Kerry's World: Father Knows Best

[Octafish]

Like father, like son -- both good people, good Democrats, and good Americans:

Kerry's World: Father Knows Best

CBS NEWS
March 2, 2004

This column from The New Republic was written by Franklin Foer.


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.

CONTINUED…

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/02/opinion/main603542.shtml

[Monkey see Monkey Do]

1. Wow. Didn't know much about his father's views

Hopefully it's due a reprint as the message seems more than timely.

[Octafish]

3. Imagine growing up the son of a True Statesman?

The basic things one can only learn from his or her parents. This builds a child's character, for good or evil.

To learn extraordinary things requires extraordinary parents. This builds a child's worldview, to do good or derive profit or gain.

[IrateCitizen]

2. THIS is very interesting!

It sounds like a book I'd absolutely love to get my hands on. I am especially sympathetic to the elder Kerry's denunciations of attempts to portray independent Marxist movements as part of some grand Soviet scheme -- one of the biggest canards every hoisted on the American public, at a tremendous cost of life.

[Octafish]

4. Treasure, time and talent, too.

All these, however, are replacable. As we see from Iraq and Afghanistan, New York and Washington, the whole world over -- all the wealth in the world doesn't add up to -- or bring back -- one single human being.

You are correct, IrateCitizen. Richard Kerry's book must be one heck of a read. The guy knew the Cold War was merely a ludicrous puppet show for public consumption while the War Party turned a buck and the plutocrats continued to call the shots through bribery and terror.

Eisenhower warned us about the military-industrial complex.

John F. Kennedy tried to do something about them -- no World War III over Bay of Pigs, Cuban Missile Crisis or Vietnam.

The War Party did something about JFK before he could get to them, using the Octopus and its army of NAZIs, Mafiosi, Big Oil, Big Guns, Big Money, gangsters, racists and sociopaths.

John Kerry knows it, too.