The only unforgivable sin in war is not doing your duty.

--DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER

Every public life has its point of origin. For the twenty-seven-year-old John Kerry, that dramatic moment came two years after he shipped out of the rivers of South Vietnam, in a committee hearing room in the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C. For it was in that grand, high-ceilinged chamber that the young Navy veteran posed what he saw as the fundamental question about the Vietnam War to the senators on the Foreign Relations Committee and beyond them to the nation at large: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"

And John Kerry was among the lucky ones who did not die, and who came back whole. The 1966 graduate of Yale University had enlisted in the Navy because it had seemed the right thing to do at the time. Following Officer Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island, and specialized training in San Francisco and San Diego, Kerry had been assigned to the guided-missile frigate U.S.S. Gridley, aboard which he visited Vietnam for the first time in March 1968. His job as ensign was to make sure the Gridley stayed perfectly maintained, but it was tedious duty and Kerry was in quest of more adventure, independence, and responsibility. He wanted to get out of the "Black Shoe Navy" and have a command of his own. So he applied for Swift boat school at the Navy's training facility in Coronado, California, and after it, he returned to Vietnam in November 1968, this time as a lieutenant (junior grade) in charge of his own patrol craft fast (PCF). These boats, each manned by a junior officer and five enlisted men, had become the vanguard in the gambit of Elmo R. Zumwalt Jr., the new commander of U.S. Naval Forces, Vietnam, to forestall Viet Cong infiltration into South Vietnam's Mekong Delta and Ca Mau Peninsula.

Between December 1968 and March 1969, Kerry led -44 -- and when that boat got shot up, another Swift, PCF-94 -- on scores of dangerous raids up the rivers and canals of South Vietnam's Mekong Delta, including the dangerous territories along the Cambodian border. In the process the young skipper was wounded three times. Between his second and third Purple Hearts, on February 28, 1969, Kerry beached his boat in the center of an ambush and killed a Viet Cong sniper armed with a B-40 rocket-propelled grenade launcher, thereby winning the prestigious Silver Star for valor in combat. Two weeks later, despite an injury to his right arm, the young lieutenant went back to save a drowning colleague under fire, this time earning a Bronze Star for bravery as well as his last Purple Heart. Any way one looked at it, John Kerry returned home in April 1969 a genuine war hero. "But I had my arms and legs," he pointed out. "Many of them I was speaking for did not."

Kerry was one of more than a thousand American veterans who descended upon Washington for five days of antiwar protests late in April 1971. The demonstration was dubbed "Dewey Canyon III," in mocking reference to the Nixon administration's Operation Dewey Canyon I and II efforts against Hanoi's supply lines from Laos in 1969 and 1971. Most of the protesters belonged to Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), an organization headquartered in New York that claimed upward of eleven thousand members nationwide. Those veterans who made it to the nation's capital for the rally were bitter. None had tried to dodge the draft, filed for conscientious-objector status, or joined the National Guard. No one could question their patriotism. Phillip Lavoie of North Dighton, Massachusetts, for example, arrived wearing his olive-drab fatigues and forearm crutches; he had lost both his legs in Vietnam to a land mine that exploded beneath him while he was on a reconnaissance mission. Lavoie would tell Associated Press reporter Brooks Jackson that he had come to participate in the mass protest against U.S. policies in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia because he cared about America. "I love this country, man," Lavoie had explained. "Like, wow, it's really beautiful. But we're not fighting for democracy over there. We're fighting so some people in this country can have more money."

Robert Muller, a former Marine Corps first lieutenant, likewise had come to the nonviolent protest in his wheelchair out of love for his country. Like all the veterans congregating in Washington, D.C., he was a survivor, an "antiwar warrior" in the apt phrase of Robert Jay Lifton, the Yale University professor of psychiatry. The Nixon White House was afraid of Muller and the other veterans because they refused to have amnesia about what had occurred in the rice paddies, elephant grass, mangrove thickets, and murky rivers of Vietnam. "I got shot through the chest," Muller explained. "The bullet went through both lungs and severed the spinal cord. And I was immediately rendered paraplegic, from the fifth thoracic vertebra down. I was conscious for maybe ten seconds after I was hit, and my first thought was, 'I'm hit. I don't fucking believe it. I'm hit!' That was the first thing that went through my head. The second thing was, 'My girl. And my family.' "

Rushed to a hospital ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, Muller had awoken to find seven tubes in his body and no hope of ever again moving his legs. Instead of feeling sorry for himself, he soon felt liberated to speak out for his many friends who came back in bags. "And that's why I can't complain," Muller explained. "I am bitter, not because I was shot in Vietnam. I'm bitter because I put my faith, my allegiance, in my government. I did so with the best, most honest intentions in the world, believing that I was doing right, because [that] my government would lie to me or lead me astray was inconceivable. But having been there, and recognizing what we've done over there, and not being able to justify the death of any of my friends, that's why I'm bitter. I'm bitter because I gave to my country myself, one hundred percent, and they used me."

Many Vietnam veterans who felt the same way had come to Washington that April to make their feelings known. The sentiment among the veterans was that either you had been to "Nam" and understood or you had been brainwashed by the war propaganda machines of the Johnson and Nixon administrations. Nobody who encountered these vets, dressed in their military fatigues, most with shoulder-length hair and angry eyes, could escape the conclusion that at the very least they had been tainted by their combat experiences. "All over Washington veterans were camped out," recalled Boston Globe reporter Thomas Oliphant of the two-mile expanse from the Washington Monument to the Capitol. "Many were disabled. They had illegally taken over the Mall. There were constant threats of police raids. The attorney general, John Mitchell, wanted to strong-arm them, and Kerry had the difficult job of keeping the veterans in check. When they got together, emotions ran high. Kerry's job that entire week was Herculean. He responded to it with incredible political skill and grace."

With Oliphant at his side that Thursday, the Vietnam veteran from Waltham, Massachusetts, who had been chosen to speak for the group was running late. John Kerry hustled across Capitol Hill having just helped defuse a dispute between the local police and a few dozen antiwar protesters over whether the latter were permitted to congregate on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court. He had negotiated a compromise whereby the group would be allowed to demonstrate on the sidewalk in front of the Court steps. Not all their contentious peers had the advantage of Kerry's immediate offices that morning; 108 of the antiwar veterans would be arrested in Washington that day, most freed on ten dollars' bail a head. And not all of the protesters, the majority of whom had been enlisted men in the war, were all that enamored of this Brahmin ex-officer representing them. "A lot of the guys were blue-collar enlisted men, and distrusted officers," former Lieutenant William "Bill" Crandell of recalled. "Kerry had to convince them he was for real."

Kerry had spent the day before rushing around Washington, D.C., talking with veterans on the Mall and working on his speech. He originally called it his "Letter to America." Some of the language came directly from antiwar addresses he had delivered earlier at the Valley Forge National Battlefield in Pennsylvania and Dedham High School in Massachusetts. "When I began it -- in the previous summer -- it was in the form of a letter," Kerry recalled. "Then I transitioned it into a speech. It didn't quite work as a letter." Cobbling his best lines from these, together with some late-night-telephoned suggestions from Adam Walinsky, who'd been a speechwriter for Robert F. Kennedy, Kerry crafted a powerful statement declaring why the United States had to end its military occupation of Vietnam. "The pace of things in Washington, D.C., was ferocious that week," he recalled of the experience. "I remember staying up much of the night, working on organizing my thoughts and collecting the testimonies of fellow veterans. I wrote directly from the heart, developed a collection of pages on yellow legal pads, and then joined them all together. The final product represented the best of my thinking, an emotional plea to Congress to stop funding the war."

Waking up at dawn on the Mall, Kerry rushed over to VVAW headquarters on Vermont Avenue, shaved, and then headed back to the Lincoln Memorial; soon thereafter he moved on to the Supreme Court. Tom Oliphant, who had intuited that the Massachusetts Swift boat veteran was the best antiwar story of Dewey Canyon III, stayed close to Kerry that morning as he moved from location to location. Together they hurried down Constitution Avenue to the Dirksen Senate Office Building with less than five minutes to spare before his appearance. When they got there, a strange calm prevailed around the building, considering approximately 1,000 veterans had flocked to town. "We climbed up the stairs, two steps at a time," Oliphant remembered. "The clock was ticking."

Kerry had been asked to testify only two nights before by Arkansan J. William Fulbright, whom he had met at a fund-raiser hosted by a fellow Democratic senator, Philip Hart of Michigan. Known as a tenacious foreign policy analyst, Fulbright had been elected to the Senate in 1944 and became one of its best-known and most influential members. When it came to promoting international student exchanges, Fulbright had become the respected brand name. But it was as a Vietnam dove that Fulbright was garnering headlines. Starting in 1966, when under his chairmanship the Senate Foreign Relations Committee held hearings on Vietnam, he became a lightning rod for dissent. The title of his 1967 book, The Arrogance of Power, soon was a catchphrase for those criticizing the U.S. government. "The role he plays in Washington is an indispensable role," Walter Lippman wrote of Fulbright in 1963. "There is no one else who is so powerful and also so wise, and if there were any question of removing him from public life, it would be a national calamity."

At Hart's party Kerry had learned that Chief Justice Warren E. Burger had led the Supreme Court to reverse a District Court order, originally sought by the White House, keeping the veterans from camping on the Mall. A virulent animosity had grown between the Nixon administration and the antiwar movement, including these Vietnam veterans. Vietnam policy critics like Fulbright could certainly see the appeal of a well-spoken, highly decorated, Ivy League-educated Navy officer denouncing the war before his committee.

Kerry had already garnered some attention as perhaps the most articulate antiwar veteran on the public-speaking circuit. His television appearances on both ABC's late-night The Dick Cavett Show and NBC News' Sunday morning Meet the Press had even brought him to the far outer edges of celebrity. But testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee -- even if it was chaired by the fully sympathetic Fulbright -- with journalists from around the world reporting his every word was at a different level entirely. The pressure was on. And the opportunity was immense. He felt it his duty to articulate the fears and laments and anguish of an entire generation -- the Vietnam generation, those who had actually been there -- in his two hours of testimony. After all, he would be the only veteran to testify. "What I wanted to do was give voice to our concerns," Kerry explained, looking back, "to put a stop to the charade."

Scrambling to collect his thoughts, he was ushered into a fourth-floor office adjacent to the committee room. Oliphant waited with him as he went over his prepared remarks. Kerry pried the door slightly ajar and took a peek inside the hearing room. It was packed, with TV cameras and lights everywhere. He turned to Oliphant and whispered: "Oh, shit." He stepped back and took a deep breath. The Globe reporter tried to joke away Kerry's stage fright. "Go ahead and be famous," Oliphant jibed. "See if I care." Suddenly, Kerry remembered, "somebody rushed up in to see me and shouted, 'They're waiting for you! They're waiting for you! Get in there quickly! You're late!' " So, clutching his folder, John Kerry headed through the large doors into the committee chamber.

As Oliphant sidled to a spot against the wall, Kerry strode toward the witness table. His wife, Julia, was already there, in the back, while his sister Peggy was anxiously awaiting his arrival in one of the front rows. The solidarity that Kerry felt toward the veterans in the chamber--"brothers," as he called them -- was palpable. "I walked into the room and it was just packed: a standing-room-only crowd; lights blazing," he recalled. "It was a media event. Five senators were sitting up there, waiting. I walked up to the table and apologized profusely for being late. I had no idea that I was going to be the only one to testify. Once I was seated, a few of the senators made introductory comments." Behind Kerry sat his college friend and fellow VVAW organizer George Butler, stroking his newly grown beard. Butler was similarly dazzled by the scene. "I counted," he marveled. "There were seventeen cameras in the room. Even the BBC and Russian television were present."

Kerry made a strong impression even before he spoke. He was long-jawed and patrician-featured beneath his dark Beatle mop. His lean six-foot-four-inch frame was clad in neatly pressed military fatigues with rows of colorful ribbons festooning the shirtfront. When he began, it was in a low clear voice, calm and unhesitating. He often looked up from his notes and straight ahead at the five senators on the committee: Chairman Fulbright, his fellow Democrats Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island and Stuart Symington of Missouri, and Republicans Clifford Case of New Jersey and Jacob Javits of New York. Kerry's testimony proved unflinching. From the outset he took control of the media spectacle, using the limelight to lambaste America's foreign policy leadership and to challenge Congress to end what he described as an immoral war. Kerry's testimony indicted not just Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon and their administrations, but the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment since the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution passed in 1964.

Sitting a dozen rows behind Kerry and quietly urging him on were some 100 more green-fatigued VVAW members whose shared frustrations and aspirations were finding their outlet in his voice. Although security at the Dirksen Building had been tight, Massachusetts Democratic Senator Edward M. Kennedy had managed to finagle passes to the hearing for the veterans. "I would like to say for the record, and also for the men behind me who are also wearing the uniform and their medals, that my sitting here is really symbolic," their decorated representative intoned. "I am not here as John Kerry. I am here as one member of the group of a thousand, which is a small representation of a very much larger group of veterans in this country, and were it possible for all of them to sit at this table they would be here and have the same kind of testimony."

Then the young naval reserve officer launched into an impassioned denunciation of the Vietnam War from a veteran's perspective. Acknowledging his disadvantage compared with senators when it came to formulating foreign policy, Kerry nevertheless suggested they had been getting the big picture wrong. He described what he had seen in Vietnam as a "civil war," a liberation movement aimed at shedding both the remnants of French colonialism and the current burden of American imperialism. "We found that most people didn't even know the difference between communism and democracy," he explained of the South Vietnamese, with the conviction of one who had been in their country to ask them. "They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart."

While his quiet assessment was moving, in essence Kerry wasn't saying anything that Senators George McGovern, Eugene McCarthy, and others hadn't already told their colleagues. And since the mid-1960s even military leaders had publicly criticized U.S. foreign policy in Southeast Asia. General James Gavin, for example, had called the war "militarily preposterous." General David M. Shoup, former commandant of the Marine Corps, had denounced the war on moral grounds. At the state capitol grounds in Madison, Wisconsin, Brigadier General Robert L. Hughes of the Army Reserve had offered a haunting dissent at a 1967 Memorial Day event. Kerry was in some ways just another military man criticizing war policy. "Yet his voice added a new dimension to the criticism of the Nixon administration," McGovern reflected. "For in a clever oratorical move Kerry, after explaining how the South Vietnamese peasants were victims in the war, shifted gears claiming that the American GIs were also victims -- that taxpayers' money was going to support corrupt local dictators throughout Southeast Asia."

What quickly became clear was that Kerry was accusing the U.S. government of war crimes, as ordained through such policies as free fire zones, harassment-and-interdiction fire, search-and-destroy missions, carpet bombings, and the torture and execution of prisoners. He scorned the rationale that one had to destroy a village in order to save it, and excoriated the effects of that policy on the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. As Kerry pointed out, they understandably saw U.S. soldiers not as liberators like the GIs of World War II, but as colonialist intruders even worse than the French before them. "We saw America lose her sense of morality as she accepted very coolly a My Lai, and refused to give up the image of American soldiers who hand out chocolate bars and chewing gum," Kerry lamented to his elders. "We learned the meaning of free fire zones, shooting anything that moves, and we watched while America placed cheapness on the lives of Orientals."

Thus the Navy man raised the grim specter of atrocities committed by Americans in Vietnam. He referred to the "winter soldier investigation" that VVAW had held earlier that year in Detroit, at which more than a hundred veterans had described heinous acts they had committed in Southeast Asia.

"They gave me a Bronze Star... and they put me up for the Silver Star," one veteran there recalled. "But I said you can shove it up your ass.... I threw all the others away. The only thing I kept was the Purple Heart because I still think I was wounded." Other veterans, in gory detail, had told gruesome stories of sadistically torturing and raping Vietnamese women. Burning villages and machine-gunning peasants who were thought to be Viet Cong had become a part of U.S. policy.

Kerry was placing the blame on the U.S. government for instituting such immoral policies. Offering his own experiences as a Swift boat skipper as an example, Kerry detailed how he had been instructed to shoot anything that moved on the Mekong Delta rivers during the U.S.-set curfew hours. He noted that this had led to some unfortunate incidents. Now, he added, veterans across the nation were coming forward to confess to war crimes. And, due in part to the lobbying efforts of VVAW, the next day Senators McGovern and Hart were going to hold hearings investigating atrocities committed by U.S. soldiers in Vietnam. Then Kerry graphically laid out why such an investigation was called for. That winter in Detroit, decorated veterans had "told stories at times that they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in a fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam, in addition to the normal ravage of war." After this breathless recounting of U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions, Kerry remarked that the foregoing indictment didn't even include the tens of thousands of Vietnamese deaths caused by the Johnson and Nixon administrations' bombing campaigns.

Now that he had the senators' rapt attention on what was so desperately wrong with the war, Kerry went after the denigrators of those who opposed it. He took direct aim at Vice President Spiro Agnew, who had delivered a gloves-off speech at West Point the year before in which he declared that "some glamorize the criminal misfits of society while our best men die in Asian rice paddies to preserve the freedom which most of those misfits abuse." Kerry glared right at the five senators and charged Agnew with distorting the antiwar view and those who held it. After all, he was no drugged-out counterculture wandering hippie guru, and neither were the other antiwar veterans sitting behind him. They were not the "summer soldiers and sunshine patriots" Thomas Paine had sneered at in December 1776, but true winter soldiers, American patriots who had put their lives on the line in the Cold War battle against Soviet and Chinese Communist expansionism. They were the fallen tiles of the domino theory, many now paraplegics and quadriplegics and amputees left to rot away ignored in poorly run and underfunded Veterans Administration hospitals. As these brave veterans tried to readjust to an unwelcoming nation, bitterness and guilt consumed many of them. They had seen with their own eyes that no "mystical war" against communism was necessary. "In our opinion, and from our experience, there is nothing in South Vietnam, nothing which could happen that realistically threatens the United States of America," Kerry stated matter-of-factly. "And to attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom, which those misfits supposedly abuse, is to us the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart."

That mention of "hypocrisy" hung over the Senate Foreign Relations gallery like a shroud. Kerry's utterance of the highly charged word -- twice in one sentence -- got everybody's attention. "Kerry gave me the chills," Symington remembered. "Right out the gate it became clear that this was going to be one of those moments frozen in time. Outside the Capitol thousands of veterans were chanting for peace while Kerry was accusing Nixon's administration, Agnew in particular, of hypocrisy. A worm was turning."

But, after charging the government with immorality, hypocrisy, and war crimes, Kerry was still not finished. Indeed, he was there, under the bright lights with all the cameras pointed at him, to advance the cause of veterans' rights. Recounting the heroism American troops had displayed at Hamburger Hill and Khe Sanh, at Hill 8815 and Fire Base 65, he choked on the very concept of Vietnamization. "Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese," Kerry declared, his voice quivering with emotion. "Each day--" he started, but he couldn't finish the thought as the gallery erupted into thunderous applause, most of it from his fellow veterans. (Kerry would be interrupted a dozen times over the course of the hours he testified.) Trying to maintain order, Chairman Fulbright grabbed his microphone and addressed the cheering veterans: "I hope you won't interrupt. He is making a very significant statement. Let him proceed."

Without hesitation Kerry continued to take direct aim at Nixon, accusing the President of letting the war in Southeast Asia drag on just because he refused to go down in history as the first U.S. chief executive to lose a war. Then, in his most famous utterance, the decorated veteran posed a pair of tough questions to the senators. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry inquired. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" An eerie silence fell over the chamber. Then muffled murmurs could be heard. It was a poignant question, and had no quick and easy answer. The reporters covering the hearing knew they had their lead. Kerry's second question would be the next day's headline; they made sure of it.

Maintaining a dignified calm throughout his testimony, even when his voice betrayed some lingering bitterness, Kerry personalized what it was like to join the U.S. military and be sent to Vietnam. He imagined an all-American teenager who one day sees a poster with Uncle Sam pointing at him under the entreaty "I Want YOU." Inspired by what he has been taught the star-spangled figure represents, the young man signs up to serve his country. He endures basic training and then finds himself in Vietnam. Like any good soldier, he follows orders. He kills as many enemy "gooks" as he can, loses a limb, and wins a medal. When he returns home there is no ticker-tape parade to greet him, only contempt from the doves for having killed civilians and resentment from the hawks for having failed to win the war. According to Kerry, employment opportunities for Vietnam veterans barely existed, particularly for those who came back physically or psychologically impaired. He offered the statistic that one out of every ten unemployed Americans was a Vietnam veteran, with the percentage much higher among African Americans. "The hospitals across the country won't or can't meet their demands," Kerry informed the senators of those too disabled even to seek work. "It is not a question of not trying; they haven't got the appropriations. A man recently died after he had a tracheotomy in California, not because of the operation but because there weren't enough personnel to clean the mucus out of the tube, and he suffocated to death."

He went on to tell of other real veterans suffering from their experiences in Vietnam. The My Lai incident -- still a point of national contention -- was an inferred backdrop to this round of remarks. Perhaps most effective was his anecdote about a Native American in California. "He told me how as a boy on an Indian reservation he had watched television and he used to cheer the cowboys when they came in and shot the Indians, and then suddenly one day he stopped in Vietnam and he said: 'My God, I am doing to these people the very same thing that was done to my people,' and he stopped. And that is what we are trying to say: that we think this thing has to end."

Had his testimony ended there, with the applause that shook the chamber, John Kerry would have been noticed in the next day's newspapers for having delivered an eloquent account of the returning winter soldier's perspective on the Vietnam War. He went on to deliver his stinging indictment of the entire U.S. foreign policy establishment. Specifically, he accused the Johnson years' Robert McNamara, Walt Rostow, McGeorge Bundy, and Roswell Gilpatric -- by name -- of having "deserted their troops," adding "that there is no more serious crime in the law of war." Pointing out the U.S. infantry's righteous boast that they never left their wounded comrades behind, Kerry excoriated the previous administration's so-called wise men for having done just that. "These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude," he proclaimed. "They have left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country."

After spelling out such a bleak assessment of everything involving the United States and Vietnam policy, Kerry ended his testimony on a hopeful note. "Thirty years from now, when a man is walking down the street without an arm, or a face, or a leg, and a little boy asks him why, he will have to say 'Vietnam,' " Kerry speculated. "And mean not a desert -- not an obscene memory -- but mean instead a place where America finally turned and soldiers like us helped in the turning."

Upon that, the veterans in the back of the gallery sprang to their feet and gave their spokesman a standing ovation. The senators just looked at one another and smiled. They knew a political star had been born. They let the applause continue to rumble on, according the impassioned young officer his moment in the limelight. Finally, Senator Symington, who had served as the first secretary of the Air Force, asked the witness a question: "You have a Silver Star?"

"Yes, sir," replied Kerry, who was wearing the Navy's third-highest award for combat at the top of his three rows of campaign ribbons.

"You have a Purple Heart with two clusters?" Symington continued.

"Yes, sir," came the answer.

"I have no further questions," concluded the Missouri senator, having established for the record the caliber of the witness.

"Credentials are something we always think about," Senator Javits chimed in. "Your credentials couldn't be higher."

What seemed to impress the Foreign Relations Committee members most during the ensuing question-and-answer session was how the twenty-seven-year-old before them articulated the veterans' pragmatic rationale for getting out of Vietnam in such effectively measured paragraphs. His eloquence was simply expected by those who knew him. The transcript of the committee's questioning of him shows just how well prepared the careful student of Vietnam had come to Capitol Hill. When Chairman Fulbright asked him how Congress should proceed to extricate the United States from Southeast Asia, Kerry had a ready answer. "If we can talk about filibusters for pork-barrel projects, we should talk about filibusters to save lives," he rejoindered. "It's an extraordinary enough question, so it requires an extraordinary response." When Senator Case, a courageous antiwar Republican, quizzed Kerry on why the White House's "peace with honor" approach wasn't the best policy, the VVAW spokesman answered: "As a man who fought in the war, I know this policy has no chance of bringing peace if it arms people of another country and tells them to go on fighting. It would be criminal if the fighting continued and if large numbers of South Vietnamese tried to stand up for something they can't. [It] would place all of their lives on our conscience, along with all the others."

As the hearing wound down, Chairman Fulbright ended the questioning with praise for the witness. Impressed with Kerry's manners and intellect, the Arkansas Democrat lauded the young activist for trying to effect changes in policy by working within the system. Dubbing him a leader of the Vietnam generation, Fulbright implored him not to lose faith in the capacity of Congress to respond to what he had said that day. "I don't think I'd be here if I didn't believe," Kerry quipped. "I won't quit, Senator, but unless the country can respond on the war, how can it respond to poverty and all the other problems? I'll keep trying, and I see no other broad system than democracy, but democracy must remain responsive or there will be pressure for other systems, and that is beginning to happen in this country." Hearing that answer, the renowned pacifist magazine writer I. F. Stone leaped to his feet in the gallery to set off yet another standing ovation for John Kerry.

Copyright © 2004 by Douglas Brinkley