LETTER FROM AMERICA: You know a politician is serious about the presidency when he appears on NBC's Meet the Press to say he is forming an "exploratory committee".
You know he is being taken seriously when he merits a 10,000-word profile by Joe Klein, author of Primary Colours, in the New Yorker.
Not that we didn't have some idea that Senator John F Kerry was dead set on getting the Democratic nomination for 2004. He has already made nine trips to New Hampshire and raised a couple of million dollars.
But many wonder if this New Englander, who is very conscious that he shares the same initials with John F Kennedy, has a realistic chance of making it to the White House.
He is certainly ambitious enough; his nickname in Boston is "Live Shot" from his fondness for television cameras. He has money. His wife is Heinz foods heir Teresa Heinz, whose Georgetown house remains a shrine to her late husband, John Heinz, killed in a 1991 plane crash.
For old-style Democrats who long for someone to rally around, Kerry is the man.
He is for gun control, abortion rights and the environment, though he told NBC: "I am for the death penalty for terrorists."
He gets cheers at Democratic rallies by declaring that no young Americans should be sent abroad to fight for oil.
He dares to accuse Republicans of cooking up the Iraq crisis to divert attention from the economy and corporate scandals.
However, Kerry is a Massachusetts liberal in the mould of Edward Kennedy, Paul Tsongas and Michael Dukakis - all of them failed aspirants to the Oval Office.
Many democrats believe they can only regain the White House by tactically moving to the centre, as Bill Clinton did in the 1990s.
Clinton lectured Democrats this week that returning to the party's liberal roots would be an electoral disaster, and that people don't trust them on national security in dangerous times.
"When people are feeling insecure," he told the Democratic Leadership Council in New York, "they'd rather have someone who is strong and wrong rather than somebody who is weak and right."
Kerry does have strong patriotic credentials. He voted for war in Iraq.
He was decorated several times for courage as a naval officer in Vietnam, where, by his own admission he was something of a cowboy, racing a fast boat into battle on the Mekong while playing Jimi Hendrix on loudspeakers.
Later, Kerry concluded the Vietnam war had no legitimacy and became spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War. He once famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam...for a mistake?"
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ANOTHER failed Democratic aspirant to the White House, Bob Kerrey, is still paying for his mistakes in Vietnam. The former senator, currently president of New School University in New York, was heavily censured last year for his role in the massacre of a Vietnamese village by a platoon under his command.
Kerrey's Vietnam past was raised several times in a tumultuous meeting in an auditorium at West 12th Street, with NSU students protesting at his support for regime change in Iraq. Many called for his resignation as president of a university with a tradition of pacifism. American campuses have become hotbeds of anti-war agitation, reminiscent of the days when John Kerry led student protests against the Vietnam war.
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With America again involving itself in foreign battlefields, the cautionary tale of The Quiet American has greater relevance than ever. Set in French-ruled Saigon, Graham Greene's novel relates how an idealistic but naive CIA agent called Pyle helped create a "third force" friendly to the Americans that exploded car bombs to discredit the communists.
Just before 9/11, Miramax completed making a film of The Quiet American. But in the climate of outrage after the attacks on America, Hollywood got cold feet about distributing a movie associating Americans with terrorism. The movie was withheld until next January. It was only released for a two-week showing in New York and Los Angeles last month after furious protests from Oscar-hungry actor Michael Caine, who brilliantly portrays a disillusioned English journalist called Thomas Fowler who helps despatch Pyle violently from the scene.
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The US Senate held a birthday party on Thursday to honour a senator who once said no one would ever "force southern people to admit the negroes into our theatres, swimming pools and homes". Strom Thurmond, the first serving US senator to reach 100 years of age, later became a supporter of civil rights. He also had a reputation for treating women in a way that would nowadays invite litigation.
As one speaker paying tribute said: "I see so many people here today whose life Strom Thurmond has touched - and some he even squeezed."