Let's talk about replacing GWBush in 2004.

Kerry's Rise Lifts Fellow Vietnam Vets
By David Maraniss

BOSTON, July 28 -- Since the searing spring day in 1968 when a grenade blew away his legs and left only a stump of his right arm, Max Cleland has been on what he calls a long and discomforting search for meaning. He has wondered about the purpose of his time in Vietnam, the lessons of his wounds, the reasons for his survival. For seven minutes on Thursday night, when he rolls his wheelchair to center stage at the Democratic National Convention and introduces his friend John F. Kerry to the nation, Cleland thinks he will be closer than ever to answering those timeless questions.

It promises to be the most emotional scene of the convention: the gaunt presidential candidate from Massachusetts stooping to embrace the broad-faced triple amputee from Georgia -- fellow Vietnam vets and former Senate colleagues, both encircled by the aging warriors they call the "band of brothers," including the Swift boat crewmates who served with young Lt. Kerry along the Mekong Delta 3 1/2 decades ago. The imagery is only a metaphor for something more profound, Cleland says, a culminating moment of personal and generational affirmation that sharply defines Kerry's rise and lends significance to the unresolved struggle of Cleland and many other Vietnam vets.

"John Kerry is really the tip of the iceberg, and the iceberg under the surface is the unconscious sense of lack of resolution of the Vietnam War," Cleland said in an interview Tuesday after taking part in a ceremony honoring veterans at Bunker Hill. "His success is like a validation of all this angst, storm and stress, and search for meaning, for people of his generation, not just for veterans, but especially for veterans because he personifies and embodies our own experience."

Cleland devoured a dripping cheeseburger at the old Warren Tavern as he spoke, his legless body perched snugly on a worn wooden bench. His longing for validation was echoed by many members of Kerry's old crew, who have been omnipresent in Boston this week and escorted the candidate as he made his way into town on a water taxi Wednesday afternoon.

"All of us have been waiting for this moment with John Kerry for 35 years," said Wade Sanders. "It has brought new meaning to our lives."

"Why did we live through this?" asked crewmate Del Sandusky. "Why are we here? For what is happening now."

John Hurley, another Vietnam vet who helped organize the band of brothers for Kerry during the winter primaries, said, "This is not just a campaign, it is a homecoming."

By no means do all veterans feel that way. A rump group of Swift boat veterans from other crews has expressed skepticism about accounts of Kerry's exploits. Some vets cannot forgive Kerry for protesting the war when he returned home and for testifying before Congress in 1971 about what he called atrocities committed by U.S. troops. And Republicans have tried to undercut Kerry's war experience by questioning, among other things, why he cut short his tour of duty after receiving three Purple Hearts for relatively superficial wounds. Cleland, from his wheelchair, finds particular force in countering that line of attack with a quote from Shakespeare's Romeo: "He jests at scars that never felt a wound."

The extent to which Kerry has embraced his Vietnam story and used it here in Boston, where a veterans caucus attracted 500 delegates on Monday and Cleland draws standing ovations at one delegation meeting after another as a revered speaker, has provoked weariness in some quarters. "I don't think they mentioned it this much at Woodstock," comedian Jon Stewart said of the Vietnam War in an interview with Katie Couric on NBC's "Today" show Wednesday morning. "I keep expecting to hear Buffalo Springfield." But for decades, Vietnam vets have grown accustomed to large segments of the public growing tired of them and wanting to move on, so a touch of sarcasm is not going to stop them now or make Cleland worry that they are overdoing it.

Kerry is not the first Vietnam vet to be either major party's presidential nominee -- Al Gore served "in country" as an Army journalist -- but he is the first to make it a central theme of his candidacy, and that, Cleland said, makes all the difference.

"I campaigned for Al Gore, campaigned hard for him, beginning in Iowa in January 2000. But there was no magic," Cleland said. "No emphasis on veterans. No organized veterans effort. As a matter of fact, Gore didn't even talk about it. And there was no band of brothers out there. This time it's the real deal. Kerry knows from whence he came. And all of that comes in the context of the search for meaning for veterans and the way meaning is being stripped away in Iraq. No weapons of mass destruction. No nuclear weapons program. No ties to al Qaeda. Okay. Okay. You can't call back those thousand kids who are now dead. You can't call back those arms and limbs over there at Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] that are now being fitted. That is what is so terrifying for the veterans of Vietnam. . . . I'm a student of history, and I can't think of a war in American history that had less meaning than Vietnam. And to sit and watch the meaning being stripped away again."

With Cleland, especially, the political and personal this year seem inextricably linked. "His resurrection has also been my personal resurrection," he said of Kerry's campaign.

It was only two years ago that the 62-year-old from suburban Atlanta was defeated in his bid for reelection to the Senate and fell into a chasm of despair. Whatever rage he felt toward Republicans for running a campaign ad linking him to Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, and questioning his patriotism for voting against a version of the homeland security bill, was dampened by a life-numbing sensation that any purpose had been drained from his existence. He did not have the energy to get mad or get even. His fiancee, Nancy Ross, recalled that the low point was not election night, when he lost to Rep. Saxby Chambliss (R), 53 percent to 46 percent, but rather the morning of Jan. 6, 2003, when the next session of Congress opened and Cleland was at home with nothing to do. "From that point on, it was hard -- very, very hard," Ross said.

Kerry, Cleland said, was among the first friends to call him after that defeat, and kept calling for weeks thereafter, urging him to "get back in the game."

"He said, 'Max, come join me, help me turn this country around,' " Cleland recalled. "I said, 'John, I will when I can.' "

It took him six months to recover from the psychological wounds of his defeat, and when he was ready he headed out to Iowa and went to work. Week by week his energy and sense of purpose increased. His appetite was back, for food and people and work. He tooled around Iowa with such force that the wheels came off his wheelchair one day in western Iowa and he had to call across the border to the Department of Veterans Affairs hospital in Omaha in search of repairs. When a bureaucrat there told him that he was not in the system, Cleland, who was head of the Veterans Administration under President Jimmy Carter, cackled and shouted with glee, "Sweetheart, I am the system." He was back.

There was an evening in Des Moines in the dead of winter when Cleland realized that the fire was blazing inside him again. It was four degrees below zero when he headed over to Bakers Square for dinner. Sanders and Sandusky and the Swift boat guys were there, along with the Bolanos brothers of El Paso, four brothers who served together in Vietnam, and Kerry's Vietnam vet friends from Massachusetts, who called themselves the dog hunters and brought with them at least four vets they found at a Boston homeless shelter. Cleland pulled out his American Express card and paid for dinner for the whole crowd, and it was then that he recited parts of the well-worn St. Crispin's Day speech from "Henry V" and dubbed them the band of brothers.

Cleland had a sense then, long before the national press corps realized it, that Kerry could win Iowa and go on from there. "What organization has targeted veterans before? Nobody," he recalled. "But John Kerry did. And when he accepts the Democratic nomination Thursday night, a large part of the reason will be because of that."

When Kerry asked him to give the introductory speech on Thursday night, Cleland began shaping his thoughts. It was because of Vietnam that Cleland was handed the assignment, and he decided not to steer away from Vietnam as he put together the speech. Ten days ago, using the chicken-scratch cursive scrawl of his left hand, he began writing on some hotel stationery in Memphis. He kept writing until he had a draft that Ross could transcribe onto a computer. Then it went through three Kerry speechwriters and back to Cleland, who refined the final draft. The themes are simple: the Swift boat, the young skipper, the trust of his men, the band of brothers, the call to service, the quiet character, the affirmation of a generation, the skipper for the ship of state.

Cleland has a soft, deep, modulated voice with only a hint of the South. It evokes a radio voice from the past, which fits with his notion that he will be delivering a fireside chat to the convention hall and to the people back home. "I don't want to scream. That's not me," he said. "It'll be calmer and quieter and probably more emotional and intense than maybe I'm even comfortable with. But I think it will liberate my friend John Kerry. . . . I hope I can get through it without choking up."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Posters against the Republican National Convention on this site.

I like this one quite a bit, tho its very eighties.

Leave them alone and they come home

Yes the Democrates believe that, Leave them alone and they will come home waggin their tails behind them. This why Bill Clinton did not arrest O.B.L when he had the chance and that is why we had 9/11 and 3000 dead, and that is the reason we need to Flush the John's in Nov.

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Further, from Slate
http://slate.msn.com/id/2104867/

Government policy ought to be written by corporate CEOs...fer sure.


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I don't know the details on the issue at hand (airborne particulate levels in coal mines), but I do have lots of experience with the safety concerns of unions and the likely risk levels involved. I doubt vbery much that there is a significant health issue at hand here. Many environmental standards were adjusted during the last years of the Clinton Administration on the flimsiest of evidence.

The many purveyors of paranoid conspiracy theiries often consider anyone who has a professional background in such matters and who knows something about the subject, as necessarily comflicted from influencing any government decision on them. The involvement of former managers or officers of such corporations in such matters is certainly no worse than the coresponding involvement of former Union officials or employees of environmental advocacy groups on the same matters.

Amen.

Remember the drinking water arsenic standards? The lower level Clinton signed into force on his way out the door (which Bush thankfully tossed out) was based on the absurd assumption that if the risk of the currently allowed levels were x, the risk at a quarter of the currently allowed level would be .25x.

For anyone here who is so scientifically illiterate that he or she does not see how laughable this notion is, consider the risk of taking 4 times the maximum dosage of a given drug--Tylenol, for instance--then consider whether it makes sense to suggest that the risk of taking the recommended dosage is 1/4 of the risk of a fourfold overdose. (Of course, it isn't.) These things are not linear relationships. With arsenic, as with Tylenol, there is a level at which the substance is safe for most people, and above which toxicity is reached. While there may be a rational argument as to what that level is, it is a scientific argument, and Clinton's position was not a scientific position. (Of course, unlike Tylenol, arsenic at low doses is considered by some scientists and doctors to be an essential nutrient; many of which are toxic at too-high doses.)

Unfortunately, it seems to me that the common sense approach to environmentalism is too often interpreted as anti-environmentalism.

Welcome back Scrat. You've been a missed person.

As with so many issues, we have to move the debate away from this absurd notion that one side of the political spectrum "cares" about X and the other side doesn't (the terms of debate as dictated by strident voices at the political poles for years) and move it to a more reasonable and potential fruitful debate that acknowledges that most or all parties "care" about X, but that we differ on how best to deal with X and whether government at this or that level should play a role in that best solution.


Thanks, Foxfyre. It's nice to be missed (by those who aren't firing at me, of course). ;-)

That dialog says all about Bush's economy policy!

Frankly, I like Bush's sense of humor.

I agree with Scrat. There are many reasons why George Bush ought to lose the next election, but this joke isn't one of them.

Heck, I agree with Thomas!

If I compartmentalize Bush's actions and policies and look at them on their own merits, there are plenty for which I would give him a failing grade (and the boot) and others for which I would give him a passing grade (and my vote in November). Of course, I don't believe compartmentalizing is the way to go, and when I look at the big picture--weigh the good (as I see it) against the bad (as I see it)--and then compare that to the likely good and bad of a Kerry presidency (again, as I see it), Bush is the man for whom I have to pull in November.

Was it humor or stupidity?

Hurray, Scrat weighs the options without bombast. A good post. And I agree, self depracating humor sounds good for any candidate.

well, let's get to the core of the matter, y'all called it "joke",and analyze the U.S economy in a short summary:
The US economy, what about I all along spoke, is bilateral. On one side there is a limited growth, point for Bush, he says not all about the situation on the US market though; but on the other side: There is no really a reduction of unemployment. Point for Kerry. Conclusion it will be still a fight for the agenda saloon and JFK has the better possibilities to win this part of the Elections 2004.

Nice post Thok. Your English is becoming dangerous. Keep it up

That's my slang, I can't help it....

I love the Onion, part CXIII. (And good program too! )