Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush

Chapter 10: Framing John Kerry: The 2004 Presidential Campaign and “the Sixties”

200 10 Framing John Kerry The 2004 PReSIDenTIAL CAmPAIGn AnD “The SIxTIeS” The Bush campaign was relentless in portraying Kerry as an exemplar of everything that’s wrong with the sixties. . . . We seesawed between each side trying to use the sixties for their purposes, both overtly and in a subterranean way. Journalist Todd Purdum (2004) The 2004 election campaign reignited the simmering fight over discordant memories of the 1960s by focusing on the most painful issue of that time: the war in Vietnam. The Democrats tried to take advantage of nominee Senator John Kerry’s distinguished service record in the war: Kerry, a navy lieutenant, was awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star with Combat V for valor, and three Purple hearts. As a decorated hero, to the Democrats he seemed emblematic of the “good sixties”: a selfless volunteer who answered John Kennedy’s challenge to “ask what you can do for your country” by joining the military in time of war. Kerry, however, had also vigorously protested against the war when he got back from Vietnam. This enabled Bush to use the 1960s against Kerry and to brand him as one more northeastern liberal example of the “bad sixties”—one of the longhaired elitist protesters who had caused America to lose the war in Vietnam. The wounds of the 1960s continued to bleed in 2004. “Gallant Warrior, Principled Dissident”: John Kerry’s 1960s Like George Bush, John Kerry spent a good portion of the 1960s at Yale (class of 1966), though his undergraduate experience was more like Al Gore’s at harvard than Bush’s: interested in politics and public issues, he became president of the Yale Political Union, was elected by his classmates to give the senior oration, volunteered for officer candidate training in the U.S. navy in his senior year, and was sent to Vietnam shortly af- 201 The 2004 Presidential Campaign ter graduating. Upon his return from the war, Kerry became a prominent spokesman for the protest group Vietnam Veterans Against the War in 1970–71. “Unlike mr. Bush, mr. Gore or mr. mcCain,” observed columnist Frank Rich during the 2004 campaign, Kerry “is the first in either party to have been both a leader in combat in Vietnam and a leader in the antiwar movement; he represents both the establishment that fueled our misadventure in Southeast Asia and the counterculture that changed America, for better and for worse, in revolt against it.”1 Kerry’s campaign focused on his Vietnam service. he was frequently flanked by Vietnam veterans at rallies and in his ads. In fact his campaign may have been saved by a fellow veteran, propelling Kerry to victory in the Democratic primaries: only days before the Iowa caucuses, Jim Rassmann, a former Green Beret who served with Kerry in Vietnam but had not seen him since, flew to Iowa to tell an emotional story of how a wounded Kerry had saved his life when he was thrown overboard by an explosion. Although by 2004 he had served massachusetts in the Senate for nearly twenty years, Kerry’s distinguished service in Vietnam remained his chief appeal for many Democratic primary voters. The main obstacle for any Democrat challenging Bush in the wake of 9/11 and ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan was to prove that he could wage war effectively. Democrats chose Kerry partly because they believed that Republicans would not be able to tag him as weak on defense issues—as they had so many other Democrats since the 1960s—and that he was thus the most “electable” Democrat. In February 2004 party chairman Terry mcAuliffe argued that one of Kerry’s main assets was his “chest full of medals.”2 To his supporters, Kerry’s candidacy was especially attractive because he appealed to a core segment of Democrats: those who had come to believe by the late 1960s that the Vietnam War was wrong. Furthermore, he had volunteered for the war, an act they took as symbolic of early 1960s idealism . As Todd Purdum reported, Kerry’s service and protest history gave him “the cachet of gallant warrior and principled dissident,” an attractive combination to Democrats.3 “The biggest doubt about Democrats coming into this election was on the military: Do they respect the military and will they support spending for the military?” said Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg in the summer of 2004. “Kerry is making considerable progress on that.”4 The Kerry campaign imagery focused primarily on events from...