The Senator Who Came In From The Cold

A younger John Kerry was a strong proponent of the Nuclear Freeze. We pick up the story as our War Hero (Vietnam) enters the Democratic primary for the 1984 Senate race:

...Kerry entered the Senate race with the advantage of a statewide presence and organization. Within a few months of announcing his candidacy, however, he was in danger of losing strategic ground to US Representative James M. Shannon of Lawrence, his chief rival in the bruising Democratic primary.

Kerry had been outscored by Shannon in the endorsement questionnaire of a nuclear disarmament group that vehemently opposed the military buildup under President Reagan.

The nuclear freeze was a defining issue across the country for liberal Democrats, who were about to be flattened a second time at the polls by the steamroller of Reagan's conservatism. In Massachusetts, the activists were a key bloc, ardently courted by Kerry and Shannon, "the liberal twins," as the other two Democrats in the primary field called them.

Shannon had outscored Kerry, 100 to 94, on the questionnaire of the group, known as Freeze Voter `84, which favored canceling funds for a slew of major weapons systems.

Then a strange thing happened...

The aspiring Senator was given a chance to revise one of his answers, and raised his score to a perfect 100. Since the two candidates were perfect on the nuclear freeze issue, neither Kerry nor Shannon won the group's endorsement.

...The stalemate for the Freeze Voter `84 endorsement was an important tactical victory for Kerry. But it could be a handicap as Kerry campaigns for president nearly two decades later.

In his zeal to keep pace with Shannon's leftward drift on disarmament, Kerry supported cancellation of a host of weapons systems that have become the basis of US military might -- the high-tech munitions and delivery systems on display to the world as they leveled the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein in a matter of weeks.

These weapons became conversation topics at American dinner tables during the Iraq war, but candidate Kerry in 1984 said he would have voted to cancel many of them -- the B-1 bomber, B-2 stealth bomber, AH-64 Apache helicopter, Patriot missile, the F-15, F-14A and F-14D jets, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Aegis air-defense cruiser, and the Trident missile system.

He also advocated reductions in many other systems, such as the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile, and the F-16 jet.

Hmm. That may not square well with the Senator's current "strong on national security" pose. But if Tim Russert asks, how might he answer? Better, his supporters will hope, than he answered the Globe:

In retrospect, Kerry said some of his positions in those days were "ill-advised, and I think some of them are stupid in the context of the world we find ourselves in right now and the things that I've learned since then."

But he defended his opposition at the time to the MX missile, the "Star Wars" strategic defense initiative, and some other programs.

"Some of this stuff was ahead of its time. Some was not as well thought out as it might be," Kerry said of his campaign posture then. "I'm not ashamed of that. I was [40] years old, running for the United States Senate for the first time . . . and I'm sure that some of it was driven at the time by the nature of the beast I was fighting politically.

"I mean, you learn as you go in life," said Kerry. He characterized as "pretty responsible" his subsequent Senate voting record on defense.

He was only forty years old, give him a break! And we agree on this - some of the ideas he supported do look as stupid now as some of us considered them to be way back then.

But what could he mean by "the nature of the beast I was fighting politically"? Surely he is not suggesting that these positions were adopted out of mere political expediency?

Comments

[Pouncer]

In all fairness, a representative who represents his constituents deserves praise for doing so, not criticism. If the folks in Massachusetts were strongly in favor of a nuclear weapons freeze, and Kerry conveyed that message to Congress, he was just doing his job.

Whether the Nuremberg Defense will be accepted by a national constituency is a question to be settled (is being settled) in the primaries.

[Crank]

I assume by "the beast" Kerry means Reagan.

[TM]

Well, was "the beast" that furrowed the brow of our man Kerry the liberal Dem machine in Massachusetts, or Reagan? And shouldn't he have been worried about the Russkies?

[Paul Zrimsek]

You mean it's not the Judean People's Front?