“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?": A History of Conventions, 2004
Senator John Kerry stood on the raised podium. The date was Thursday, July 29, 2004. Below Kerry, on the floor of the Fleet Center in Boston, the Democratic delegates went exuberant. “Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,” the delegates chanted.
The exuberance lasted. Senator Kerry had to put up his hands, asking for quiet, once, twice, three separate times.
The exuberance lasted. Senator Kerry had to say “thank you,” in another attempt to quiet the crowd, once, twice, thrice – actually 17 consecutive times.
When the delegates quieted, finally, Senator Kerry lifted his right hand to his forehead as a salute. Behind him, on the huge video screen, Kerry’s behavior could be viewed in quadruple size.
“I’m John Kerry,” the Senator began his nominating speech, “and I’m reporting for duty.”
The delegates went exuberant. “Kerry, Kerry, Kerry,” the delegates chanted. But right there, according to Elisabeth Drue, a journalist known affectionately as “Dean Drue” for her books on many of the national conventions of the 20th and 21st centuries, John Kerry “lost the election.”
Drue continued, “The Vietnamization of the 2004 Democratic Convention made Kerry into a hypocrite. It didn’t take George Bush to do that. It didn’t take Karl Rove and his swiftboat reeducation. John Kerry did it all on his own. And his surrogates didn’t help matters, either.”
In fact, every major speechmaker at the Convention (with one exception, Ron Reagan and his plea for stem cell research) – from President Carter to the Clintons to Al Gore to Ted Kennedy – mentioned Kerry in terms of Vietnam.
In his speech Bill Clinton said, “When they sent those swiftboats up the river in Vietnam and they told them their job was to draw hostile fire, to wave the American flag and bait the enemy to come out and fight, John Kerry said: Send me.”
In his vice presidential nominating speech John Edwards said, “When John Kerry graduated college, he volunteered for military service, volunteered to go to Vietnam, volunteered to captain a swiftboat, one of the most dangerous duties in Vietnam that you could have. As a result, he was wounded, honored for his valor… They saw him reach into the river and pull one of his men to safety and save his life. They saw him in the heat of the battle make a decision in a split second to turn his boat around, drive it through an enemy position, and chase down the enemy to save his crew. Decisive, strong: Is this not what we need in a commander in chief?”
“YES!” the delegates screamed.
However, Elisabeth Drue argued, that message didn’t jive with John Kerry’s overriding theme on Vietnam. “In 1971 John Kerry went in front of a Congressional committee,” she explained. “By then, he’d returned from the war and become an invaluable voice in the Vietnam protests. He called for cut and run. His message to the congressional committee was clear: wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Kerry railed at the president of the United States, Richard Nixon. In 1968, Nixon had campaigned on a platform called Vietnamization: the slow withdrawal of troops, with the last soldier coming home by the end of Nixon’s first term in office. ‘How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?’ Kerry asked the congressional committee. His question took their breath away. His question exposed the Vietnamization policy for what it was: a façade, a fraud. Covertly, quietly, Nixon wanted to keep the war going. He believed in the policies of containment.”
Flash forward to 2004. In his nominating speech at the Convention, Kerry called Iraq, “The wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.” His plan for Iraq, however, mirrored Nixon’s stated plan in Vietnam: the slow withdrawal of troops, with the last soldier returning home by the end of Kerry’s first term in office.
“What John Kerry did is the Vietnamization of Iraq, or Iraqization,” Elisabeth Drue argued. “What John Kerry did is Vietnam, part II. Never mind the almost daily suicide attacks in Iraq in 2004, including a pick-up truck laden with 500 kilograms of explosives crashing into the main gate at the U.S. headquarters. Never mind Condoleezza Rice admitting that the intelligence used to identify weapons of mass destruction in Saddam’s Iraq may have been wrong. John Kerry did not argue for cut and run, as he did in 1971. That might have been politically effective and ethically consistent. It might have showed his moral compass – something he spoke a great deal about at the Convention. Instead he offered the Vietnamization version, the Iraqization. It didn’t take Bush and Rove long to realize that Kerry had morphed into Richard Nixon.”
“How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” Such a salient question. Someone in the Kerry camp should have asked the candidate that question before the Democratic Convention of 2004. Nobody did and one of the most vigorous voices of the Vietnam protest of the early 1970s began to sound a lot like Tricky Dick. By the end of the campaign the Bush camp had taken the magnetism out of Kerry’s moral compass. And John Kerry, the most self-congratulatory of senators, was forced to congratulate George Bush on his reelection.
(To celebrate the summer of 2008, a summer of conventions after all, I am writing a series on the presidential conventions of the latter half of the 20th century. This is the penultimate column. To read earlier parts of this series, please click on the link “More articles by Brian Josepher” below. You will see the “History of Conventions” articles to the right.) |
