Salon.com > Douglas Brinkley

Why Kerry threw his ribbons

Wed, 28 Apr 2004 22:18:00 +0000

Just days before Christmas in 2002, I interviewed Sen. John Kerry about his Vietnam combat experiences at his cluttered study high atop Boston's Beacon Hill. This is where Kerry keeps his Vietnam War archive, including artifacts from his swift boat days. At one juncture during our interview session, he pointed above his desk to a frayed American flag tattered with bullet holes. It was the one that had fluttered from PCF-94 over Kerry and his crew through the Viet Cong attacks they had survived together on the narrow waterways of South Vietnam in the first three months of 1969. We spoke about the harrowing day he saved the life of Jim Rassmann, a Green Beret who fell into a river amid a hail of mortar rounds.

"Do you still have the Silver Star," I asked Kerry. "Yeah," he said, "do you want to see it?" My answer was yes. He walked across his study to a secondary desk with clutter on top, mainly books, and opened the top right drawer. This is where he keeps all of his war medals.

"Nothing too fancy," he said as he pointed to the various boxes in which his medals were kept. "They don't bring back good memories." After glancing at them briefly we went back to our taped interview.

John Kerry’s first Purple Heart

Sat, 17 Apr 2004 23:05:00 +0000

It was Dec. 2, 1968, and Lt. j.g. John Kerry was on a special nighttime covert mission in Vietnam. He had been ordered into a Viet Cong-infested peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay to disrupt a smuggling operation. His vessel was a Boston Whaler, a boat that could float after taking 1,000 rounds of automatic weapons fire. Much of the evening was spent apprehending fishermen in a curfew zone. At approximately 2 a.m., however, they proceeded up an inlet with wild jungle on both sides of the boat. As they approached a bay, Kerry's whaler fired flares into the air. To their horror, not far from them, were a startled group of Viet Cong smugglers trafficking in contraband.

"We opened fire," Kerry told me in a Jan. 30, 2003, interview. "The light from the flares started to fade, the air was full of explosions. My M-16 jammed, and as I bent down to grab another gun, a stinging piece of heat socked into my arm and just seemed to burn like hell. By this time one of the sailors had started the engine and we ran by the beach strafing it. Then it was quiet."

Clinton’s lust for legacy

Tue, 18 Jul 2000 18:20:00 +0000

New York Times columnist William Safire quipped in 1994 that Jimmy Carter was really globetrotting to satisfy a "lust in his heart for a Nobel Prize," hoping to recast his legacy from that of a failed president to a world statesman. That aside has new meaning when applied to President Bill Clinton's current attempt to broker a Middle East Peace accord at Camp David, one that would almost guarantee him the coveted honor. Tens of thousands in Tel Aviv may be chanting "Jerusalem is not for sale!" but for a U.S. president obsessed with his legacy, an Israeli-Palestinian agreement would mean that the opening paragraph of future textbooks would offer something else besides impeachment and sex scandals.

Only two U.S. presidents have received civilization's most august award: Theodore Roosevelt won in 1906 for mediating a conclusion to the Russo-Japanese War, and Woodrow Wilson won in 1919 for his role in overseeing the Versailles treaty, which ended World War I. A technical snafu in Oslo denied Carter his rightful sharing of the Nobel Peace Prize with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin and Egyptian President Anwar Sadat for brokering the Camp David Accords in 1978, and a movement has been underfoot to compensate him for the oversight. Just months after Carter left the White House Sadat, in a forceful letter to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee dated April 11, 1981, nominated his American friend for the honor, citing his "unwavering commitment" to Middle East peace as evidenced at Camp David, and his tireless efforts to find a solution to the Palestinian problem.