KERRY'S TRIALS.(excerpt from Joe Klein's '2002: A Profile of John Kerry')(Excerpt)

From 2002, a Profile of John Kerry, by Joe Klein

The New Yorker's complete coverage of the 2004 Presidential race

John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976, when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of obscurity. His celebrity as the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was fading. The war was over, and his much heralded testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was five years in the past. He had entered law school after losing a congressional election in 1972, a race he was widely expected to win. A story about him in the Boston Globe during this time ran under the headline "once a hot political property."

Kerry practiced law for six years. During that period, he began inching back into public view in Massachusetts, rebuilding a reputation both for aggressive investigation and for showmanship which he still enjoys today. The issues that mattered to him then have dominated his subsequent legislative career, and it is his brief career as a lawyer, more than his record as a protester, that could suggest what kind of President he would make.

Given his background in the antiwar movement and progressive politics, Kerry might have seemed like a natural for a public defender's office. "That's a stereotype of the worst order and a total knee-jerk reaction," Kerry told me during a recent conversation about his legal career. "I always had a prosecutor's mind and a prosecutor's bent. It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated." For a politically ambitious young lawyer like Kerry, especially one who was known only as a protester, it also made sense to earn a law-enforcement credential.

After graduation, Kerry was hired as an assistant district attorney under John J. Droney, who was the district attorney of Middlesex County, the largest county in the state, with more than a million residents and encompassing the cities of Cambridge and Lowell. "He knew of me because I'd already run for office, and we shared a mutual connection to Senator Kennedy," Kerry said. Droney was a major figure in Massachusetts legal and political circles. He served as the Cambridge coordinator for John F. Kennedy's first race for Congress, in 1946; became district attorney in 1959; and kept a seemingly unassailable hold on the office for the subsequent two decades.

By 1976, Droney was suffering from what was later revealed to be A.L.S., or Lou Gehrig's disease. "He was moving very slowly, and he couldn't speak clearly," William Codinha, another assistant district attorney during this period, said. "If you knew him, you could understand what he was saying, but if you didn't it would have been virtually impossible." Droney was running for reelection in 1978, and he decided to make Kerry his first assistant. According to Codinha, it was "to put a face on the office when Mr. Droney couldn't get around. And John Kerry was a great face to put on the office."