Biography: Those who want to learn more about John Kerry might start with this compelling study of the young naval officer and decorated war hero who survived Vietnam to become an anti-war activist, a senator for Massachusetts, and now the 2004 Democratic presidential candidate, writes Anthony Glavin.
Given unfettered access to Kerry's letters, war journals and unpublished reminiscences, Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at the University of New Orleans, has produced an in-depth portrait of both Kerry and the Vietnam conflict that in many ways served to define his generation.
The grandson of a Czech Jew named Fritz Kohn who converted to Catholicism and moved to Chicago in 1905, Kerry likely inherited his sense of public service from his father, Richard, a career diplomat in the US foreign service, whose overseas postings saw Kerry spend two years in Swiss boarding schools. His mother, Rosemary Forbes, from an old New England family, yet reared in England and France, is credited with instilling a sense of social justice that saw her son embrace the burgeoning US civil rights movement while still at St Paul's boarding school in New Hampshire.
Entering Yale in 1962, Kerry played soccer, headed the student political union, devoured the anti-war poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and first began to question American involvement in Vietnam. Nonetheless, he entered the US navy upon graduation in 1966, feeling it was his duty despite his growing reservations about the war.
Stationed on the guided-missile frigate Gridley for 13 months, Kerry was devastated in February 1968 by news of the combat death in Vietnam of one of his closest friends, and again that June by the assassination of anti-war presidential candidate Robert Kennedy. By that November, Kerry himself was in Vietnam, skipper of a PCF Swift boat designed to engage the Vietcong in the treacherous rivers and canals of the Mekong Delta. The deployment of these loud, clumsy, shallow-bottomed 50-foot aluminium boats in narrow, often jungle-obscured waterways struck Kerry and many of his fellow "brown-water sailors" as an inane strategy within an increasingly meaningless war. That said, Kerry proved himself an uncompromising and courageous Swift boat skipper, collecting three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Medal after risking his own life to rescue a fellow sailor, before being transferred out of Vietnam in April 1969, and discharged in January 1970.
Much has been written about Kerry's patrician background and aloof manner, but his Vietnam journals and letters home, together with the testimony of his crew members, reveal a reflectiveness, a keen intellect and a basic decency behind his personal style. Troubled by "how cheap life became" and dismayed by the racism inherent in how "most of the men found that it was really easy to kill a 'gook'", Kerry also reflected upon the critical difference between occupiers and liberators of war-torn countries, a distinction seemingly lost on the current US administration in its rush to war on Iraq.
Returning to the US, Kerry became the leading spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, campaigning for the upgrading of veterans' hospitals and electrifying the nation with his two-hour televised denunciation of carpet- bombing, free-fire zones, search-and- destroy missions, and atrocities against Vietnamese prisoners and civilians before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. Defeated in his bid for Congress in 1972 by a smear campaign which painted him as an unpatriotic radical, Kerry eschewed politics for a decade, serving as a state prosecutor, before being elected Massachusetts lieutenant governor in 1982 and US senator in 1984.
Honouring a promise in his war journal "never to forget", he made 14 trips back to Vietnam between 1991 and 1993 as chair of a senate committee investigating the POW/ MIA issue, which led - after further lobbying of President Clinton by Kerry and fellow Vietnam veteran Senator John McCain - to full diplomatic recognition of Vietnam by the US in 1995.
Brinkley's exhaustively researched book tells us plenty about Kerry that his own campaign will likely highlight - his ice hockey, hunting, motorcycle, surfing, glider piloting - but possibly not the fact that he speaks French! At six feet four inches, Kerry will dwarf Bush next autumn in those post-debate handshake photo-ops which the Republicans must be dreading. Dwarf him in every sense.
Anthony Glavin is a writer and former US Peace Corps volunteer
Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War. By Douglas Brinkley, William Morrow/Harper Collins USA, 546pp. $25.95