THE LONG WAR OF JOHN KERRY.(senator's outspokenness on political issues, including war)(Interview)

On a rainy October morning, the day after Senator John Forbes Kerry, of Massachusetts, announced that he would reluctantly vote to give President George W. Bush the authority to use lethal force against Iraq, the Senator sat in his Capitol Hill office reminiscing about another war and another speech. The war was Vietnam. The speech was one he had delivered upon graduating from Yale, in 1966. Kerry was twenty-two at the time; he had already enlisted in the Navy. As one of Yale's champion debaters and president of the Political Union, he had been selected to deliver the Class Oration, traditionally an Ivy-draped nostalgia piece. But the speech he gave, hastily rewritten at the last moment, was anything but traditional: it was a broad, passionate criticism of American foreign policy, including the war that he would soon be fighting.

I'd been trying to get a copy of this speech for several weeks, but Kerry's staff had been unable to find one. There seemed a parallel--at least, a convenient journalistic analogy--to his statement the day before about Iraq: two questionable wars, both of which Kerry had decided to support, conditionally, even as he raised serious doubts about their propriety.

Kerry bristled at the analogy. He assumed that a familiar accusation was inherent in the comparison: that he was guilty of speaking boldly but acting politically. And it is true that from his earliest days in public life--a career that seems to have begun in prep school--even John Kerry's closest friends have teased him about his overactive sense of destiny, his theatrical sense of gravitas, and his initials, which are the same as John Fitzgerald Kennedy's. "I signed up for the Navy in 1965, the year before the Class Oration," Kerry said now, with quiet vehemence. He repeated it, for emphasis: "I signed up for the Navy. There was very little thought of Vietnam. It seemed very far away. There was no connection between my decision to serve and the speech I made."

But there was a connection, of sorts. Kerry had made the decision along with three close friends, classmates and fellow-members of Yale's not so secret society, Skull and Bones: David Thorne, Richard Pershing, and Frederick Smith. All came from families with strong traditions of military and public service. Pershing was the grandson of General John Pershing, the commander of the American Expeditionary Force in the First World War. (Richard Pershing was killed during the Tet offensive.) "Our decisions were all about our sense of duty," Fred Smith, who went on to found Federal Express, recalls. "We were the Kennedy generation--you know, 'Pay any price, bear any burden.' That was the ethos."

The week before John Kerry delivered the Class Oration, the fifteen Skull and Bones seniors went off on a final jaunt together to a fishing camp on an island in the St. Lawrence River. Fred Smith remembers spending the days idly, playing cards and drinking beer. David Thorne, however, says that there was a serious running discussion about Vietnam. "There were four of us going to war in a matter of months. That tends to concentrate the mind. This may have been the first time we really seriously began to question Vietnam. It was: 'Hey, what the hell is going on over there? What the hell are we in for?' "

Kerry's reaction to these discussions was intense and precipitate. He decided to rewrite the speech. His original address, which can still be found in the 1966 Yale yearbook, was "rather sophomoric," he recalled. "I decided that I couldn't give that speech. I couldn't get up there and go through that claptrap. I remember there was no electricity in the cabin. I remember staying up with a candle writing my speech in the wee hours of the night, rewriting and rewriting. It reflected what I felt and what we were all thinking about. It got an incredible reception, a standing ovation."

The Senator and I were sitting in wing chairs in his office, which is rather more elegant than those of his peers--the walls painted Chinese red with a dark lacquer glaze and covered with nineteenth-century nautical prints. There is a marble fireplace, a couch, a coffee table, the wing chairs: in sum, a room with a distinct sensibility, a reserved and private place. Kerry seemed weary. Our conversation was interrupted, from time to time, by phone calls from his supporters--most of whom seemed unhappy about his Iraq vote. At one point, he had to rush over to the Senate chamber to vote on another issue. When he returned, we began to talk about his time in Vietnam. He served as the captain of a small "swift boat," ferrying troops up the rivers of the Mekong Delta. He was wounded three times in four months, and then sent home--the policy in Vietnam was three wounds and you're out. He received a Bronze Star, for saving the life of a Special Forces lieutenant who had fallen overboard during a firefight, and a Silver Star. The latter, a medal awarded only for significant acts of courage, was the result of a three-boat counterattack Kerry had led against a Vietcong position on a riverbank. He had chased down, shot, and killed a man that day. The man had been carrying a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher. "You want to see what one of those can do to a boat?" he asked. "A couple of weeks after I left Vietnam, a swift boat captained by my close friend Don Droz--we called him Dinky--got hit with a B-40. He was killed. I still have the photo here somewhere."