The New Republic

By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book,
The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man.
Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign
Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin,
and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into
retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of
glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on
his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off
Cape Cod. If he had any reasons for professional bitterness, they
should have long since faded.None of these facts, however, becalmed him. His book has a young
man's brash, polemical tone. The Star-Spangled Mirror is a critique
of moralism in America's foreign policy--and, more than that, it is
a critique of America's national character. "Americans," he writes,
"are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and
white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate
all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric
accommodation--everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America
has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and
fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights,"
falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in
the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own
goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union
wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned,
Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every
instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an
American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use
of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use
of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further
claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national
movements"--outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea
for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense
of U.S. moral superiority.

Despite its blunt arguments, The Star-Spangled Mirror received
little attention. Foreign Affairs greeted it with a 90-word
summation in its review section. But the work of Richard Kerry, who
passed away in 2000, will soon experience posthumous
reconsideration. It won't be because of the renewed relevance of
his arguments (although his book does read like a contemporary
brief against neoconservatism). It will be because his son is a
leading candidate to run U.S. foreign policy.

According to the conventional telling of John Kerry's biography,
largely told by Kerry himself, his foreign policy views were forged
in the Mekong Delta. During his disillusioning four-month combat
stint on a Navy Swift Boat, the limits of U.S. power were revealed
to him. As Newsweek argued in a cover story last month, "Kerry's
policy views, as well as his politics, were profoundly shaped by
the war." But, for all the neatness this narrative provides, it
overlooks an entire chapter in Kerry's intellectual history: his
childhood. In fact, Kerry's foreign policy worldview, characterized
by a steadfast belief in international institutions and a suspicion
of U.S. hard power, had fallen into place long before he ever
enlisted. As Kerry's biographer, the historian Douglas Brinkley,
told me, "So much of his foreign policy worldview comes straight
from Richard Kerry."

Richard Kerry's father, a Czech Jew, fled Europe. The son, by
contrast, embraced it. As a law student at Harvard in the late
'30s, he read continental philosophers like Kierkegaard and
histories about Bismarck and Metternich; he traveled to France,
where he took sculpture classes and met his wife. Hoping to parlay
his love of Europe into a career, he chose international law as his
law school specialty. After World War II, which he spent in the
Army Air Corps testing new airplanes at high altitudes, he moved
his family to Washington to take a spot in the Department of the
Navy's Office of General Counsel, hoping that his proximity to the
State Department might help him land a job there.

Two years into his Washington stint, Kerry's relocation paid off.
The State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs hired him
to help work through the thicket created by America's adherence to
a new set of postwar international agreements. According to
Brinkley, the cosmopolitan Kerry was a true believer in the United
Nations and the postwar promise of global government.

But, as much as he believed in the United Nations, it was not his
prime passion. A devoted Europeanist, Kerry was more preoccupied
with the devastation of Europe and the monumental task of
reconstructing it--a romantic project that enticed a generation of
young diplomats, including George Kennan and George Ball. The
appeal of the task wasn't just the economic and physical rebuilding
of the continent. Kerry and others like him viewed themselves as
building a new political order for the continent, a new method for
arranging international affairs that would consign war to the
dustbin of history. In the early '50s, Kerry became an enthusiast
for nato and the nascent efforts at creating a unified Europe.

In 1954, Kerry received an assignment that put him at ground zero of
the cold war. He moved to Berlin to advise former Harvard President
James B. Conant, whom Dwight D. Eisenhower had charged with
overseeing the rehabilitation of West Germany. Once again, Kerry's
job consigned him primarily to lawyerly work. His chief task was to
devise answers to the questions created by Berlin's confused
status. Martha Mautner, a political officer who served with Kerry
in Germany, told me, "There were so many questions about the status
of Berlin that the lawyers had to handle. There were Four Powers
[the United States, Britain, France, and the Soviet Union] running
the city. What was its relationship to the Federal Republic?" But
Kerry's interests extended far beyond these matters. During his
tenure in Europe, he attended conferences in Paris, London, and The
Hague, where he discussed with other mid-level diplomats the future
of the transatlantic alliance and the possibilities of a new
continental order. According to Brinkley, through these
conferences, Kerry established relationships with a group of
like-minded government officials, including the famed French
planning commissioner (and intellectual architect of the European
Union) Jean Monnet.

These conferences reinforced Kerry's belief that the preservation of
the Atlantic alliance and the creation of a new Europe should be
the overriding priorities of U.S. foreign policy. But the reality
of U.S. policy was far different. For most of the Eisenhower
administration, America's prime objective was containing communism.
And, unlike the administration he served, Kerry believed that
cooperation and diplomacy, rather than militarism, should resolve
these tensions. In The Star-Spangled Mirror, he condemns the United
States for "lecturing" European allies about the horrors of
communism and accuses it of "bad manners" and "spoiled behavior."
He writes, "At times we expected the allies unquestioningly to
follow our leads; sometimes we failed to consult them in advance
before reversing policies; at other times we ignored their
requests."

Even at the time, Kerry wasn't quiet about his disagreement with the
hard- line anti-communists. Although he had initially viewed
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles as a kindred spirit and
cultivated a relationship with him, Kerry felt uncomfortable with
his rhetoric about "godless communism." (In his book, Kerry spends
several pages arguing against Dulles's "intensely moralistic
outlook.") According to Brinkley, Kerry bluntly told Dulles the
shortcomings of his increasingly hawkish approach, undermining
their relationship in the process. This was typical behavior for
Kerry, who had a growing reputation for outspokenness. John Kerry's
friend and former aide Jonathan Winer says, "[Richard Kerry] was a
dissident in a time of conformity."

For all his impolitic instincts, Kerry's undeniable competence kept
propelling his career forward. Following his posting in Berlin, he
served as top aide to Georgia Democrat Walter George, the chairman
of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. And, in 1958, he took
what would be his highest posting in the Foreign Service, as Oslo's
chief political officer, where he played a vital role in opening
Norway to American spies and weapons. But his competence could get
him only so far--which is to say, it couldn't overcome his maverick
reputation and win him a coveted ambassadorship. By the Kennedy
administration, Brinkley says, Kerry sensed he had hit a ceiling in
the Foreign Service. Kerry told his family, "They seem not to
listen to what I have to say, so I'm going to quit." Brinkley adds,
"He saw his role as becoming a protester, criticizing the
government from the outside in lectures and his book."

Richard Kerry, whose own father committed suicide, was not a very
effusive parent. When his twelve-year-old son John lay quarantined
with scarlet fever at his Swiss boarding school, Richard Kerry
didn't make the trip from Berlin to visit him. But there was at
least one subject that fostered easy conversation between the two:
foreign policy. "It allowed them to break through an emotional
wall," says Brinkley. "They talked about foreign policy the way most
fathers and sons talk about football." Well into his Senate career,
John Kerry would phone his father to ask his opinion about
international issues ranging from arms control to Central America.
Watching the conversations, Winer says, "I saw two people talking
about policy very seriously with unexpressed affection."

From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign
policy protg. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry
dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys
were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, [John] Kerry was
discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father
introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John
Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife.

As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his
father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a
debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United
States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior
year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is
the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among
Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating."
And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he
used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning,
"What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of
interventionism."

If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was
because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more
radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown
enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist
foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any
burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the
Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New
Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he
groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He
was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back
from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his
opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the
government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was
being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take
off the uniform and to become a critic."

John Kerry, of course, did exactly this, first in Vietnam Veterans
Against the War and eventually in the U.S. Senate. From the moment
he arrived in Washington, Kerry promised that "issues of war and
peace" would remain his passion. And, from the start, this meant
that he would criticize Ronald Reagan's war against communism,
especially when it was fought through proxies in the jungles of
Central America. In 1985, he traveled to Nicaragua to meet with the
Sandanista government, telling The Washington Post, "I see an
enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell [the
Sandinistas] what to do." Soon after his return, he pressured
Congress into investigating the administration's illegal funding of
the Contra rebels, opening a trail that culminated in the exposure
of the arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. And, a few years later, in
the late '80s, he repeated this success, launching an investigation
that revealed that another of the administration's favorite anti-
communists, the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, had been deeply
enmeshed in drug-trafficking. Kerry was also skeptical enough of
U.S. power that he voted against authorizing a popular
intervention--the Gulf war--and opposed a 1995 resolution that
would have allowed the arming of Bosnians.

There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry.
Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has
occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama
and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality
in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not,
even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine
through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the
administration's "high- handed treatment of our European allies, on
everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has
strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no
surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to
strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just
deeply felt; they're in his blood.

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