In many ways, John Kerry has lived the greatest foreign policy challenges of his generation. The son of a foreign service officer, he spent much of his childhood in divided Cold War Berlin, where boyish mischief for him was riding his bike into the Soviet sector. As a young man, recently graduated from Yale University, Kerry enlisted in the Navy and probed the rivers of Vietnam in enemy territory. As a 28-year-old, he gave dignified voice to misgivings about the Vietnam War, famously asking in testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971, “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?”
Kerry has grappled with those questions of war and peace, confrontation and compromise, and occupation and abandonment ever since, perhaps most notably as a presidential nominee during some of the darkest days of the war in Iraq. Few in Washington share his depth and breadth of foreign experience. At age 69, he has spent nearly half his life — 27 years — on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He’ll be an able replacement for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
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As a 5 year participant in combat in French Indochina, I have vivid memories of Senator Kerry's statements circa 1971-1972 like
"Mr. Kerry, you said at one time or another that you think our policies in Vietnam are tantamount to genocide and that the responsibility lies at all chains of command over there. Do you consider that you personally as a Naval officer committed atrocities in Vietnam or crimes punishable by law in this country?"
-- Crosby Noyes, Washington Evening Star
" There are all kinds of atrocities, and I would have to say that, yes, yes, I committed the same kind of atrocities as thousands of other soldiers have committed in that I took part in shootings in free fire zones. I conducted harassment and interdiction fire. I used 50 calibre machine guns, which we were granted and ordered to use, which were our only weapon against people. I took part in search and destroy missions, in the burning of villages. All of this is contrary to the laws of warfare, all of this is contrary to the Geneva Conventions and all of this is ordered as a matter of written established policy by the government of the United States from the top down. And I believe that the men who designed these, the men who designed the free fire zone, the men who ordered us, the men who signed off the air raid strike areas, ... are war criminals."
-- John Kerry, on NBC's "Meet the Press" April 18, 1971
IMHO Senator Kerry was a traitor not only the US but to the millions of less priviledged combat grunts that served combat tours and were treated with scorn upon their return becauseof false and treasonouus statements by John Kerry.
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John Kerry has been a political opportunist since birth. He has no qualms trashing his own country, if it can futher his own goals. He did this as a Vietnam veteran turned protester, and again while critcizing the war in Iraq (which he voted for). He claimed falsely that US troops were entering homes in the dead of night... Please. Let him be Secretary of State, at least it will get him out of the Senate. But do not suggest that he is in any way a hero
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