Interviews
An Interview with Douglas Brinkley
Barnes & Noble.com: What made you want to write this book about John Kerry? When you began it, did you think that Kerry could win the Democratic presidential nomination?
Douglas Brinkley: People assume I had some kind of wisdom about Kerry's ascendancy, but I actually started this book several years ago. I wanted to do a project about United States senators who were Vietnam veterans. Kerry had never written about his experiences, and I saw him as a perfect vehicle for telling a coming-of-age story through his combat experience in the Mekong Delta and his leadership in the antiwar movement. I originally planned to do only an article on Kerry and then found he kept voluminous war diaries -- this was back in 2002, and he had not formally announced he would run for the presidency. His was a great story to tell, and I then decided it would make a good book.
B&N.com: Did Kerry's upbringing affect his decision to enlist to fight in Vietnam, rather than seeking a draft deferment?
DB: His father, Richard, was a test pilot during World War II. He flew planes at very high altitudes and contracted tuberculosis. His father always wanted to serve his country. But because of his tubercular condition, he moved into the Foreign Service. Richard Kerry believed very strongly that communism had to be defeated. But he was opposed to the Vietnam War since he thought it was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time. Still, in 1966, when John Kerry graduated from Yale, there was no thought that he would not serve or would try to seek a deferment instead or an seek easy billet in the National Guard.
B&N.com: How did Kerry come to oppose the war?
DB: In Kerry's diaries, letters, and journals you can see how anguished he was about the absurdity and immorality of trying to win over the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese people. He didn't agree with burning their villages in "order to save them" and wrote his mother and father that he was "an uncommitted soldier." When he returned to the United States in March 1969 after winning three Purple Hearts, he continued as a U.S. naval officer and served as an admiral's aide, all the while looking for a way to get out of uniform and take to the streets to add his voice to the antiwar movement. That opportunity came in January 1970, when he was able to leave the Navy, and he became the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
B&N.com: As part of a 1971 Washington demonstration against the Vietnam War, Kerry threw away his ribbons but kept his medals. Why didn't he throw away the medals in the protest too, since in keeping them it seems to suggest that he had some kind of ambivalence about discarding them?
DB: There was no ambivalence at all. Most of this criticism of Kerry regarding his not giving up the medals has come from the far right, from people like Rush Limbaugh.
In April 1971, Kerry was the organizer of a demonstration denouncing the Nixon's administration's incursion into Cambodia and Laos. This demonstration was intended for veterans to give something back to the government in protest such as a ribbons, dog tags, berets, and enlistment papers. He was wearing all of his ribbons at the time. He gave away those ribbons. He would have looked like a jerk wearing dangling medals. When they organized the demonstration, they didn't even know they were going to give back something to the government. At the time, he was in Washington organizing this, and his home was in Boston -- that was where his belongings were. Very few veterans were wearing medals at that demonstration. They were giving back ribbons and papers. The main thing is that is was a symbolic gesture. It is true that the ceremony rankled a lot of veterans. It upset John McCain.
B&N.com: What did Kerry say on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he was selected to testify against the war before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee?
DB: At the beginning of that week, Kerry appeared on Meet the Press, and he then met Senator William Fulbright at a cocktail party. Fulbright was so impressed with Kerry that he invited him to testify before the committee. In his testimony, Kerry gave the famous line, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" All three network news shows seized on that. And it drew attention to Vietnamese Veterans Against the War.
B&N.com: How do you see Kerry using his Vietnam service and subsequent opposition to the war in the presidential campaign? Will the issue help or hurt him?
DB: Certainly his Vietnam service will help him. People care about his service and foreign affairs experience.
B&N.com: Will Kerry's service in Vietnam in comparison to President Bush's service in the National Guard continue to be an issue?
DB: It's a back-burner issue. It helps define both men's biographies. Kerry certainly has the more triumphant saga of how he spent his youth, but people are not going to vote over each candidate's military service.
B&N.com: What lessons might Kerry draw from his naval service in Vietnam that might affect a Kerry presidency?
DB: Kerry's most famous quip is, "I know something about aircraft carriers, for real." Someone who has seen combat knows that you go to war only as a last resort. Anyone who has spent time seeing people getting shot up knows that the glamour of the battlefield is nonexistent. That experience will affect the most difficult choice of sending troops abroad. A President Kerry would send troops into action only if all diplomacy fails.
B&N.com: What will your next book be about?
DB: Later this year [2004], Viking will be publishing my edited version of Jack Kerouac's journals. It will be called Windblown World: The Journals of Jack Kerouac, 1947-1954.
