Two observations about Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Last night, like many people, I watched the C-Span presentation of Kerry's 1971 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. I found this opening line a bit strange:

I would simply like to speak in very general terms. I apologize if my statement is general because I received notification yesterday you would hear me and I am afraid because of the injunction I was up most of the night and haven't had a great deal of chance to prepare.

The "very general" remarks turn out to be an elaborate and eloquently written statement. The Committee Chairman, Senator Fulbright, seems to accept the image of Kerry dashing off the statement at the last minute: "You said you had been awake all night. I can see that you spent that time very well indeed." This draws a laugh from the crowd, and it made me laugh too. Hearing it last night, I couldn't help but think that Kerry has an intense drive to make a myth out of himself: he's a man who, sleep-deprived, can, at the last minute, jot down what turns out to be a brilliant and devastating speech (written out longhand on a yellow pad?). But it isn't really very funny: the urge to self-mythologize is not a desirable quality in a President.

Of course, I also see the deniability written into the statement. He doesn't literally say he wrote the speech himself during the night, only that he didn't have "a great deal of chance to prepare." If pressed, he could easily concede that the speech had been written well in advance and that he merely meant that he hadn't had a chance to practice delivering the speech. I'm not saying he lied, only that he crafted his words to create a heroic image of himself.

Another things that struck me that Kerry said right at the beginning of his testimony was:

I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony.

The Swift Boat Veterans' second ad has been criticized for taking Kerry's testimony out of context and not making it clear that he was only quoting other people. But look at Kerry's introduction: it is a grandiose assertion, claiming to say what all veterans would say. Senator Fulbright proceeds to accept his statement as the statement of all veterans ("Mr. Kerry, it is quite evident from that demonstration that you are speaking not only for yourself but for all your associates, as you properly said in the beginning"). I can see how that might create a simmering anger in the veterans who felt their own stories were preempted, an anger that boiled over when Kerry premised his presidential campaign on his status as a war veteran. Kerry's portrayal of the Vietnam experience, which he claimed was every vet's story, was one of atrocities and war crimes and the realization that they had fought for nothing:

I would like to talk to you a little bit about what the result is of the feelings these men carry with them after coming back from Vietnam. The country doesn't know it yet, but it has created a monster, a monster in the form of millions of men who have been taught to deal and to trade in violence, and who are given the chance to die for the biggest nothing in history; men who have returned with a sense of anger and a sense of betrayal which no one has yet grasped.

Kerry took it upon himself to say what millions of men felt, and it is not surprising that a good number of them resented being characterized as a tiny subcomponent of an angry "monster." Kerry contributed to the painful stereotype of the Vietnam vet as a crazy, violent misfit.

Kerry was, I think, "laser-beam focused" on stopping the war. His words were well-received by many who put that goal above all else, because those words powerfully expressed complete negativity about the war. I think there are many people today who oppose the Iraq war the same way and who use the same rhetoric: everything about the war is abysmally, hopelessly wrong. Yet the situation then as now was more complex than will be admitted by many who have formed a firm belief that they know what the right outcome is. Those who choose to express themselves this way, however, can create a lot of angry opponents as well as a lot of ammunition for their opponents' arguments. Of course, taking the position that the war is actually a complex problem--as Kerry has done with Iraq--creates another set of opponents and arguments.