Reply #22: Personal account of Kerry losing his ideals in 1983. very sad... [View All]

[JohnOneillsMemory]

This is a personal account from a member of the American Friends Service Committee that my father sent to me to warn me not to expect much from Kerry by way of policy change.

"...what Kerry did and told me in 1983 (not to mention two decades of compromised behavior since) it has little to do with him as a presidential candidate. Back then, as Lieutenant Governor, Kerry played an important role in Senator Kennedy’s effort to convince the Reagan Administration to choose Boston as the Homeport for the planned Battleship Iowa naval flotilla. The central weapons system of that flotilla was to be the nuclear-armed Tomahawk cruise missile. That the deployment of these weapons was a violation of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze which Kerry and Kennedy ostensibly supported, that these weapons made war with the Soviet Union more likely, that the Navy has a long history of nuclear weapons accidents, and that the homeport was to be located at the end of a busy runway at Boston’s Logan Airport (and thus carried the danger of a catastrophic nuclear weapons accident,) were of no consequence for Kerry as he made his political calculations.

Along with Tony Palomba of Mobilization for Survival, I led the successful opposition to the Homeporting campaign. At one point I had a one on four meeting with Kerry, two of his aides, and one of (then) Governor Dukaukis’ aides. During that meeting, every time I asked Kerry a question about the dangers and roles of the nuclear armed Tomahawks and the flotilla itself, he answered by saying “As an old Navy hand…” you have nothing to fear, or “As an old Navy hand…” it’s not a problem.

Seeing that he was hardly about to give an inch, I explained that I remembered what he had said and had done as he organized and worked with Vietnam Vets Against the War, and I asked him how what he was telling me squared with what he had said then. A long and excruciating silence followed, during which it seemed that we could hear dust fall on the floor boards of his State House office.


Finally, he broke the painful silence and said “The name of the game is different now.”



That my friends is the Senator Kerry that many of us here in Massachusetts have come to know over the past two decades.



In addition to needing hard and clear statements of policy from Kerry now as a candidate, we also need to be educating and organizing so that if we are fortunate enough not to be saddled with the imperial Texas Mafia beginning in 2005, that we are ready to confront and move a Democratic Administration which would come to power in the tradition of those that have launched imperial wars, refused to implement the NPT, and practiced “coercive diplomacy” with nuclear threats and blackmail, and urged funding for so-called “missile defenses” and the militarization of space.

Sorry to be an iconoclast, but illusions will kill us…and many others."