Kerry hopes so. "I've got a pretty fundamental sense of why I'm in this business," he says to this reporter, again sounding out one of his themes. "I know what brought me here in the first place. And I'm very frustrated."

Here he begins, again, to test a theme, one I later hear him give from the top of a picnic table at a meeting of Springfield Democrats. "Because so much has been written about the 'Greatest Generation,' I think it's time that we ask the question: What's going to be said about the virtue of our generation? Nobody seems to be nurturing that very much."

Of his fellow boomer, Bush, he says: "I can't tell you what this administration is offering us that suggests that we have a larger sense of what we'd have as a legacy with respect to this time we have in government to make a difference."

Kerry, who first jumped to national prominence during the Vietnam War, combines a "Greatest Generation" profile with a hippie credibility his peers must envy. He enlisted in the Navy right after graduating from Yale in 1966, served six months in country, was awarded a Bronze Star, a Silver Star and three Purple Hearts. Then he came back and marched against the very war in which he had served so valiantly, helping to form Vietnam Veterans Against the War.

"How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry famously asked the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971. "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" Sen. Claiborne Pell, D-R.I., thanked Kerry, then 27, for testifying before the committee, saying, "As the witness knows, I have a very high personal regard for him and hope, before his life ends, he will be a colleague of ours in this body."

A few days before I was to travel with Kerry in Massachusetts, I found an ancient copy of "The New Soldier" -- which Kerry and Vietnam Veterans Against the War put together in 1971 to record their week in Washington protesting the war. I handed it to him upon squeezing into his minivan, and he began leafing through it.

"There's Robert Muller," Kerry says, pointing at scrapbook photos in the back of the book showing a high-school era Muller pole vaulting before he went abroad and lost the use of his legs. "Gold Star Mothers," he says, pointing to a photo of an older woman wrapped in a flag, clutching the medals that are all that's left of her son. "There's Rusty Sachs," Kerry says. "Look at his face." Sachs is throwing one of his medals back on the steps of Congress; he's fighting back tears.

The moment has political ramifications, and not just because some -- like McCain -- found the spectacle of veterans tossing their medals distasteful and inappropriate. In 1984, the Wall Street Journal revealed that -- despite a speech Kerry gave in which he angrily claimed that "This administration forced us to return our medals ... These leaders denied us the integrity those symbols supposedly gave our lives" -- Kerry had actually kept his medals. The medals he threw that day belonged to others, it turned out. It was an example, the media alleged, of Kerry the phony.

From Kerry's perspective, of course, it was all pretty complicated and he never really understood what the brouhaha was all about. The medals were, after all, a highly personal matter. He'd ultimately decided to throw his also-important ribbons, and the medals he tossed were on behalf of some disabled vets. He never claimed to have thrown his own medals, and certainly the more important matter was that he had enlisted and fought bravely in the war, and had then come back to protest the atrocities he had participated in. And, it should be noted, in the "60 Minutes" interview with Kerry, which ran a mere four weeks after the 1971 demonstration on the Mall, Kerry refers to the "the emotion in the faces of those men who threw their medals back ... if you watch their faces, there was agony in them as they threw those things back," and so on, continuously referring to the medal-throwers in the third person, never including himself.

A couple pages after the photo of Sachs and others throwing their medals back are two different close-ups of the piles the vets left in their wake. "Look at that," Kerry says. "You see? A big deal was made about whether I threw back my medals or ribbons or whatever, but look. People threw everything. Ribbons. Discharge papers. Photographs. Certificates ..."

Indeed, that's what the photos show. In one photo, a veteran is throwing his cane. Kerry swallows. Slightly shakes his head.

He moves on to other photos in the book. In one of the last shots, a sapling stands on the Mall where the veterans all congregated that week in April. The text next to the photo says "The quadrangle on the Mall is vacant. Not one act of violence has been committed. They came in peace. The war in Indochina continues."

"We planted that tree," Kerry says. "But it's not there anymore. We went there recently to look for it and they added a wing of a museum or something." With weariness, Kerry hands the book back to me. We're off to the next stop.

Recent Stories