Inside The Mind Of John Kerry

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Eventually Kerry did mention Diana's situation in some speeches but only after his sister began to talk about it publicly. That confirmed something I had long suspected: Kerry is a very proper Bostonian. His apparent aloofness is actually an antique form of New England propriety. His reluctance to wear his religious faith on his sleeve is part of this ethos, as is his formal, hortatory Sunday-sermon speaking style. A strong sense of honor comes with the territory, a discomfort with swagger and braggadocio. "I once was with Kerry watching Bob Dole on television," recalls David Wade, an aide who is usually found in Kerry's immediate proximity. "Someone was asking Dole about how he was wounded in World War II. Dole wouldn't do it. He said, 'You just don't talk about those things.'" Kerry, who was wounded three times in Vietnam, nodded his head vigorously, as Wade remembers, and said, "That's how it is."

Kerry talks all the time about the lessons he learned in Vietnam but rarely about what he did there. The story of how he saved Green Beret Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River under fire in 1969 would never have been told if Rassmann hadn't offered to tell it--dramatically, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Years ago, three of the Vietnam combat veterans Kerry served with in the Senate--John McCain, Bob Kerrey and Max Cleland--told me something that Kerry had never even hinted at: that Kerry had come to their rescue on occasions when they had been publicly attacked. He organized Op-Ed pieces and television appearances to defend his colleagues; he wrote a letter during the 2000 South Carolina primary, signed by Vietnam combat veterans of both parties, calling on George W. Bush to stop associating with veterans' groups who said McCain had abandoned vets; when Kerrey was accused of participating in a massacre of civilians in Vietnam, Kerry called some mutual friends and had them hang out with Kerrey until the storm passed. "I just love the guy," Kerrey once told me.

Military honor certainly accounts for some of Kerry's overactive sense of propriety, though not all of it. "The reticence, or whatever, came from both our parents but from my mother most of all," Kerry's younger brother Cameron told me a few weeks ago. "She was vehement about civic duty and personal correctness. Once, when I started talking about winning a ski race, she said to me, 'Shrink it down'--meaning my head. That was one of her expressions. John was more of a rebellious adolescent than I was. He had some real knock-down, drag-outs with our father. But he never rebelled against what Mom taught us."

Actually, Kerry didn't rebel all that much against his father either. Richard Kerry was a career foreign-service officer who saw public service as a priestly calling. He was vehement in his beliefs, a foreign policy realist who disliked U.S. attempts to remake the world (and disagreed with his son's decision to go to Vietnam). Family discussions around the dinner table were dead serious and high-minded; irony doesn't seem to be a Kerry family specialty. At an early age, John had to act like a member of the Council on Foreign Relations to get his father's attention and perhaps his affection. That may have caused some rebellious moments, but young Kerry never renounced the foreign policy priesthood. He is, to this day, very much a diplomatic traditionalist.