A Call to Service - Rilegato

Kerry, John

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670032603 ISBN 13: 9780670032600

Casa editrice: Penguin, 2003

Riassunto

A senate opposition leader and 2004 democratic presidential candidate shares his experiences as a veteran, an opponent of the Vietnam War, his efforts to fight the political establishment, and his hopes for the presidency. By the author of The New War. 100,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

John Kerry the leader of the American Democratic Party.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Preface

Twelve years ago, late one night, I found myself on a C-135 transport plane that was taking me and two senatorial colleagues on the long flight across Europe and the Middle East to Kuwait. The Persian Gulf War had only recently ended, and we were headed for a postwar inspection tour of the region.

John Glenn, John McCain, and I had been discussing our shared love of flying until John Glenn fell asleep. And now John McCain and I sat in uncomfortable silence for a few moments until, inevitably, we started talking not about the Gulf War but about our war—Vietnam.

Though we had served together in the U.S. Senate for nearly five years at that point, we had never yet shared our common and separate experiences in Vietnam. We were aware of each other’s public stories, of course. I knew that John—the son of a distinguished admiral—had been a Navy pilot who was shot down over North Vietnam, where he was held, beaten, and tortured for five and a half years, much of that time served after he refused to accept freedom on terms that violated the POW code of honor governing the order of prisoner releases.

And John knew I had also been a Navy officer, commanding a “swift boat”— a small, fast patrol boat used for counterinsurgency missions—in the Mekong Delta for two tours of duty. Unlike him, I had been able to come back after I received my third Purple Heart. Upon my return, however, based on my strong feelings that our fighting men were being sacrificed for a mission in which our leaders no longer believed, I got involved in the effort of veterans to stop the war.

Not surprisingly John, who was still imprisoned in the Hanoi Hilton at that time, took a dim view of my antiwar activities and, in fact, campaigned for my Republican opponent when I first ran for the U.S. Senate in 1984. But he didn’t - really know the story of my personal experiences in Vietnam, just as I didn’t really know his.

The gulf between us on that issue was typical. In those difficult years of the Vietnam War there were too many on both the left and right in this country, along with the Communists in Vietnam, who had tried to pit those who had worn the uniform and now opposed the war against those who still supported it and who, whether on the battlefields or in prison cells in Hanoi, continued to serve with the greatest of valor. John McCain and I were caught up in that crossfire, started by those who wanted differences over the war to become fundamental differences between two soldiers.

I don’t know exactly how long we talked about Vietnam in that dark C-135 cabin, but by daybreak we shared a new understanding—and a new friendship. And we built upon that friendship over the next few years to bring our war, finally, to an end.

Later that year, I was asked by the Senate majority leader to chair a special committee on POW/MIA affairs, in part because of continuing media reports— and family hopes that they raised—that a significant number of Americans were still being secretly held in Vietnam. This issue, moreover, had led to the continuation of our economic boycott against Vietnam and our refusal to resume normal diplomatic relations with that country even though the hostilities had ended nearly two decades earlier. John McCain also agreed to serve on this committee.

Both of us had signed up for what was generally regarded as one of the most thankless tasks in Washington. We had to review a thousand old documents, struggle to achieve some level of cooperation from a Vietnamese government that had hundreds of thousands of its own MIAs, and deal with a POW/MIA advocacy network that fed every wild rumor or conspiracy theory, preying on the grief of families of Americans who had not come home. We had to fight against the Rambo psychology of reopening all the contentious issues of the war all over again, and—for John McCain and me, at any rate—we had to come to grips with our own memories.

I certainly remembered how close I had come to being killed by rifle fire and rocket launchers from the shore in our forays deep into Viet Cong territory. I remembered crew members and close friends who didn’t come back. I knew I could have wound up, like John McCain and the sons and husbands of those who anxiously followed our hearings, a POW or MIA.

We made a total of eight trips to Vietnam during and immediately after our hearings. These visits were filled with unforgettable experiences, and one of the most deeply moving of them was accompanying John to the site of the Hanoi Hilton and seeing the tiny room—really almost a cage—where he sacrificed a good part of his young adulthood for his country, in pain and fear and isolation.

I have had no greater privilege in all my life than finding, then standing on, common ground with John McCain, with whom I formed a close personal and political alliance during these hearings. We insisted on examining all the evidence, demanded that witnesses be held accountable for the reliability of their testimony, and, in the end, convinced the entire committee to agree on a report that concluded that there were likely no Americans still alive in Vietnam.

And our alliance continued to the next steps our country needed to take to honorably put the war behind us—abandonment of the economic boycott against Vietnam and normalization of diplomatic relations. President Clinton had the courage to put these policies into action, and he still says that he couldn’t have done it without the constant presence and united support of two Vietnam vets named John—one a Democrat, one a Republican; one a famous POW, the other a famous war protester. As for me, I’m most proud of the fact that when we say the word “Vietnam” today we mean not just a war but a country—at long last, a place where, as I hoped thirty years ago, “America turned and veterans helped in the turning.”

My friendship with John McCain has continued and even strengthened after our last Vietnam mission, and neither of us has much use for those in either party who complain that we should keep to our own partisan interests. In fact, we have discovered that we share something far more precious than party: a common call to service.

I learned several important lessons during our effort to put the war behind us for ourselves, our generation, and our country.

I learned how to reach across partisan and ideological divides to find common ground in the rich soil of American values and experiences.

I learned how to overcome the passionate convictions of narrow interest groups to build a consensus based on facts rather than prejudice.

I learned how to make my personal experiences a platform for broader lessons about American ideals and their special place in the world’s struggle for peace and justice.

And perhaps most important, I learned that the call to service did not end with a discharge from the Navy or election to the United States Senate.

I’m pretty sure that our mutual experience in transcending the Vietnam trauma was one important factor that led John McCain to run for president in 2000 as a serious reformer, a “straight talker,” and a patriot who believes our willingness to meet domestic challenges is as important a test of national will as our willingness to engage in warfare. He did his best to summon his party to rise to such values, and had he succeeded, the country would be in much better hands today.

I don’t believe there’s much left in the Republican Party of the spirit of true civic service or the courage to defy powerful interests and seriously address the most pressing national issues. And too many people in my own Democratic Party are focused on narrow interests and as a result have too little vision of the vast potential for achievement, at home and abroad, for the United States under the kind of leadership we deserve.

It’s time for a new call to service. It’s time to rally Democrats, Republicans, and inde- pendents alike to face the common challenges of this generation. In the course of my career, from the Mekong Delta to the Senate, I’ve tried to muster the right combination of the toughness to govern and the compassion to care—along with a deep commitment to justice and to America’s progressive values. But my experiences have taught me that a leader succeeds only to the extent that he is able to communicate his values, his goals, his ideas, and much of who he is in direct communication, one on one. I began that kind of conversation with John McCain on a C-135 late one night, and it’s continued ever since. I want to begin that conversation with my fellow citizens in this book and during this presidential campaign, and continue it while we work together to meet the challenges of our age.

Why I Am Running for President

I am a child of the greatest generation of Americans and therefore a member of the most fortunate generation of Americans. Like my parents, I have always hoped and often assumed that my own children will have more opportunities in life than I had and will live in a country and in a world where such opportunities are more widely shared and more deeply rooted than at any time in the past.

I am running for president in no small part to redeem that promise for the America to come. While we are living today in the most extraordinary and powerful nation on earth, I believe not only that America’s best days are still to come but that our best work is yet to be done. We have the capacity to lift the life of our own land as well as lead the world to a safer and more hopeful future. But doing so will require equal measures of strength, vision, and resolve, embodied in a leadership that grasps both the breadth of our potential and the great legacy of our past.

As Americans, we inherit with our birthright of freedom a sacred chain of responsibility that stretches back to the Founders and to the sacrifices of the immigrants who built this country before and after them and extends to the present day. Our task is not just to guarantee material progress: along with a better life we must pass on to our children that unique sense of opti...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Penguin
• Data di pubblicazione: 2003
• ISBN 10: 0670032603
• ISBN 13: 9780670032600
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero edizione: 1
• Numero di pagine: 256