Letter From Ground Zero : dilemma the antiwar movement faces with Kerry

Halfway through Tim Russert’s hourlong interview with
Demo- cratic presidential nominee Senator John Kerry on
April 18, there was an exchange that revealed in
microcosm some of the fundamental unspoken rules of
American politics in our day. Russert played a clip
from Kerry’s 1971 appearance on Meet the Press
following his testimony as a leader of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War before the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee. A long-haired Kerry, in uniform, was seen
saying that he stood by the essence of his testimony,
in which he had said that veterans had admitted they
had "raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires
from portable telephones to human genitals and turned
up the power." He added that under the Geneva
Conventions such acts were war crimes.

Russert did not play the tape to congratulate Kerry for
his truth-telling. On the contrary, he was clearly
calling him on the carpet. He even suggested that "a
lot" of Kerry’s allegations had been discredited. In
fact, every word that Kerry spoke then has been shown
to be true in an abundance of testimony. Even now, new
revelations pour out. For example, the Toledo Blade
just won the Pulitzer Prize for unearthing the story of
an army company that went on a seven-month rampage in
Vietnam, routinely killing peasants, burning villages,
cutting off the ears of corpses. Troops in the field
can hardly engage in such conduct over a period of
months without the knowledge and at least tacit
approval of higher authority.

Kerry answered warily. He began by trying to make light
of the clip. "Where did all that dark hair go?—that’s
a big question for me," he joked. He went on to say
that although some of his language had been
"excessive," he was still proud of the stand he had
taken. His predicament is worth pondering. The powers
that be, with the approval of mainstream opinion, had
sent him into a misbegotten war whose awful reality
they covered up. When he helped uncover it, it was not
they but he who was punished. In short, by sending
young men into an atrocious, mistaken war, they created
a truth so distasteful to the public that its
disclosure, by discrediting the discloser, keeps them
in power. Was Kerry "flip-flopping"—the Bush
Administration’s main campaign charge against him? Was
he all-too- characteristically trying to back off from
a position he had once taken while at the same time
embracing it? And didn’t this performance echo his
complicated and equivocal stance on the Iraq war, in
which he has said that his vote in the Senate to
authorize the President to use armed force against Iraq
was "not a vote to go to war" and that in 2003 he voted
"for" the $87 billion supplemental authorization for
the war "before" he voted "against it" (a statement the
Republicans are making political hay with in a current
TV ad)?

Kerry’s equivocations are indeed related. For if as a
soldier in Vietnam in 1968 and ’69 he was brought face
to face with one reality—the human reality of the
war— then as a presidential candidate in 2004 he has
been driven up against another—the political reality
that no antiwar candidate of modern times has ever made
it into the White House. One might think that Kerry’s
good sense and bravery in opposing the Vietnam War
three decades ago might stand him in good stead today.
(How many Americans now think getting into Vietnam was
a good idea?) But as the Russert interview shows, just
the opposite is the case. It is Kerry’s bravery as a
soldier fighting the mistaken war, not his bravery as a
veteran opposing it, that helps him in his bid for the
presidency.

And so just as Kerry bowed to political reality by
distancing himself from his old testimony while
expressing continued pride in it, so he bowed to that
same reality by voting for the Iraq authorization
(while expressing opposition to "the way" the President
went to war). Even today he will not acknowledge that
his vote— and the war—were a mistake. Kerry is stuck
between politics and truth.

After the Congressional vote on the war, however, a
peculiar thing happened. Kerry’s political sails, far
from filling with a fresh breeze, began to flap idly in
the wind. Polls and pundits agreed: His nomination was
dead in the water.

The action shifted elsewhere. For while opposition to a
crazy war might not be a ticket to the White House, it
was still good for something. It swelled a powerful
popular movement. Huge demonstrations against the war
took place in the United States, as they did throughout
the world. In the time of Vietnam, antiwar sentiment
propelled first Eugene McCarthy, then Robert Kennedy
and later George McGovern into the forefront of
Democratic politics. Now antiwar sentiment propelled
Howard Dean into his brief moment of front-runnership.
In the game of politics and truth, truth was sneaking
in the back door. Suddenly, everyone was saying that
the Democratic Party had recovered its energy, its
"backbone."

But then came another surprising twist. A shrewd, or
possibly over-shrewd, Democratic primary electorate,
steaming with indignation against the war but
apparently fearful of history’s lesson that the antiwar
man cannot win, shifted its allegiance from Dean to
Kerry. All at once, the apparently political
calculation that had underlain Kerry’s vote for the war
in the first place paid off, and he became the
candidate.

Such is the archeology of the dilemma that Kerry and
the Democratic Party face today. Their flip-flopping,
which is real enough, is between the truth as they see
it and politics as they know it to be. The party is an
antiwar party that dares not speak its name. Its
candidate is energized, but with a borrowed energy. He
has a backbone, but it is a borrowed backbone.

The antiwar movement that has lent Kerry and his party
this energy and this backbone faces a dilemma, too. On
the one hand, it needs Kerry to win, even though he
refuses to repent his vote to authorize the war. On the
other hand, neither the movement nor Kerry can afford
to let the antiwar energies that were and remain a
principal source of their hopes and his die down. The
movement must persist, independent of Kerry and keeping
him or making him honest, yet not opposing him. If
truth must be an exile from the mainstream of politics,
let it thrive on the margins.

http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20040510&s=schell