Best things ever written about Kerry

[whometense]

It's getting hard to dig up new pictures, so I thought it might be fun to do this instead.

I'll start:
http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061703.shtml

Day after day, according to the tapes and memos, Nixon aides worried that Kerry was a unique, charismatic leader who could undermine support for the war. Other veteran protesters were easier targets, with their long hair, their use of a Viet Cong flag, and in some cases, their calls for overthrowing the US government. Kerry, by contrast, was a neat, well-spoken, highly decorated veteran who seemed to be a clone of former President John F. Kennedy, right down to the military service on a patrol boat.

The White House feared him like no other protester.

[whometense]

1. Tom Oliphant

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=8118

In his remarkably thorough book on Kerry’s formative youth, Douglas Brinkley tells a story about the two of us in the moments just before Kerry began his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. We had walked from the Vietnam veterans’ encampment on the National Mall together, taking a detour while he defused a potentially volatile demonstration outside the Supreme Court. When we entered the Dirksen Senate Office Building and raced up the stairs a few minutes before he was due to speak, we were struck by the absence of people in the stairwell and in the long corridor approaching the hearing room. It felt like a Sunday.

But when we reached the door and opened it a crack, Kerry drew back suddenly, stunned at the sight of a completely packed room. I nudged him forward again and attempted to cut the tension by saying, “Go ahead. Be famous. See if I care.”

It never occurred to me or to him where that moment might one day lead. I think it’s important that the presidency looms on his horizon not as a codicil in some trust fund, a virtual entitlement by virtue of lucky birth. Instead, it looms at the end of a long climb up the ladder from assistant county prosecutor.

John Kerry is a good, tough man. He is curious, grounded after a public and personal life that has not always been pleasant, a fan of ideas whose practical side has usually kept him from policy wonkery, a natural progressive with the added fixation on what works that made FDR and JFK so interesting. I know it is chic to be disdainful, but the modern Democratic neurosis gets in the way of a solid case for affection. Without embarrassment, and after a very long journey, I really like this guy. As one of his top campaign officials, himself a convert since the primaries ended, told me recently, this is pure Merle Haggard. It’s not love, but it’s not bad.

Thomas Oliphant is a columnist for The Boston Globe.

[whometense]

2. Charlie Pierce

This is my all-time favorite. I could quote the entire article. Please read the whole thing. It's pure catnip, beginning to end.
http://kerrylibrary.invisionzone.com/index.php?showtopic=4&st=20#

In the fecund hothouse of Massachusetts politics, where political bona fides are measured not in years but in generations, Kerry was never perceived to be a pol, and the pols resented him. Hence every time John Kerry wins an election he's not supposed to win—especially the one in 1996, when he came back from eight points down in August to win reelection to the Senate, sending popular Republican governor William Weld spinning all the way into a midlife crisis—the assembled wiseguys always wonder how he's managed to put it over on them again.

- snip -

Yet sometimes, even within the most conventional moments of a conventional enterprise like a presidential campaign, which is now as ritualized as a high pontifical Mass and not half as many laughs, Kerry can take any moment by surprise. On an MTV special, Kerry is asked if he is now or ever was cool. He does not staff out the answer. He doesn't draw it from Machiavelli or de Tocqueville but, rather, rings a true change on the gospel according to Duke Ellington.

"If I were cool," he explains, "if I told you I was cool, then I wouldn't be cool."

He'll turn up with a football out on the tarmac, and the surprise is not that he does so but that he throws a perfect spiral, thumb rotating down counterclockwise the way they showed you in the old Johnny Unitas videos. He'll wander back through the plane and talk about sailing or about the right kind of hiking boots, and these are easy moments when you realize that, for all the wonkish camouflage he can throw up, while there may be a few finer minds than Kerry's in politics, there are none more purely discursive. (After all, how many politicians can boast a campaign biography whose index includes both Elmo Zumwalt and Warren Zevon, or has the Paris Peace Talks listed right after the bass player from Mountain?)

- snip -

Unless you understand the Weston dump, you cannot understand how it happened for John Kerry in Iowa, much less how he now has come to the point where next month he will give a speech accepting the party's nomination for president when the Democrats convene in Boston. Weston is a woodsy, precious suburb to the west of Boston. Weston does not provide curbside rubbish pickup. So on the average Saturday, a good percentage of the town's registered voters bundle up their trash and take it to the dump. In the average election season, this means that they are greeted there by a clutch of candidates, stepping gingerly over the orange peels and tabbouleh shrapnel to ask for votes.

In 1980, Barney Frank was running for Congress to replace Robert Drinan, whom Pope John Paul II had ordered to surrender his office. Now, if Kerry was from outside the tribe, Frank—a gay Jewish man from New Jersey—might as well have beamed in from Neptune. However, he had the sharpest wit in American politics, which counts big in a pol, and he hired a woman named Mary Beth Cahill to run his campaign shop. She called John Kerry, and John Kerry showed up, bright and early, to work the Weston dump for Barney Frank.

"I never had to ask him twice," Cahill recalls. "No task for him was too small. He was a volunteer attorney for us who watched polls in Waltham so there wouldn't be anything funny going on there, and he went to the dump in Weston whenever we asked."

[europegirl4jfk]

3. Amazing articles!

The Boston Globe series was the first thing I came across on the web when I did a serious research on Kerry. These articles are amazing and made me want to know more about JK. During my next trip to England I bought the Boston Globe Kerry biography and after that book I couldn't stop reading about him. He had such an interesting life, and he is the first politician ever I trust and admire.

[whometense]

4. Glad you liked them!

If you want to see more, the Kerry Reference Library http://kerrylibrary.invisionzone.com/index.php?s=27af61743dbbb7fa6b75f18c332d91db&showforum=3 has a wonderful collection.

I've got more too.

Have you seen Hunter Thompson's endorsement from Rolling Stone?

Fear and Loathing, Campaign 2004

Dr. Hunter S. Thompson sounds off on the fun-hogs in the passing lane

By DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON

Armageddon came early for George Bush this year, and he was not ready for it. His long-awaited showdowns with my man John Kerry turned into a series of horrible embarrassments that cracked his nerve and demoralized his closest campaign advisers. They knew he would never recover, no matter how many votes they could steal for him in Florida, where the presidential debates were closely watched and widely celebrated by millions of Kerry supporters who suddenly had reason to feel like winners.

Kerry came into October as a five-point underdog with almost no chance of winning three out of three rigged confrontations with a treacherous little freak like George Bush. But the debates are over now, and the victor was clearly John Kerry every time. He steamrollered Bush and left him for roadkill.

Did you see Bush on TV, trying to debate? Jesus, he talked like a donkey with no brains at all. The tide turned early, in Coral Gables, when Bush went belly up less than halfway through his first bout with Kerry, who hammered poor George into jelly. It was pitiful. .. . I almost felt sorry for him, until I heard someone call him "Mister President," and then I felt ashamed.

- snip -

Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

- snip -

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush's vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't. Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president's lawn.

We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.

That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

Still gives me chills.

[europegirl4jfk]

7. Thanks for the link to the Kerry Reference Library

I think I've been there before and I wish I had the time to read their whole collection. And no, I haven't seen the Hunter Thompson article. That's very strong language. Isn't that the guy who committed suicide recently? That's so sad! He totally believed in JK. It must have been horrible for him when Bush was re(s)elected.

[whometense]

8. You're right.

He did kill himself very recently. He was having health problems, and was a notoriously brilliant-but-unstable person. I couldn't help wondering in the back of my mind whether the election results contributed to his depression. They must have.

Our loss. I'm sure Bush didn't wast any time mourning him, though.

Here's Jann Wenner's endorsement (from the same wonderful issue of Rolling Stone with Kerry on the cover)

...For now, it is our job to right the wrongs of the Bush administration, to fix the damage before it is too late. But to simply list the dangerous failures of the Bush presidency as the primary reason to vote for John Kerry would sell short a man of high purpose and moral courage. He is battle-tested, both as a young man in war and as a political leader up against the withering and unprincipled assault of the Bush-family attack machine.

John Kerry brings gravity and experience to this historic race, not to mention an intellect equal to the challenges before the nation. A complex, modern world demands we make judgments based on facts and careful analysis, not on ideology or religion...

...I have known John Kerry and have followed his career for nearly thirty years. He resonates with the best values and ideals of our shared generation and is one of its outstanding leaders and heroes. The anger at the stupefying misleadership of America by George W. Bush is enough cause to vote for change, but it should not overshadow the quality and substance of John Kerry. He is an honest man and a fair man; he goes where his intellect and high ethical values take him; and he tells the truth, and is willing to trust the American people with that truth, and make them his partner in the leadership of this country.

I urge you to read the interview with Senator Kerry conducted in early October on the eve of the second debate. It lays out very clearly where he stands and where he wants to go.

It is time to return to the idealism, the boldness and the generosity of spirit that marked our great presidents. We need a leader who lifts our hopes -- not one who divides us with disguise and fear -- and tells us the truth. We want to bring America back to our bedrock values of tolerance, honesty and hope, the beliefs that hold us together.

Edited to add a link to the Rolling Stone interview. Also to add, isn't it interesting that all the heroes of our generation endorsed Kerry??? I can't think of one who stood up for *.

[karynnj]

5. All of these were really interesting

One thing that I noticed in the first was that they quoted Kerry's response to Morey Safer's interview. Earlier this week someone (you ?)posted another article talking about a Safer interview and they quoted a much longer fuller response to the question. Something to the effect that there were a lot of things that needed to be done and he didn't think that he could do them and keep people as happy as you need to. (I tried to look back at likely threads, but didn't find it - so I hope my paraphrase is not too far off. )

The answer in the Globe is weird - Kerry knew at 27 he was too young and it kind of seems like he's saying he's not confident enough that he could do what a President needs to do (ever). The difference is significant in that in the longer version Kerry was probably saying that he thought his anti-war activism might preclude his being President, which really goes against the "opportunistic" charge. The longer version sounds far more like Kerry.

[whometense]

6. I'm not sure I posted it,

but I do remember that interview, and you're absolutely right that he was saying he imagined this activism might prevent him from ever becoming president.

This country has a short memory. They like to think of that time in terms of drugs, flower children, and the glamorous antiwar movement.

Well, you were around too - we can both attest to the fact that there was a TON of anger between generations, a large number of young people furious at Nixon. And a nasty, nasty schism no one should forget because we just saw it reenacted last year, between Vietnam vets for and against the war. There's no question at all in my mind that Kerry protested the war because he believed deeply it was wrong. It would have been an asinine move for a slick career politician to make.

[whometense]

9. James Carroll (another Bostonian) from

the New Yorker, circa 1996

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/content/?050530fr_archive01

A Friendship That Ended the War
by James Carroll
Issue of 1996-10-21
Posted 2005-05-30

...I heard Kerry speak against the war on a number of occasions, beginning in the fall of 1970. I never doubted, and still don't doubt, the authenticity of his act. Opportunism? Kerry may have harbored political ambitions when he returned from Vietnam, but, given the divisions of the era, he had good reason to believe that what he was really throwing away was his main political chance.

I was a Catholic priest at the time—a chaplain at Boston University and a campaign volunteer for the antiwar Jesuit Robert Drinan, who was running for Congress. Kerry sometimes introduced Drinan at rallies, and I remember hearing him do so once at B.U. The young Navy combat veteran was something the peace movement had not seen before, and I remember the curious silence in the packed hall as the scruffy, long-haired kids of the counterculture watched this lean, well-groomed military man approach the podium. I remember the unapologetic authority with which he laid claim to our attention. John Kerry's knowledge of the war, unlike that of other prophets of peace, was not abstract: "We saw Vietnam ravaged equally by American bombs," he testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in the spring of 1971, "as well as by search-and-destroy missions, as well as by Vietcong terrorism, and yet we listened while this country tried to blame all of the havoc on the Vietcong. . . . We learned the meaning of free-fire zones, shooting anything that moves. . . . We watched the U.S. falsification of body counts. . . . Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake. Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.'

"We are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" John Kerry's words—the truth of lived experience—cut through the inflated rhetoric of politics and registered with the establishment. But to members of his own generation his witness meant something else still: Kerry spoke as much for those who had gone off to fight the war as for those who'd rejected it. As the son of a military man, I was particularly moved. I was a peacenik with a secret: I had grown up believing in the ethos of military honor and still longed for its redemption. Years later, I came to understand more fully how my father and others like him had tried to protect our nation's moral integrity, but at the time Kerry was the only person who made it seem possible to be a patriot and a war objector both...

[ginnyinWI]

10. Hunter Thompson--frank and to the point!

Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for thirty years as a good man with a brave heart -- which is more than even the president's friends will tell you about George W. Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him.

-snip-

Back in June, when John Kerry was beginning to feel like a winner, I had a quick little rendezvous with him on a rain-soaked runway in Aspen, Colorado, where he was scheduled to meet with a harem of wealthy campaign contributors. As we rode to the event, I told him that Bush's vicious goons in the White House are perfectly capable of assassinating Nader and blaming it on him. His staff laughed, but the Secret Service men didn't. Kerry quickly suggested that I might make a good running mate, and we reminisced about trying to end the Vietnam War in 1972.

That was the year I first met him, at a riot on that elegant little street in front of the White House. He was yelling into a bullhorn and I was trying to throw a dead, bleeding rat over a black-spike fence and onto the president's lawn.

We were angry and righteous in those days, and there were millions of us. We kicked two chief executives out of the White House because they were stupid warmongers. We conquered Lyndon Johnson and we stomped on Richard Nixon -- which wise people said was impossible, but so what? It was fun. We were warriors then, and our tribe was strong like a river.

That river is still running. All we have to do is get out and vote, while it's still legal, and we will wash those crooked warmongers out of the White House.

:hippie:

[whometense]

11. Martin F. Nolan

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/a/2004/04/04/INGU65TJNS1.DTL

Can't kiss off Kerry

He's a hardscrabble campaigner who woos blue-collar voters and fights for life when behind

- Martin F. Nolan
Sunday, April 4, 2004

In chauffeuring President Bush's $200 million re-election machine, Karl Rove faces distractions foreign and domestic. He is in danger of joining the long line of those who have underestimated John Forbes Kerry.

I've got sore feet from marching in that parade myself. I've known the Massachusetts senator for more than 30 years. Flip-flopper? Opportunist? I thought so. An elitist out of touch with ordinary folk? That was my assumption, which voters demolished. As a Boston Globe reporter and editor, I've been flummoxed when he showed more intelligence and toughness than I thought he had.

For several years, Californians have asked, "What do you think about John Kerry?'' My response: "Compared to whom?'' The question has become easier to answer. Kerry has a habit of starting slowly, falling behind (as he did against Howard Dean last year), then coming back, connecting with voters and winning elections. The Bush campaign's current arguments are so lame that next year Karl Rove may list on his W-2 form "former genius.''

The Bush campaign longs for a McGovern-Mondale-Dukakis rerun, hoping the Democratic foe is weak or passive. Kerry has made mistakes and has yet to articulate what his priorities as president would be, but like another Massachusetts liberal with the initials JFK, war and combat are not metaphors to him. He is strong and aggressive. Moreover, he's been hassled by experts at it.

One of the first people to ask me about Kerry was Rove's spiritual ancestor, Charles Wendell Colson, White House counsel in 1971. "Pretty impressive performance,'' Chuck told me after Kerry testified before a Senate committee. But to his boss, President Richard Nixon, as revealed on tape years later, Colson said, "This fellow Kerry that they had on last week. ... He turns out to be really quite a phony.'' Kerry, Colson told Nixon, "was in Vietnam a total of four months,'' without saying that it was the veteran's second tour. Nor did Colson mention Kerry's three Purple Hearts, Silver Star and Bronze Star, telling Nixon, "He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue.''

Such misinformation has followed Kerry ever since. One story often told is that at the end of one march, he threw medals over the fence, but they weren't his own. He didn't say they were. Another veteran had asked him to do it. Kerry threw his own ribbons over the fence near the Capitol but hadn't brought his medals.

Critics called him phony because they were reluctant to confront the testimony he offered on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War. "In our opinion and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America,'' the 27- year-old former Navy officer told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on April 23, 1971. Calling U.S. policy "the height of criminal hypocrisy,'' he asked, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?''

Having covered every anti-war march since 1965, I had heard much eloquence and was less impressed than my colleague, Tom Oliphant, whom I urged to pursue the Kerry story further. Tom was right and I was wrong.

In Massachusetts, Kerry went house hunting, shopping for a congressional district to live in and run from. He was called ambitious and an opportunist. What politician isn't? He lost a race for Congress in 1972 to Paul Cronin, a Republican ambitious and opportunistic enough to be a favorite of Chuck Colson.

Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976 and became a prosecutor in Middlesex County, where he won high marks for zeal in the courtroom. In 1982, when he ran for lieutenant governor, I was no longer Washington bureau chief but editorial page editor for the Boston Globe.

Kerry sought the Globe's endorsement but didn't get it. We favored Evelyn Murphy, an environmentalist who had served in the Cabinet of Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis. In that crowded primary, Kerry won with 29 percent, finishing 40,000 votes ahead of Murphy. Kerry the politician, while shaking your hand, looked over your shoulder for someone more influential. He did not defer to opinion-makers in academe or the media but did well with voters.

In 40 years of covering politics, I've disregarded exit polls in favor of actual voting results. In that primary, I noted that Kerry lost much of liberal suburbia while carrying blue-collar cities like Boston, Worcester and Lowell. Must be a fluke, I figured. In 1984, when Paul Tsongas announced his retirement from the U.S. Senate, Kerry ran, again not as the establishment's choice. On a snowy day in 1984, I was stuck at Boston's Logan International Airport, waiting for a flight to Washington, D.C. My fellow passenger, U.S. Rep. Joseph D. Early of Worcester, was boosting his colleague, Rep. James M. Shannon of Lawrence, whose Senate candidacy was backed by House Speaker Tip O'Neill. As editorial page editor of the Globe, I assured Joe I shared his enthusiasm.

"Marty, this kid has national potential,'' Early said. I asked. "Joe, can Jim beat John Kerry in Worcester?'' Joe's response: "No problem!''

A Sept. 7 editorial endorsed Shannon, conceding that Kerry, "who showed bravery in Vietnam, showed bravery again when he helped lead fellow veterans against the war.'' The editorial also said, "Effective representation in the Senate requires more than oratory, where an ambitious speechmaker is often ineffective.''

The voters rejected the Globe's advice. Kerry won Worcester and many other places. So, for Thursday's paper, I did what many have done since: explained why they underestimated John Kerry. An editorial, flavored with crow and humble pie, praised Kerry, "whom we congratulate for his eloquent 'outsider' victory against a candidate endorsed by most politicians, unions and newspapers. On the Democratic side of the ballot, the most striking outcome was the shrinking importance of the 'liberal' vote. Kerry triumphed ... by winning conservative, blue-collar cities -- Boston, Brockton, Chelsea, Everett, Malden, Quincy, Revere. ... If the Democratic primary had been a liberal referendum, Shannon would have done better. He carried Brookline and Newton while Kerry won Fitchburg and Worcester. In Boston, Shannon won the Back Bay and the South End; Kerry carried Dorchester and South Boston.''

"Reagan Democrats'' were at their zenith in 1984, helping Ronald Reagan win 49 states, including Massachusetts. Ray Shamie, an amiable businessman who had once flirted with the John Birch Society, was Kerry's opponent. By November, in the Globe's esteem, the tall guy grew taller: "He would make a worthy successor to Sen. Paul Tsongas because he shares the open-mindedness, common sense and dedication which Tsongas brought to his too-short Senate career." We also "waved the bloody shirt,'' as they said in post-Civil War politics: "If elected, Kerry would be the only Democrat in the Senate to have served in Vietnam. That credential would be vital in a Senate debate over the wisdom of sending troops to Nicaragua. A Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts are not necessary equipment to deal with the issues of war and peace, but they are not abstractions easily dismissed.''

In the Senate, Shamie would vote with Jesse Helms, the Globe said, but Kerry "would likely line up with Bill Bradley, Christopher Dodd, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Gary Hart. ... For an articulate, clear voice in the Senate and for courageous leadership in shaping the future of America, the Boston Globe endorses John F. Kerry for senator.''

That's what the editorial said because editorials are about choices. During that campaign, David Rogers of the Wall Street Journal insisted on taking his old bureau chief to lunch at Locke-Ober Cafe, where I told him the Senate race was "between a looney-tune and an empty suit.'' But while Walter F. Mondale lost Massachusetts with 48.4 percent, Kerry won with 55.1 percent, running 10 points ahead of the Democratic presidential nominee in blue-collar communities like Fall River, New Bedford, Taunton, Worcester, Brockton and Saugus.

The loyalty of working-class Democrats to Kerry persists. In the presidential primary of 2004, Kerry's highest totals were in Fall River (87.9 percent) and New Bedford (86.2 percent).

In the Senate, Kerry filled out the empty suit and fulfilled his promise, using his prosecutorial skills against Reagan-era zanies. But for 20 years, he has lived in the imposing shadow of Edward M. Kennedy, one of the most durable, diligent and effective senators ever to sit in that body. From Kennedy, Kerry has learned the uses of adversity, becoming a better politician and a better guy. A failed marriage and two tough re-election campaigns humanized him. Like President Bush, he went to an elite prep school and to Yale, but in 2003, he entered a less exclusive society when his prostate cancer was diagnosed, and he joined what one doctor calls "the world's largest men's club.''

In 1995, he married Teresa Heinz, an heiress. Since she owns several vacation homes, some Bush operatives think "lifestyle'' could be an issue. But the Bush campaign will be unable to reconstruct a humble log cabin for the president. Both men are rich, so let's make the contest a yacht race between Nantucket and Kennebunkport! We'd get new cliches. We'd swap the race-track front-runners and dark horses for tacking to starboard and the sending all flags flying.

Bush is supposedly more likeable than Kerry. That's what many in Massachusetts thought about Gov. William F. Weld, who won re-election in 1994, then took on Kerry for the Senate in 1996. Weld was an affable and intelligent right-winger who switched sides to support abortion rights, easily charming many Massachusetts liberals.

Weld was ahead because pundits and academics value likability, while many voters prefer the tougher guy. During seven televised debates, Kerry came back, reminding voters why the governor was a Republican. Weld didn't lose his likability, but lost the election. The same thing could happen to George W. Bush.

The last extended conversation I had with Kerry was in 2001, over breakfast at the Fairmont Hotel. After three decades, he had endured and matured. His authenticity was vivid, Chuck Colson's charges notwithstanding. His charm was without calculation, and his most beguiling trait was intellectual curiosity, another trait he shares with another JFK. As our conversation ranged from the Alaska wilderness to the role of Frederick Law Olmsted in the Boston parks system, the thought struck me that while the last seven presidents have talked about "energy independence,'' Kerry understands it.

Kerry's self-confidence and intellect blend with his toughness, as Bush may discover. The president may win in November, but he'll know he's been in a fight.

Martin F. Nolan has covered nine presidential campaigns for the Boston Globe. He now writes on politics from San Francisco.

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