Inside The Mind Of John Kerry

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"He had three impossible decisions to make," says John Sasso, Kerry's old Boston political friend who is his liaison to the Democratic National Committee. "If he'd made the wrong choice on any one of them, he wouldn't be here today. I don't think two out of a hundred politicians would have been able to make all three correctly under such intense pressure--but those are the sorts of situations where John is at his best." That is, of course, the party line among John Kerry's friends. He is great when his back is against the wall. He is studious, thorough and engaged when making policy decisions. He is independent to the point of being something of a loner. He takes on tough issues with little political upside--investigating drug running by Nicaraguan contras using CIA planes, investigating money laundering at the corrupt, Abu Dhabi--owned Bank of Credit and Commerce International, doing the scut work necessary to prove that no American prisoners of war were still being held by the Vietnamese.

All of which is true but incomplete. Kerry is an oddly elusive character for a national politician. There are nagging questions about his steadiness, especially on issues located at the jittery intersection of politics and policy. His contradictory votes on Iraq--giving the President the authority to go to war, then voting against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for the occupation--have been at the heart of the Republican attacks against him this year. And Kerry's most notable asset--his grace and clear thinking under pressure--comes and goes with maddening irregularity. "He always scares you at the beginning of a race," says a Boston politician who has watched Kerry for decades. "He's unfocused, ineffective--and then, at the last minute, he gets his act together and wins." That was true in his race for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 and for the U.S. Senate in '84, and it was certainly true in Kerry's toughest campaign before 2004, his Senate race against Governor William Weld in '96. It is an enigma that cuts close to the essence of an intensely private man: Why does John Kerry require a near death experience to be an effective politician? I have a theory.

Early last summer, Kerry told me--off the record--that his sister Diana had been laid off from her job as a Boston public-school teacher because of budget cuts. Kerry had recently staged a press conference with the teacher of the year in South Carolina, who had also been laid off, and I asked him whether he planned to hold a similar event with Diana. "Oh, no," he said. "I wouldn't want to embarrass her."