What Douglas Brinkley's Book Tells Us About John Kerry

In running for president, Sen. John Kerry is dancing on the head of a pin. While President George W. Bush can seem maddeningly simplistic in a complex world, candidate Kerry is awash in nuances and contradictions. An anti-war candidate who voted for the war in Iraq but opposed the latest appropriation for reconstruction, Kerry is also running as the populist foe of the wealthy and privileged, though he is himself a multimillionaire Boston Brahmin Yalie who never married a woman worth less than $300 million. Kerry's contribution to the two-century-old genre of campaign biographies and autobiographies is characteristically complex but also, like his life story, moving, inspiring and surprisingly formidable.

In Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, historian Douglas Brinkley shows how Kerry can pull off another great paradox defining his campaign: glorifying military exploits in a war he abhorred and later famously opposed. The book pulls no punches. Brinkley defines Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam War as the launching pad to his political career. In fact, while a Republican might have started the book with Kerry's heroics in winning the Silver Star or the Bronze Star, Brinkley begins with Kerry's dramatic Senate testimony as a wounded and decorated war veteran denouncing the war. This opening positions Kerry as a man of conscience doing his duty -- both in fighting for his country and in opposing the war he came to believe was immoral.

Campaign biographies are supposed to be predictive. Readers want a crystal ball suggesting whether the subject will win and just what kind of president he will be. This book will excite Republicans with the prospect of casting Kerry as a Jane Fonda-loving, pot-smoking traitor-dilettante who ran anti-war protests from the comfortable perch of"the Georgetown home of Oatsie and Robert Charles," warm hosts despite being pro-war Republicans. In fact, many, many rich or famous people have cameo appearances in the saga of this strikingly well-connected patrician who proves that America still has an aristocracy.

Yet Democrats will rejoice that this JFK -- John Forbes Kerry -- is no Michael Dukakis. Ramrod straight, with a chestful of medals and a massive Dudley Do-Right chin only a mother, Garry Trudeau, or a Mount Rushmore sculptor could love, Kerry is not well-cast as a subversive. Moreover, he is not afraid to fight -- and the thumbnail sketch of his political career emphasizes many veterans' deep loyalty to Kerry and the delicate, deep-seated"Band of Brothers" emotions Republican character assassins must avoid unleashing when attacking him.

Tour of Duty is clearly a presidential campaign biography. John Kerry emerges as a Golden Boy from an earlier era, born in 1943, the well-bred son of a Foreign Service officer with deep roots and extensive connections. A St. Paul's School preppie, a Skull-and-Bones Yalie, Kerry spent his youth hobnobbing and high-flying, all the while nursing feelings of financial inadequacy among the mega-wealthy and demonstrating an ambition that was just a tad out of place in his world of cotillions and trust funds. In yet another squaring of the circle, Brinkley balances the romantic frivolity of Kerry's social set with the emerging seriousness and public-service-oriented patriotism of the young Kerry himself.

Sen. Kerry granted Brinkley full access to his"War Notes" and nine interviews"with only one string attached," Brinkley writes,"that I write any book or article drawn from them within two years." This generous grant occurred in 2002, which means that the deadline just happens to coincide with Kerry's presidential push. To underscore the message, the book ends with an epilogue:"September 2, 2003 [Charleston, South Carolina]," with Sen. Kerry launching his presidential run lovingly supported by his"brothers," his fellow Vietnam veterans.

The journals and notes Kerry provided are so extensive that his voice comes through loud and clear. Readers of this book will feel the sense of mass-produced intimacy, so essential to modern democratic political bonding, and will find it hard to understand journalistic descriptions of Kerry as"aloof." In keeping with the genre of campaign biography, Brinkley makes his subject heroic, a man for our times and a man for all times, a silver-tongued do-gooder clearly cast from birth to fill George Washington's shoes and be"first in war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

Yet Brinkley's brief for Kerry's presidential candidacy may rank as the oddest presidential campaign biography or autobiography ever written. Invariably, these works are straightforward puff pieces celebrating the candidate and setting up the candidacy -- and the hoped-for victory -- as the logical culmination of a life well-lived. Romantic novelists and the politicians themselves, with their respective professional instincts for melodrama laden with symbolism, are more suited to this genre than historians, trained as they are to delight in complexity and preserve a critical distance. While Brinkley clearly admires Kerry, sometimes slavishly, this biography does not ignore the doubts about Kerry's sincerity and fears of his ambition that have dogged Kerry since his youth. It would be hard to find any other campaign biographer who would write,"From the time he started law school in the fall of 1973 to his successful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1984, he compiled a modest record of somewhat unfocused achievement."

Brinkley's account of Kerry's wartime service -- especially the brief four months he spent in combat -- is simply too long. The historian became too enamored with his sources, namely Kerry's voluminous journal entries describing an overlooked part of the war: the patrolling of Vietnam's rivers. Though somewhat illuminating, these details bog down the book.

This is a shame, because Brinkley's account of Kerry's emergence as the leading war veteran against the war is well-paced, insightful and compelling. In this account, which covers the last quarter of the book, Kerry emerges as a patriot. Like so many others, Kerry grew his hair long, had his nightmares and vented his rage. But he also worked to moderate anti-war radicals. In trying to present the movement's best public face, Kerry demonstrated his great skill: his ability to speak American to Americans. He emerges not as a fire-breathing radical, but as a hard-core liberal in the mold of Ted Kennedy, Allard Lowenstein and George McGovern. In fact, at the risk of resurrecting Newt Gingrich's noxious phrase from the 1990s, compared to Kerry, Bill and Hillary Clinton are merely Potemkin McGoverniks; this guy is the real deal.

Ultimately, this book does what a campaign book should do. Tour of Duty hails John Kerry as an American hero, and navigates biographical minefields -- the book spends much time introducing Julia Thorne, whom Kerry married in 1970, but dispatches his divorce in two cryptic lines; it dutifully attempts to make Kerry's flamboyant returning of someone else's war medals at a rally seem reasonable. More important, the book suggests that Kerry will not be so easily demonized or outfoxed in the campaign. Brinkley provides an engaging portrait of Kerry and the Vietnam era. It still remains for the candidate to explain why heroic service in the Mekong Delta during the 1960s augers effective leadership in the twenty-first century White House.

This article first appeared in newsobserver.com and is reprinted with permission of the author.