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Senator Kerry's journey to war began in grandly shabby shared digs at Yale College in Connecticut. It was winter 1965, and the Vietnam draft hung over every male undergraduate. Bundy, a scion of the "Boston Brahmin" aristocracy, was playing late-night host to his Uncle Bill. William Bundy was an assistant secretary of state and one of the key architects of the war in southeast Asia. After a dinner, he walked to his nephew's rooms for a few beers and, more importantly, to ask the gilded youth of Yale if they would fight for their country.
"Bill came round to see how Yale students felt," Bundy said. "There was already a sense of discontent in the air, of protest. He appealed to us, as people from an educated, reasoned background, people who understood the world. He said we needed those people to be officers." Kerry, a dauntingly intense 21-year-old, whose close friends already joked about what cabinet posts they would seek when he became president, was electrified.
"I was all ears, a sponge," he later recalled. "We listened to him talk about Vietnam in depth, why it was important, and what our generation would do." Harvey Bundy believes the evening removed any last doubts in his roommate's mind. Shortly afterwards, Kerry enlisted in the navy, the service of his hero, John F Kennedy.
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To Bundy, it is vital to understand that Kerry was a member of an older generation that was already passing in 1965. "Our year saw a duty to serve," he said. "We didn't burn our draft cards. The class two or three years below ours saw a moral duty to oppose the war.
"It was a generation divide."
In a supreme irony, if Kerry, 60, had been born into the next generation, that of President George W Bush, he would never have gone to Vietnam. "If we'd been two or three years younger, John may very well have been a very active anti-war spokesman from the start," Bundy said. Leadership, one way or another, was a given. "Whether he realised back then he would run for president, the way that he set his life out was to lead and to serve."
http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/22/news/world/world01.asp |
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