John F. Kerry, D-Mass.

Sen. John McCain was frustrated. The senior senator from Arizona had picked up the paper one October day and read that the U.S. military had dropped only six bombs on Afghan targets the day before. He’d been holding his tongue, not wanting to fall into one of the media’s favorite scenarios — the hotheaded McCain still battling his GOP primary nemesis President Bush — but this was too much. He told his chief of staff, Mark Salter, to start writing an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal, ultimately signed by McCain, that would urge the administration not to be afraid to wage an effective — and thus ugly — war.

“There were conversations about not bombing during Ramadan, worrying about the coalition guys, finding ‘moderate’ Taliban, ‘We have eviscerated the enemy,’ all of this kind of stuff,” McCain told Salon. (On Oct. 17, a Pentagon spokesman, Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Gregory Newbold, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that “the combat power of the Taliban has been eviscerated.” A week later, a different Pentagon spokesman would completely contradict this.) “I thought it was important to focus back on what our goals had to be,” McCain said. “And while Ramadan is important, the coalition is important, refugees and innocent people being killed is tragic and terrible, all of them are secondary to getting our job done. That’s what I was trying to say.”

There was one word that didn’t appear in McCain’s op-ed, though it was always in the mind of the man who spent 5 1/2 years in a Hanoi prison camp: Vietnam. But last week the specter of Vietnam began to loom increasingly large, as critics began worrying that the United State’s military might was proving ineffective against the rag-tag Taliban troops and wondering if America was going to be caught in a quagmire with no clear path to either military or political victory.

As the first comparisons to America’s worst military debacle began to be heard, the two most prominent Vietnam veterans in American politics, McCain and Sen. John Kerry, D.-Mass., spoke with Salon in their respective offices about the war against terrorism and the challenges it poses. Neither of the two friends — one a former presidential candidate, the other a likely candidate who has already amassed the largest campaign coffer for 2004 — believes Afghanistan will turn into another Vietnam. But that doesn’t mean they don’t think there are plenty of lessons to be learned from that war with direct relevance to the current one.

President Bush groused that critics wanted an “instant gratification war,” and others discounted the criticisms as armchair quarterbacking. Neither McCain nor Kerry share those views. Both men have serious concerns about the way the war has been conducted so far. To some degree, their opinions divide along party lines. McCain, like other conservatives, see Vietnam as a war that politicians didn’t let the military win. Kerry, like other liberals, finds many reasons for America’s failure in Vietnam — including Pentagon duplicity. And unlike McCain, he is prone to bouts of uncertainty.

For all their differences of politics and temperament, the two senators share a unique perspective. As Kerry pointed out, veterans in politics look at the war somewhat differently from their colleagues who haven’t served. They “know what hesitancy, political duplicity and fear, misjudgment — however you want to characterize it — what the impact is on life out there,” Kerry went on. “John and I both share a belief that when you commit young people in the uniform of their country to an enterprise you owe them everything to support them, facilitate their ability to do the mission, to protect them. In other words, to not be reckless. And I think Vietnam was reckless at times. Leaders were casual about what they asked people to do without having a larger sense of the endgame, or staying power.”

But Kerry and McCain have markedly different views on the legitimate use of force. McCain comes from the school that sees war as a horrible business only to be waged as a last resort — but then with a commitment to the full use of force. Many of the foreign policy stances of the former Naval aviator — who was awarded a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Legion of Merit, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross — conform to this, like his early 1980s break with then-President Reagan against a U.S. military presence in Lebanon. (McCain didn’t think the U.S. should have sent troops.) Or his Clinton-era support for U.S. involvement in Kosovo — which came with expressions of disappointment that Clinton would not consider using ground troops (as he publicly proclaimed).

Kerry expresses similar sentiments. But, in character for Kerry — a former Naval officer on a gunboat in the Mekong Delta, who came home from Vietnam with his Silver Star, Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts to form Vietnam Veterans Against the War — his feelings are more complex, and perhaps contradictory. In an Oct. 28 interview with Brit Hume on the Fox News Channel, Kerry questioned some of the military targeting, expressing concern for “an enormous public relations component of this war. Almost an equal component of the war is the humanitarian part and the public diplomacy piece, because you have to avoid igniting the Muslim world.” “But,” Kerry went on, “the targeting, I think, of the military piece of it could be even more intensive.”

Hume was perplexed. “Senator, let me see if I have this straight,” Hume said. “You’re saying that we’re being too aggressive in our targeting of civilians and yet, not aggressive enough in our targeting of military targets? That we need to have such exquisite precision in our targeting that we don’t hit any civilian targets and yet we have to somehow, at the same time, be more aggressive in what we’re doing? Senator, do you think that is possible?”

Kerry insisted it was, saying that the U.S. should attack the Taliban front lines harder and be more careful about bombing near population centers. (If, as the Pentagon contends, Taliban forces are purposely relocating among civilians, the desire to separate the two may prove hard to realize.) Kerry seemed somewhat awkwardly caught between the hawkish desire to pursue all-out war and the dovish desire to avoid civilian casualties.

But these two schools of thought — McCain’s no-holds barred military mindset and Kerry’s reluctant warrior/peacenik — frequently unite, particularly on matters that might recall the war they fought in. Both men give Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld good marks. Both see the public as supportive of this war, as opposed to the one in which they fought. “The American people were never convinced — even when they were supporting the war, and they were in the early years — that this was a direct threat to the United States of America,” McCain says. “They never believed that and they were probably right. We didn’t think about it in terms of 5,000 Americans, innocent civilians, having been killed by VC.”

Likewise, both men were upset when they heard another Pentagon spokesman, Rear Admiral John Stufflebeem, say on Oct. 24 that he was “a bit surprised at how doggedly [the Taliban] are hanging on to their power.” The two men, with firsthand experience of the doggedness of the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, winced at Stufflebeem’s comments, which seemed to underestimate the Taliban in the same way that many accused the U.S. top brass of underestimating the Viet Cong.

“I was appalled by that briefing,” says Kerry. “I was shocked by it. First of all, it runs counter to what most people who look at those folks and have studied them would say about them. These are hardened, devious, courageous, tough fighters. And all you have to do is look at what they did to the Russians and the British. That was an incredibly naove and conventional view being expressed.”

McCain’s take is less critical but no less disappointed. “He shouldn’t have been” surprised, McCain says. “And even if he was, he probably shouldn’t have said it.”

McCain says he’s concerned about a number of statements coming from the administration in the past few weeks: “When they say that the Taliban had been ‘eviscerated’ and it wasn’t; when they say they’re looking for moderate Taliban and there aren’t any; when they say they don’t want chaos to ensue and therefore … we don’t want the Taliban to fall too fast,” he says. “At least in certain circles of the administration there was a misperception of the capabilities and tenacity of the Taliban.”

But Kerry and McCain disagree as to how much the Taliban forces resemble the Vietnamese. McCain sees little in common, and likens the Taliban more to Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge than to the Viet Cong.

“The VC were nationalists with a Communist overlay,” he says. Afghanistan more resembles Cambodia in 1975, where “you had economic and social chaos in the country, so you have a very extreme group in charge. The North Vietnamese might have been cruel and oppressive … but they were not the kind to kill someone because they were wearing glasses, as in the case of Pol Pot. Or, in the case of the Taliban, to shoot a woman in the soccer stadium because she watched a Western television program.”

“There’s a difference between oppression and insanity,” McCain says.

Kerry, conversely, sees some definite similarities. The Taliban’s habit of using civilians as shields reminds Kerry of the Viet Cong: “They’ll be hiding in the towns, they’ll come out and fight and then go back in and meld in with the population.” Echoing American soldiers’ complaints in that other war, Kerry predicts that “it’s gonna be hard that way to tell who’s Taliban and who isn’t.”

For this reason, Kerry says he was “delighted” when B-52s began carpet-bombing Taliban troops last week. “That’s why we want to concentrate on them while they’re concentrated in one place.”

McCain, too, says that he was “very encouraged” by the introduction of the B-52s. “We learned from the Vietnam war that we can’t dilly-dally around. The war in those days was graduated escalation. And you can’t do it with graduated escalation.”

Another Vietnam lesson Kerry thinks the United States should take to heart is “know your enemy.” The United States underestimated the Vietnamese, he argues. To prevent that from happening this time, Kerry says he’s been sending his 99 senate colleagues stories he thinks they should be reading, including one by former New York Times executive editor Joe Lelyveld on the worlds of suicide bombers and a Washington Post piece that profiled an Islamic extremist being held prisoner by the Northern Alliance.

Kerry voices a final lesson from Vietnam that doesn’t seem anywhere near the forefront of McCain’s mind: Keep peppering the military with tough questions. “I’m not going to sit out there like some potted plant on TV” and just mindlessly support the war, he says. The military, he thinks, has learned the lesson of Vietnam. And then, raising a thought that surely McCain would agree with, he says, “The question is: Will the politicians learn the lessons and stay out and give the military a mission and get the job done?”

For those Americans who are worried that the Social Security system will prove to be as reliable a source of income as the latest McDonald’s Monopoly Sweepstakes, last week’s interim meeting of the 15-member President’s Commission to Strengthen Social Security should be of interest. The meeting’s agenda is “a review of historical experience in administering portable personal accounts,” but the group’s larger purpose is to recommend to President George W. Bush sweeping changes to the Social Security system.

The meeting had potential for drama. Nonpartisan experts believe Bush’s budget would have dipped into the Social Security surplus had it not been for some last-minute budgetary chicanery. Democrats insist it still might. And there was some more sleight of hand when it came to federal open meeting laws; the General Services Administration’s new interpretation of the 1972 Federal Advisory Committee Act open meeting law took effect just two days before the commission was to meet, allowing its members to meet privately Wednesday morning as long as they bifurcated into two “subcommittees,” exploiting a loophole in the federal sunshine laws. Good government groups — still angry over the closed-door Energy Task Force meetings headed by Vice President Dick Cheney — insist that by holding closed meetings in the morning the commission is, in the words of Common Cause president Scott Harshbarger, “skirting the spirit of our open meeting laws.”

When I show up for the commission meeting at the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, there doesn’t appear to be too much public outrage, though. Or even interest. In the lobby, a few colorless men speak in hushed tones of “solvency,” but the meeting machinations are hardly Ludlum-esque. I don’t see any other reporters trying to peek into the closed-door meetings, certainly none outside the solarium where one of the meetings began to convene over breakfast.

Clearly visible as it is, right off the Grand Ballroom where the public meeting will later take place, the private gathering doesn’t seem remotely dark and foreboding. A projector has been placed near the table, no doubt ready for all sorts of visuals about how the system’s going to start paying out more in benefits than it’s receiving in payroll taxes in 2016, and how the system itself, without reform, is going to go bust in 2038.

The makeup of the commission is a stacked deck, with every one of the 15 members generally supporting Bush’s plan for partial privatization of Social Security accounts. Many Social Security reformers worry that may hurt any chance for a constructive, bipartisan plan to save Social Security.

“I’m very supportive of the commission, but it’s been discredited,” former Sen. Bob Kerrey, D-Neb., will later tell me, having worked closely in the Senate on the issue with former Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, D-N.Y., the commission co-chairman. “It lacks credibility when all of the members favor some modification of what Bush campaigned on. It needs some dissenters. It needs some skeptics. But they’re a bunch of smart people. Regardless, its composition is nowhere near as important as what Bush does with its recommendations.”

Commission member Tim Penny, a former Democratic representative from Minnesota, says the commission will present its report to Bush at either the end of November or beginning of December. Having pursued the unenviable task of fiscal responsibility in the Democratically controlled U.S. House from 1982 to 1994, Penny thinks of himself as a realist when it comes to tackling tough political matters. He’s more than aware that many pols who somehow get distracted along the path to bold and meaningful reform excuse themselves to get some popcorn never to return.

Penny, however, says that when he was asked to join the panel last spring he “was assured that the president was serious about this.” And he became convinced. In a subsequent meeting with the president, Bush told Penny that reforming the current system is “a leadership issue” designed for the presidency, a “leadership issue” he would meet head-on.

While Penny acknowledges that Bush’s campaign-trail pronouncements about Social Security “were a little vague,” he does point out that it was on the trail that Bush began not only making the case for partial privatization of Social Security accounts, but also alluding to some of the tough choices ahead. Promising that he would “preserve the benefits of all current retirees and those nearing retirement,” Bush would say nothing about those of us who expect to collect Social Security down the road. It’s an implicit acknowledgment of “some restriction of benefits,” as Penny puts it.

Those are the “hard choices,” as the deficit hawks at the Concord Coalition put it in a report this month. Those choices consist of either increasing contributions to the system — read: higher Social Security taxes; securing a higher return on current investments, presumably through partial privatization; reducing benefits, or staggering them based on other income; increasing the age at which Americans can collect Social Security; or increasing the system’s financing from general revenue as opposed to relying solely on payroll taxes.

“Simply counting on robust stock market returns, or presumed fiscal dividends from reform itself, is not a realistic solution,” the Concord Coalition report states. “There is no free lunch solution. Each reform option involves trade-offs and each comes with a fiscal and political price, regardless of whether it aims to prop up the existing pay-as-you-go system or aims at transitioning to a partially pre-funded system.”

Commission officials — none of whom have to face voters — today seem willing to at least discuss hard choices, specifically reducing benefits by tying future benefits to the index of inflation instead of wage growth. They discuss this behind closed doors but it leaks out, of course, since this is Washington and since the point of this commission is in part to float trial balloons. At a press conference, however, Moynihan says that none of us should read too much into their talk.

“I wish you wouldn’t get too preoccupied with the day-to-day events,” he says. “We’re trying to think the way — well, it would be presumptuous to compare ourselves to Edmund Witte, who was the staff director of the Committee on Economic Security that Francis Perkins chaired” — during the Roosevelt administration, forming Social Security. “But they were thinking in terms of 75 years, and they did it pretty well, didn’t they? And here we are about the time to sort of think of the next 75.”

“Have we made any conclusions?” asks Richard Parsons, co-chief operating officer of AOL Time Warner and Moynihan’s co-chair. “Not at this point in time.”

The Democratic National Committee already has begun running an ad slamming Bush for “using gimmicks to hide a raid on Social Security.” But where are the Democrats? Circling like a school of sharks at a Florida surf-a-thon, they sense a winning issue. The Bush plan will raise the retirement age, they say. It will cut benefits, it will put the whole system at risk, it’s unworkable, it will reward big Bush campaign contributors on Wall Street.

But are the Democrats’ counter-claims responsible? How are we supposed to react when the Democratic congressional leadership feigns outrage that Bush would dare to use an accounting gimmick to hide his dip into the Social Security trust fund, when most of those same Democrats have been voting to dip into the trust fund for so long that all that’s in there is a bunch of government IOUs?

And what of their current tactic, the charge that the GOP has created a crisis so as to justify partial privatization? Partial privatization may be the worst idea since New Coke, but the pending crisis is not invented. The current pay-as-you-go approach cannot be sustained. A couple weeks ago, while touring Massachusetts, Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., called the Democratic Policy Committee’s talking points on Social Security “disingenuous,” and seemed to take issue with how his party was acting as if nothing was wrong with the system.

Penny is quick to point out that the commission’s report is just Step 1 of the process. After all, none of the members of the commission are current lawmakers. After their report, Penny says, the next step might be for Bush to convene a panel of members of Congress to figure out how to enact some of the recommended reforms.

What of a report in the Wall Street Journal that Bush’s senior advisor, Karl Rove, assured GOP lawmakers that nothing would be enacted before the 2002 elections? Penny shrugs. “That may be,” he says.

Kerrey says that in the end he fears Bush, urged by GOP congressional leaders, will opt out of leadership on this issue just as President Clinton did. “My guess is Bush will pretend to do something with it but will do nothing and break one of his campaign promises. And the reason is, the Republican leadership will tell him the same thing Clinton heard from Congress: ‘Hey, we don’t want to fix the damn thing.’

“He challenged Al Gore’s character on this issue,” Kerrey recounts. “He said ‘Gore lacks the character to do anything about it, and I won’t lack the character, I won’t look at political polling data.’ And God bless him if he does. But he’s gonna get a wake-up call from the Hill. They’re gonna tell him, ‘You talked, but don’t do anything. Otherwise we’ll lose the House.”

Not long ago, Kerrey wrote a letter to his old pal Moynihan, urging him to begin describing politicians who haven’t signed onto any proposal to fix Social Security as supporting the “do nothing plan.” While proposals like the one offered by Moynihan and Kerrey on their way out of the Senate — and the pending one from the commission — will be picked to death by opponents, this fight is often uneven since the critics frequently have no counter-plan of their own to defend.

“Five hundred members of Congress support the do-nothing plan,” Kerrey says. “We should make them justify it. Right now, they don’t have to explain it; instead it’s Moynihan who’s trying to fix the problem. I’m suggesting that we don’t let anybody who is not supporting some specific plan off the hook. If they say, ‘I haven’t figured out what to do,’ you say, ‘Well, you must lack the intelligence to be a member of Congress.’ I mean, it’s a very simple thing to figure out. You either raise taxes or increase the amount of income being taxed or you decrease benefits.”

Both Democrats and Republicans have historically been in favor of the do-nothing plan, but the Democrats appear to be leading the charge right now as they oppose Bush’s commission every step of the way.

“Social Security is running a surplus of more than $150 billion, and these surpluses are growing and projected to last for 24 years,” Sen. Paul Wellstone, D-Minn., said in the Democrats’ weekly radio address on Aug. 18. While briefly acknowledging that “the system does face real but manageable long-term financial challenges,” Wellstone went on to say that all was OK in the world of our fading retirement account savings. “Social Security is not in crisis,” Wellstone said. “It is not broken. It is not facing bankruptcy.”

All of those assertions, of course, depend on what your definition of the word “is” is. The Social Security benefits of Wellstone, who turned 57 last month, are indeed guaranteed, not in crisis, not broken, not facing bankruptcy. But by the time Wellstone’s three children, David, Marcia and Mark, and his six grandchildren, Cari, Keith, Joshua, Acacia, Sydney and Matt, try to collect, the system will indeed be broken unless there are major reforms soon. When Wellstone was born, there were approximately 16 workers for every one beneficiary; today that ratio is about 3-to-1. And it’s shrinking as baby boomers reach retirement age. Facing what promises to be a tough reelection contest next year, Wellstone has long opposed raising the retirement age or reducing benefits so as to solve the problem facing his progeny. “The greatest danger facing Social Security today is the Wall Street campaign to privatize it,” he has said.

Bush is to be lauded for even addressing this issue seriously, but one has to wonder how square he’s being with us. Since the transition costs of partial privatization have been estimated to cost as much as $1 trillion, where is that cash going to come from? He has yet to address that question, either as a candidate or a president.

Last year, hectored for weeks by the campaign of Vice President Al Gore about how he would fund the privatization plan, Bush finally said during the third presidential debate that “we need to take a trillion dollars out of that $2.4 trillion surplus.” But a funny thing happened to that $2.4 trillion: It was spent on the tax cut. Last week’s International Monetary Fund report indicated that the price tag of the $1.35 trillion cut will be at least $2.5 trillion.

“The recently enacted tax cut considerably weakens the chances that the President’s Commission will succeed in designing a credible plan to restore long-term Social Security solvency,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, and Peter Orszag, a senior fellow at Brookings Institution, in a joint statement. “In a fundamental sense, the tax cut has undermined the opportunity that the nation had to use the projected budget surpluses as a substantial down payment on the longer-term budgetary pressures facing the nation.”

Tellingly, the Bush administration doesn’t seem to actually be preparing for any major Social Security reforms. In a July 23 letter to Sen. Max Baucus, D-Mont., Stephen C. Goss — chief actuary for the Social Security Administration and a technical advisor to the President’s Commission — acknowledged that while the payroll tax revenues for Social Security are scheduled to exceed costs only until 2016, if the president’s proposed partial privatization plan were to be enacted that date would be moved to 2007.

Moreover, at a press conference on Wednesday, Mitchell Daniels, director of the Office of Management and Budget, acted as if the major reform measures the President’s Commission is currently preparing to propose can be added to the budget with no problem.

As Daniels announces $1 trillion in future budget surpluses — a fairly rosy scenario, it should be noted — he’s asked if the administration is willing to commit that trillion to the costs of partially privatizing Social Security.

“With regard to Social Security reform, no one knows what the transition costs may be,” Daniels responds. “I’ve heard numbers as high as the $1 trillion you used, but I don’t think anybody knows that yet, and I think the president wants to await the report of the commission and work that’s going on within the administration before we can really cost out a plan.”

But optimists — notably those who no longer hold elected office — say Congress may yet take action. “I have a sense that both sides recognize they’re going to have do something soon and it’s going to have to be responsible,” former Sen. Warren Rudman, R-N.H, a deficit hawk and one of the founders of the Concord Coalition, says. “The numbers over the long term are very discouraging for young people paying into the system today. It’s no wonder they have no confidence in the system.”

But it’s not just the system some of us don’t have confidence in.

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Forget everything you’ve heard about whom Al Gore should pick for veep. It’s not Dick Gephardt, the would-be speaker of the House who took himself out of the running this week, even though his appearance on the ticket might help lock in labor support. It’s not Sen. Bob Graham, the avuncular Floridian who might play with Dubya’s mind by making him work hard for the Sunshine State, where his brother Jeb is supposed to run the show. It’s not Dick Durbin, who could help in Illinois. And it’s not Evan Bayh who might help in … well, just where would he help? Forget the lot of them.

The best person for Gore to pick for veep is Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

Kerry isn’t exactly a household name. You might even be confusing him with Bob Kerrey, the notoriously anti-Gore Nebraska senator, who’s been shooting spitballs at the vice president for a year now. John Kerry is the junior senator from Massachusetts, a Democratic stronghold that would require Gore’s running through several White House interns to lose.

So why Kerry? Gore should pick Kerry, in part, because Clinton picked Gore. When Clinton chose Gore in 1992 he broke with almost every rule of vice-presidential selection. Gore offered no regional balance: He came from a neighboring state, Tennessee. He offered no ideological balance: He was close to a carbon copy of Clinton, a border-state New Democrat. At best, he gave Clinton some Washington credibility he lacked. But Gore was a great pick.

What Clinton did was do away with the notion that the vice presidency is a cardboard prop a presidential candidate uses to cover up his own deficiencies. And that was a good thing, because it was outdated thinking from a bygone era when the vice presidency was one of the more inconsequential of government posts.

For better or worse, Bush seems to be sticking very closely to this old-fashioned logic. Almost every possible veep choice the Bush people have mentioned is intended to balance the ticket in one fashion or another. Ticket balancing made more sense in the old-old days when the veep slot was used to appeal to party activists and functionaries more than to voters. In the modern, more image-driven presidential game the balancing model can sometimes leave the nominee telling voters, in essence, “Hey, if you like me, you’re just gonna love this guy who’s nothing like me.” How does that work exactly?

Pundits often note that George Bush was the first sitting vice president to win the White House since 1836. What they seldom mention is that few of them even tried. For most of our history the vice presidency was filled by stand-ins and mediocrities. So long as the president didn’t die in office the vice president simply walked off into obscurity when his time was through. Today a veep is a likely successor, or at least a future party nominee. Voters know that, and they see the candidate in that light.

The bottom line is that the nominee and the veep should be a unified team. The veep choice shouldn’t balance the message the top guy (or gal) conveys: He or she should reinforce it. That’s what made picking Gore a masterstroke: his very similarity to Clinton. It gave the Democratic ticket a coherent and unified message, and it signaled on Clinton’s part a confidence about who and what he was. That’s exactly what a modern vice-presidential pick should do. And Gore fit the bill.

Here’s why Kerry does the same for Gore.

First: ideology. Kerry is a centrist, progressive Democrat in the same way Gore is, in the same way Clinton is: not in a wishy-washy kind of way, but the kind that manages to combine elements of both. Of Bill Clinton’s many political gifts, none has been greater than his ability to mold together New Democrat and Old Democrat elements in the same political mix, and do it in a way that doesn’t appear forced but, somehow, holds together. Gore doesn’t manage the amalgam quite so deftly, but he’s the inheritor of that ideological legacy.

Kerry is a similar sort of figure. He is difficult to pigeonhole on either the right or the left of the Democratic Party, but his mix of policy positions works as a unified whole. He’s got good liberal credentials, and he’s also got good (actually, increasingly good) ties to the New Democrat wing of the party.

Some of this complexity shows through in his biography. Take an example from Kerry’s young adulthood: After graduating college Kerry enlisted in the Navy and served as a gunboat officer in the Mekong Delta, earning three Purple Hearts and a number of other medals along the way. Then, after leaving the Navy, he became the leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a key antiwar group. He’s unassailable. No one can gainsay his courage or patriotism; yet he’s got perfect credentials for anti-war types. For a Democrat, you just can’t get a better record than that. Kerry’s mix of political views doesn’t match that dramatic flair, but for a Democrat in the year 2000 they make for an equally good combination.

Second: temperament. Kerry is intelligent, knowledgeable on policy, attractive and articulate — like Gore. Also like Gore, he’s no glad-hander, or emotion-gusher like Bill Clinton. He’s not stiff and wooden exactly, but more cool and perhaps a touch distant. But for Gore’s No. 2, that’s a good thing. Kerry is a deceptively good campaigner, as he demonstrated when fending off challenger William Weld, then the most popular pol in Massachusetts, in 1996. Like Gore at his best, Kerry oozes experience and seriousness of purpose. And maybe a little unlike Gore, he’s got flair.

Third: He just looks the part. And that matters more than you might think. Kerry has the look of a future president, and it’s no secret he’d like to be one. Graham could help a bit in Florida. But does anyone think Graham would have any hope or chance of being a president unless Gore puts him on the ticket? Or that the party faithful could get excited about the idea of Graham (who’ll turn 64 a couple days after the election) as a future president? Of course not. Graham’s an impressive figure, but not a future president, or the equal partner a modern veep candidate should be. Dick Durbin of Illinois? Same thing. He might help a bit in Illinois (and he’d probably be the second-best pick), but he lacks Kerry’s punch and style.

Kerry has his shortcomings, as every pol does. His second wife is heir to an almost billion-dollar fortune, and that will get him a little ribbing. Kerry’s a bit of blue blood, or as they call them in Massachusetts, a Brahmin. And Kerry’s choice won’t electrify the press the way someone like Colin Powell would for Bush. But Kerry would be a deceptively strong choice, and voters would warm to him the more they got to know him.

Ask Bush or Gore what’s important in a vice-presidential nominee and they’ll give the same old tired line about being ready to take over as president at a moment’s notice. That’s all spin, of course. But there is also a certain truth buried in that old, tired answer. The No. 1 qualification for a modern veep is whether they’re really presidential material. Not because the president might die, but because that’s what voters really want to see in a veep. And that’s why John Kerry’s the man for Gore.

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David Hale, the most important witness in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, gave false and misleading testimony to a federal jury in an effort to conceal his relationship with conservative political activists who ran a secret anti-Clinton operation, according to three individuals with firsthand knowledge of the events in question.

Hale gave the disputed testimony during the April 1996 criminal trial of then-Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and Jim and Susan McDougal, the former partners of Bill and Hillary Clinton in their failed Whitewater land deal. Hale was the Whitewater independent counsel’s chief prosecution witness in the case.

The disputed testimony centered around the circumstances as to how Hale came to retain Theodore Olson as one of his attorneys. Olson, a partner with the prestigious Washington, D.C., law firm of Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher, is a former Reagan administration official and a conservative partisan, who provided legal counsel to Hale when he was called to testify before a congressional committee.

Two sources say that they believe Hale misled the federal jury to conceal his involvement with the Arkansas Project, a $2.4 million effort to investigate and discredit President Clinton, which was financed by conservative billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife. To finance the Arkansas Project, Scaife funneled money for the effort through the American Spectator magazine, via the tax-exempt foundation that operates the conservative periodical.

At the Tucker-McDougal trial, Hale testified he had found Olson through Randy Coleman, a Little Rock criminal defense attorney who represented Hale at the time. Hale also testified that he was assisted in the effort to find Washington, D.C., counsel by an individual he identified as “Senator Hollingsworth.”

But the sources interviewed by Salon stated that Hale found Olson through two conservative political activists who directed the Arkansas Project: Stephen S. Boynton and Dave Henderson. Boynton, Henderson and Hale had all been friends for more than a decade prior to the formation of the Arkansas Project.

Had Hale told the federal jury in the Tucker-McDougal case about the role of Boynton and Henderson in helping him find Olson to serve as his counsel, it would almost certainly have led to public revelation of the existence of the then-secret Arkansas Project, including Hale’s role in the endeavor.

Deputy Whitewater independent counsel W. Hickman Ewing Jr., who has directed the Arkansas portion of Starr’s investigation, has stated that no FBI agents or prosecutors working for his office knew anything about Hale’s involvement with the Arkansas Project or the alleged payments to Hale until they were revealed by Salon in March of this year.

If it is determined that Hale misled the federal jury, the ramifications to Starr’s investigation would go far beyond the Tucker-McDougal case, casting further doubt on the truthfulness of Hale’s charges of illegal conduct by President Clinton.

Central to Starr’s Whitewater investigation have been allegations made by Hale that in early 1986, then-Arkansas Gov. Clinton had pressured Hale, who was running a federally subsidized lending company, to make a fraudulent and illegal $300,000 loan to Susan McDougal. Those allegations were cited by Attorney General Janet Reno in early 1994 when she appointed the first Whitewater independent counsel.

But the four-year investigation by the independent counsel has uncovered scant evidence to corroborate Hale’s claims. President Clinton adamantly denied Hale’s charges when questioned under oath as a witness during the Tucker-McDougal trial.

There would be consequences for Hale as well if it were determined that he misled the federal jury. A March 19, 1994, plea-bargain agreement between Hale and the Whitewater independent counsel states: “Should David L. Hale commit any further crimes or should it be determined he has given false, incomplete, or misleading testimony or information … David L. Hale shall thereafter be subject to prosecution for any federal criminal violation of which this Office has knowledge.”

Under the agreement, according to federal law enforcement officials, if there should be a finding that Hale lied, he could now be prosecuted for dozens of crimes he admitted to during the course of the Whitewater investigation. He had previously been granted immunity from prosecution for those crimes in exchange for his testimony against others and his pledge that he would never lie to Starr’s investigators.

Defense attorneys in the Tucker-McDougal case also said it was potentially significant to their clients if Hale lied during the trial to conceal his relationship with the Arkansas Project. “That would have been central to the defense of our case,” says Darrell F. Brown, an attorney for Tucker. “To have known that Hale was working that closely with the American Spectator, or that he received funds from them, would very likely have had tremendous impact on the jury’s decision.”

Recently, of course, Starr’s stalled Whitewater probe has been overshadowed by allegations that Clinton had a sexual affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, lied about it under oath, and encouraged Lewinsky to lie as well. Clinton’s critics have repeatedly said that a pattern of deception defines Clinton’s role in these various cases, but much of the evidence of such a pattern has hinged on the credibility of Hale. Recent media reports suggesting that Whitewater will not even be included in any impeachment report Starr files with Congress raises anew the questions surrounding the origins of Hale’s charges.

A federal criminal investigation is currently underway to examine allegations that an employee of the Arkansas Project named Parker Dozhier made numerous cash payments to Hale during the time that Hale was a cooperating witness in Starr’s Whitewater probe. Salon first disclosed allegations that Dozhier, a Hot Springs, Ark., fishing resort proprietor, made the payments to Hale over a two-year period.

Dozhier has denied making any such payments. But he has admitted that he provided Hale with the free use of a fishing cabin and car while he stayed at Dozhier’s resort. Dozhier has also acknowledged that he received $48,000 from the American Spectator to be the magazine’s “eyes and ears” in Arkansas.

Hale’s lawyer Olson has his own long-standing ties to the American Spectator, the Arkansas Project and Scaife. At various times, Olson has served on the American Spectator’s board of directors as its secretary-treasurer and as its attorney. He is currently reported to be one of several individuals overseeing an internal “analysis” and financial audit of the Arkansas Project for the magazine’s board.

While an assistant attorney general in the Reagan administration, Olson himself was the target of an independent prosecutor’s investigation, which examined whether he had misled Congress in a dispute over toxic waste cleanup. Ultimately, no charges were brought against Olson.

Olson was retained by Hale to resist a demand for his testimony before the Senate Whitewater Committee. Assisting Olson in that effort was John A. Mintz, a former general counsel for the FBI, who was at the time “of counsel” to Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Mintz has since left the law firm. (Since 1993, Hale has employed seven separate attorneys to represent him in the various criminal investigations of his activities by the Small Business Administration, the U.S. Department of Justice, three congressional committees and the Whitewater independent counsel.)

Two sources with detailed knowledge of the events in question told Salon that both Olson and Mintz also provided advice to the Arkansas Project, dating back to its inception in late 1993 or early 1994. Indeed, one of the initial meetings to set up the Arkansas Project was held at Olson’s downtown Washington, D.C., office at Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher. Mintz also was at the meeting. Among others in attendance were Ronald Burr, then the publisher of the American Spectator; Michael Horowitz, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank funded by Scaife; and Boynton and Henderson, who came to direct the day-to-day activities of the Arkansas Project.

“Olson is somebody who Scaife would trust to see that nothing went wrong and that his money would not be wasted,” said one source familiar with the meeting.

In addition to his involvement with the American Spectator, Olson has served on the advisory boards of four separate Washington, D.C., conservative organizations that have received substantial funding from Scaife, according to a Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher biography of Olson and financial disclosure statements of the four political groups.

Olson’s wife, Barbara, is also a founder and member of the national advisory board of the Independent Women’s Forum, a conservative activist group that has received at least $350,000 in funding from Scaife over the last several years. She recently took a leave of absence from her job as general counsel to Senate Assistant Majority Leader Don Nickles, R-Okla., to spend more time making television appearances on behalf of the group as a vocal critic of President Clinton and supporter of Starr.

At the direction of Olson and Mintz, Hale declined to testify before the Senate Whitewater Committee in l995 and l996, asserting his Fifth Amendment rights, absent a grant of immunity of prosecution for any information he might provide the committee.

Mintz informed the Senate committee in a June 6, l996 letter:
“I have advised the Committee … that Mr. Hale will claim the protection of his Constitutional privilege under the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States and respectfully decline to testify … if he is compelled to appear in response to the subpoenas.”

Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., a member of the Senate committee and a former prosecutor, angrily declared at the time that his fellow Senators should “not be bamboozled and bullied by a legal scheme into giving an immunity that we don’t need to give.” Kerry pointed out that if the committee accepted Mintz’s proposal, Hale could disclose his involvement in any number of serious crimes for the very first time, and never be prosecuted.

Ultimately, the Senate Whitewater Committee declined to grant immunity to Hale as a condition for him to testify. The committee completed its investigation and issued a final report without ever hearing his testimony.

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During his April 1996 testimony at the Tucker-McDougal trial, Hale was asked during cross-examination by an attorney for Jim McDougal, “Who referred you to Mr. Olson?”

Hale responded, “Randy Coleman [Hale's Arkansas attorney] found out that there was a fellow down there who worked in Democratic Senator Hollingsworth’s office that knew him and recommended him.”

That claim, according to an individual with intimate, firsthand knowledge of Hale’s defense in the case, was not true. In fact, according to the source, Coleman played no role whatsoever in finding Olson to serve as counsel to Hale.

This individual further said that it was the Arkansas Project’s Henderson and Boynton who made the original contact with Olson. Only long after the fact, the source said, did Coleman then learn about and approve of the decision by Hale to retain Olson. After that, the source said, Coleman and Olson consulted with one another and coordinated some of their activities.

Coleman declined to comment, citing “attorney-client privilege.” Olson and Mintz did not return numerous phone calls seeking comment.

The source with firsthand knowledge of Hale’s legal defense further said that Coleman had never consulted with any “Senator Hollingsworth” or anyone with a similar sounding name in seeking Washington, D.C., legal counsel for Hale.

Indeed, there was not then nor is there now any “Senator Hollingsworth” in the United States Senate. The only member of the U.S. Senate with a similar name is Sen. Ernest F. Hollings, D.-S.C., the ranking Democrat on the Senate Commerce Committee. Hollings says that neither he or anyone on his staff ever assisted Hale in finding legal counsel.

“To the best of my knowledge, I have no idea what David Hale is talking about,” Hollings said through his director of communications, Maury Lane.

A review of records of the Arkansas State Senate over the course of the last decade found no one has served in that body with the last name Hollingsworth or any name even remotely similar.

The only prominent political figure in Arkansas in recent years with such a name has been Perlesta Hollingsworth, who has never served in the state Senate. In the course of a three-decade-long political career, however, Hollingsworth has served on the Little Rock city council, as a deputy prosecutor for the state’s sixth judicial district and as an advisor to the late-Arkansas Gov. Winthrop Rockefeller. Hollingsworth also served as a justice on the Arkansas Supreme Court in the mid-1980s, after being appointed by then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

“I know nothing about any Ted Olson,” a slightly bemused Hollingsworth said in a telephone interview. “This is the first time I have heard that was [Hale's] testimony. I don’t know what he’s talking about.”

A second source, who has worked for the American Spectator, confirmed that Hale found Olson as his attorney through the Arkansas Project’s Boynton and Henderson. The source said that Henderson brought Hale and Dozhier to Washington, D.C., to meet Olson and Mintz. According to the same source, both Olson and Mintz represented Hale on a pro bono basis.

Accounting records of the Arkansas Project obtained by Salon show that Gibson, Dunn & Crutcher was paid at least $18,000 over one two-year period for work that Olson and Mintz performed during that period of time. But sources claim that work was unrelated to any representation of Hale.

Another individual with detailed knowledge as to how Olson came to represent Hale is Caryn Mann, a Bentonville, Ark., assistant funeral home director, who between early 1994 and the early summer of 1996 was Parker Dozhier’s live-in girlfriend. During that time, Hale, often accompanied by FBI agents detailed to the office of the Whitewater independent counsel, stayed at Dozhier’s resort.

Mann and her son Joshua Rand have provided detailed information about the activities of Dozhier, Hale and the Arkansas Project to law enforcement agencies. Mann told Salon that Dozhier and Hale told her that Boynton and Henderson directed the effort to find legal counsel in Washington, D.C., for Hale. “David needed a separate attorney in Washington, D.C.,” Mann recalled. “Parker was talking a lot to Henderson and Boynton about the problem. Henderson said that he would look for an attorney for Hale.

“Dave Henderson came up with Ted Olson. At first, P.D. [Parker Dozhier] said he had never heard of him. He said, ‘I don’t like it. I don’t know who this guy is.’ Henderson was very excited and positive about Olson, but they [Dozhier and Hale] weren’t so sure.”

According to Mann, Hale and Dozhier then went to Washington, D.C., to meet Olson themselves. Mann said that Dozhier told her that the American Spectator would reimburse him for his trip expenses. Accounting records of the Arkansas Project and American Spectator obtained by Salon show that Dozhier was routinely reimbursed by them for various travel expenses. But it could not be determined from the records whether Dozhier was reimbursed for the trip he took with Hale to Washington, D.C., to meet Olson, because while the records show the disbursement of funds for travel, they do not specify where the travel took place.

“When they came back, they weren’t concerned about anything anymore,” said Mann. “It was all taken care of. Olson was going to be taken care of and paid. He wasn’t to be charging David that much. It was going to run through the Spectator.”

During his testimony in the Tucker-McDougal trial, Hale testified that he had first retained Olson in December 1993: “I talked to Mr. Olson in December of 1993 when we got notified that they might subpoena me before Congress … And then again last year I got word again that they might subpoena me before Congress so I retained Mr. Olson. Simply, I do not know anything about how they do that up there; just to advise me on what do you do, where do you go.”

Just before he retained Olson, Hale was in frequent contact with Henderson and Boynton, according to Hale’s long-distance telephone records. In fact, the records indicate that Hale’s first call to Henderson occurred on Nov. 22, 1993, just prior to when Olson began representing him.

Henderson, Boynton and Dozhier did not return several phone calls seeking their comment for this article.

David Bowden, Hale’s current attorney, said he could not comment because Hale’s testimony during the Tucker-McDougal trial occurred before Hale retained him. Hale did not respond to requests for an interview left with Bowden or at a home where he stays while in Little Rock.

The question of whether Hale did in fact mislead the Whitewater jury about how he came to retain Olson will likely be examined by federal investigator Michael Shaheen, the former Justice Department official appointed by Starr to probe the alleged payments to his key Whitewater witness. “His [Shaheen's] mandate is to investigate whether or not there were any payments to Hale and whether they colored his testimony,” observed a federal law enforcement official. “If Hale lied to cover up a relationship with those who might have paid him, that’s something that surely should be looked at.”

The same official said that if the Arkansas Project was instrumental in providing legal counsel to Hale, that such free legal assistance could be considered a gratuity: “Anything of value — just not cash payments — might be a gratuity. That could be free rent. That could be the use of a car. That could be free legal assistance.”

Shaheen, the former counsel to the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was named to lead an investigation of the alleged payments to Hale last May after Starr and Attorney General Janet Reno clashed as to how such an inquiry would be handled. To assure the independence of his investigation, Shaheen will report to a panel of retired federal judges instead of Starr or Reno.

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LITTLE ROCK, Ark. – David Hale, the most important witness in independent counsel Kenneth Starr’s Whitewater investigation, gave false and misleading testimony to a federal jury in an effort to conceal his relationship with conservative political activists who ran a secret anti-Clinton operation, according to three individuals with firsthand knowledge of the events in question.