Maybe there's a filmmaker out there somewhere who'd be interested in
making a kind of surreal documentary - something in the Being John
Malkovich vein, called John Kerry Appears Before His Own Committee.
The action opens in 1971, with Vietnam Veteran John Kerry posing his
famous question to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: "How do you
ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" The camera then
cuts to the Committee members where we find not its 1971 Chair,
Arkansas Senator J. William Fulbright, but its 2010 Chair,
Massachusetts Senator John Kerry who is painfully unable to answer the
young man in front of him.
Like the Malkovich film, the Kerry film
would focus on questions of continuity and consciousness: How can the
1971 and the 2010 versions be the same man?
Until that filmmaker steps forward, though, we'll have to deal with
these questions in more mundane fashion and simply ask how Kerry can
today fail to repeat the question he asked thirty-nine years ago - or
at least why he won't ask it out loud, when his doing so would carry
far more weight than it did the first time.
True, Kerry has recently sounded less than a 100 percent comfortable
with the Administration's war plans - his remarks at a recent
Committee hearing prompted the headline: "2 leading senators raise
doubt about Afghan war." And given the Bloomberg National Poll's
finding that only seven percent see the war in Afghanistan as the most
important issue facing the country right now, a glass-is-half-full
take might be that at least Kerry drew some pretty decent attention
toward this war. An optimist might even say he's just warming up.
The problem is that John Kerry's had nine years to warm up now. And
what has he come up with after all that time? While questioning
whether the Administration had a "solid strategy," he nonetheless
argued that "this is not the time to give up." Give it another nine,
maybe.
The same day that Kerry was telling the nation to soldier on, the
Foreign Relations Committee released 1,100 pages of classified
transcripts of 1968 closed sessions that included remarks from
Senators expressing serious misgivings about the course of the Vietnam
War. The 2010 Kerry is very impressed that the record "shows these
guys wrestling with the complexity of it when our generation was
living it out in a very personal way. You couldn't have imagined in
that room of the Capitol that policy makers were agonizing over it in
that way, and having that gut kind of conversation."
I can't help but think that the 1971 John Kerry would have said, "So
what?" - or at least a lot of the other Vietnam Veterans Against the
War who came to Washington with him would have asked, "But what did
they do?" Kerry's predecessor, Fulbright, seemed much more to the
point at the time when he stated his fear that if all the Committee
did was wring its hands, "We are just a useless appendix on the
governmental structure."
Bloomberg's pollsters may have found that concluding the Afghanistan
War doesn't rank that high on most Americans' priority lists, but it's
not because they think it makes sense - 58 percent considered it a
"lost cause," while only 36 percent thought the U.S. could win. It's
just that it has come to seem almost a permanent and inevitable part
of the political landscape - a situation that cries out for people in
high places to act upon what so many can see. But what is Kerry
calling for? "A better understanding of exactly what the definition
of success is in Afghanistan."
John Kerry's done some very useful things in his twenty-five years in
the Senate; he even voted against authorizing the Gulf War. But
whether it was his White House ambitions, genuine belief in the "War
on Terror," or something else, his name does not come up in
discussions of current antiwar leadership. If someone who knows him
could just tell him that he still has the chance to realize the
promise he showed nearly forty years ago by giving the right response
to the question he asked back then, it would be a great service to him
- and the rest of us.
Until then, though, it's hard to avoid the conclusion that where the
1971 John Kerry pushed the nation forward, the 2010 version is holding
it back.