breezy about his place in the polls and rebuts his doubters by telling stories about past campaigns where the polls were dead wrong.

And even Kerry's former opponent, former Massachusetts Gov. William F. Weld, who challenged him for his Senate seat in 1996, says Kerry may surprise his rivals.

"I give him some credit for having comeback ability," Weld said. "He really stood up on his own two feet and didn't take any guff in the last couple of months of the campaign."

For Kerry, this moment is perhaps just another challenge in a lifetime of successes. And for now, he is defiant.

"I don't care what anybody else says. We're going to win in New Hampshire and start in Iowa," he says.

And the Real Deal Express bus rolls on.

Maeve Reston can be reached at mreston@post-gazette.com.

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