AI
Thursday, May 13, 2004 10:14:14 PM
The Real John Kerry:
From: The 'Pewter Guy (A US Nval Verteran)
John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943 at a military hospital in Denver, Colo., while his father Richard Kerry, a pilot in the Army Air Corps, was being treated for tuberculosis. Soon after his birth, the Kerry family returned to Massachusetts. This, however, was only a temporary residence for young Kerry, who was destined for an unusually privileged upbringing. Kerry's father was a diplomat in the Foreign Service and his mother, Rosemary, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family, whose wealth is drawn primarily from its land holdings on Cape Cod. They made certain that Kerry received the best education that their positions could afford him and Kerry was educated at Swiss boarding schools and attended an elite private school in New Hampshire, before enrolling in Yale University.
At Yale Kerry was actively involved in sports and the student social life. He was a member of the exclusive club Skull and Bones, to which George W. Bush, two years younger than Kerry, also belonged. Kerry was chairman of the Political Union and later, as Commencement speaker, urged the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and to scale down foreign military operations. And this was way back in 1966.
When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. The Navy assigned him to the destroyer USS Gridley which, between December 1966 and July 1968, saw four months of action off the Vietnam coast. In August through November, 1968, Kerry was trained to be the skipper of a patrol boat for Vietnamese rivers. For about four months, until April of 1969, Kerry was the commanding Lieutenant of a "swift boat" in the Mekong Delta and thus was in charge of ferrying soldiers and supplies up the Mekong River. While doing this he was wounded slightly on three different occasions and his boat took part in Operation Sealords, mostly scouting out Viet Cong villages and transporting South Vietnamese marines to various destinations up and down narrow rivers covered with heavy foliage on either side. One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to befriend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities. The small boats were easy targets for ambush from enemy soldiers on the banks of the river, and often took fire as they sped through hostile territory. On February 28, 1969, his swift boat came under a rocket attack. A subsequent military report about the engagement, quoted by a 1996 article in the New Yorker, stated: "Kerry's craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions . . . (his craft) then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from (Kerry's craft) and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber." About the incident Kerry recalled, "It was either going to be him or me. It was that simple."
For his actions that day, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. Some controversy would arise with concern about the incident years later though when during a close election with William Weld in 1996, the Boston Globe's David Warsh questioned the circumstances of Kerry's heroism that day. Evidence emerged that the Viet Cong who had fired the rocket was alone and had already been wounded by the gunner on the Kerry's boat.
In addition to his Silver Star (the citation for which indicates he could have possibly disobeyed standing orders for his type of duty), other decorations he received during his four months of service 'in country' included a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts (for which he missed only one or two days of duty as a result of all three 'injuries'). He also received two Presidential Unit Citations and a National Defense Service medal.
Because he had received three Purple Hearts he qualified for an early transfer out of country which he promptly requested, thus cutting his tour of duty in Viet Nam short by eight months. Returning home early in 1969, Kerry made an about face in his position on Vietnam. Disillusioned, angered, and feeling an onerous sense of betrayal by Washington's handling of the conflict, he became a prominent anti-war protestor. Referring to the involvement in Vietnam as the "biggest nothing in history," Kerry became a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America and the spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
Jane Fonda and John Kerry at an anti-war
rally in Valley Forge, Pa. (Leif Skoogfors/Corbis)
On Labor Day weekend 1970, Kerry - then a rising star with Vietnam Veteran Against the War - teamed up with Fonda as the two headlined an ugly anti-war in rally in Valley Forge, Pa., railing against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia from the back of the same flatbed truck. The photo shows "Hanoi Jane" listening raptly as speakers denounced American soldiers for committing "genocide" in Vietnam and accusing the U.S. of "international racism." Three rows behind 'Hanoi Jane" sits a man who bears a striking resemblance to the Democratic presidential front-runner. According to Corbis Images, which owns the image, the photo was taken at the same 1970 Valley Forge protest that turned Sen. Kerry into an anti-war star.
Douglas Brinkley's biography "Tour of Duty" chronicles Kerry's exploits at Valley Forge, where he reportedly followed Fonda onto the back of that pick-up truck to deliver his own diatribe against the war in Vietnam. "We are here because we above all others have earned the right to criticize the war on Southeast Asia," Kerry shouted into the microphone, as Fonda and the crowd cheered wildly. "By the time [Kerry] hopped off that pick-up truck to thunderous applause," writes Brinkley, "he was the new leader of the VVAW by popular default." The Massachusetts Democrat's speech also cemented his alliance with Fonda, and the two traveled to Detroit to organize a January 1971 event they called the "Winter Soldier Investigation."
At a Detroit motel, Kerry and Fonda assembled a myriad of disgruntled witnesses claiming to be Vietnam vets, each with his own story of American atrocities. According to Jug Burkett, whose landmark Vietnam war history "Stolen Valor" chronicles some of Kerry's anti-war misadventures, Fonda played a key role at the Detroit event. "There's no doubt that Jane Fonda financed the Winter Soldier hearings," Burkett told NewsMax on Monday. He said that several of the witnesses who testified at the protest's "hearings" later turned out to be complete impostors. The event prompted "Hanoi Jane" to "adopt" Kerry's group "as her leading cause," writes Brinkley. It was at Kerry's Winter Soldier protest that the anti-American actress met her future husband, Students for a Democratic Society radical Tom Hayden.
The next year Fonda was off to Hanoi, where she mounted an anti-aircraft battery and pretended to shoot down American pilots.
It was in this capacity with the VVAW that Kerry achieved national renown and laid the nascent groundwork for a career in politics. In April 1971 while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Vietnam, he asked a question that echoed throughout the country: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" A day after delivering this simple question, he led a group of veterans that hurled their war medals onto the Capitol steps to protest the war. Though it later became clear that Kerry had only thrown his ribbons on the steps (to this day his medals are proudly displayed in his office), the events cemented Kerry's position as a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Morley Safer praised him as "a veteran whose call to reason . . . seemed to bridge the Abbie Hoffman's of the world and [then-Vice President Spiro] Agnew's so called "silent-majority.'"
John Kerry addresses veteran and
other anti-war demonstrators on the
Mall in Washington, D.C., in April, 1971.
Kerry's involvement in the antiwar movement marked the opening steps in his political career. Some analysts and writers thought him precociously ambitious. In a 60 Minutes television interview during this period, Morley Safer asked Kerry point blank, "Do you want to be president?" Kerry replied with a "no" and a laugh.
The cover of "The New Soldier," an out-of-print collection of speeches by John Kerry and other members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War edited by David Thorne and George Butler, consisted mainly of a photo of a half-dozen bearded protesters, some of whom were carrying an inverted U.S. flag. It's a safe bet the image was selected (by whom we don't know) because of its provocative resemblance to the Marine Corps War Memorial. Whether or not it constituted a mockery of that memorial, however, not to mention a desecration of the flag, is an open question. According to the U.S. Flag Code, the flag can legitimately be displayed "union down" as a distress signal, which is arguably just the symbolic meaning the protesters intended.
In 1972, after what political analyst Michael Barone called "some widely observed district shopping," Kerry ran for a Massachusetts congressional seat and lost. After the campaign he entered law school at Boston College, and after graduating in 1976 went to work as an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts and earned a reputation as a "top prosecutor" for leading the prosecution against a prominent New England organized crime boss and for modernizing the district attorney's office.
In 1982, Kerry was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts (he served under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis) and in 1984 he ran for Paul Tsongas's vacant Senate seat. He was supported by the nuclear freeze movement and feminists, and won election while refusing to accept contributions from political action committees. During his first term, he became a critic of government waste.
Today Kerry is serving his third consecutive term on Capitol Hill. Throughout he has broached contentious issues that many others, even from his own party, avoided.
He was an integral player in the Oliver North Hearings, having launched an investigation in 1987, known as the "Kerry Committee," that exposed the diversion of drug money from counternarcotic operations to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras. In 1992, Kerry coauthored a report for the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), "an elaborate corporate spider-web" that defrauded depositors of billions of dollars, engaged in money laundering, arms trafficking, and allegedly facilitated the development of Pakistan's nuclear arms program. Kerry pursued the charges against the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International," as it became known, despite the involvement of the late Clark Clifford, an advisor to four Democratic presidents. Clifford was the president of First American Bank, a Washington, D.C.-based, federally regulated bank that was secretly and illegally bought by BCCI with Clifford's aid in the mid-1980s.
In 1991 the Senate created the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to investigate the possibility that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam. Acting as chairman, Kerry helped persuade the group to vote unanimously that no American servicemen still remained in Vietnam. In doing so, he helped begin the process of normalizing U.S.-Vietnamese relations.
But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992 when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.
Kerry was a delegate to the Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, Teresa Heinz, the widow of former Republican senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania an heir to the Heinz fortune), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000.
Kerry has continuously criticized the Bush administration for its abandonment of the Kyoto protocol and encouraged the United States to promote what he views as sound and sustainable environmental policies. In an August 2002 Time article Kerry asserted, "American's deserve better choices than this Administration is offering. The United States must stop being an environmental isolationist and once again work with our global allies…First and foremost, we must lead at home, where American's unrivaled ability to drive economic growth through innovation can protect the environment and create jobs."
Kerry has said in the past that if other candidates launch media attacks against him during the campaign, he might use some of his wife's money to respond, but it is unclear how much would be available. Teresa Heinz controls a reported $550 million to $600 million, but much of that may not be available for Kerry's political use.
"A big chunk of Mrs. Kerry's fortune could be off-limits," Business Week reported in the summer of 2003. "Campaign finance analysts say candidates are allowed to use unlimited amounts of their own cash, but they cannot spend assets that belong to a family member."
In February 2003 Kerry left the campaign trail to undergo surgery for prostate cancer. He has reportedly made a full recovery.
http://www.pewterguy.com/MiscDocuments/MilitaryOnKerry.htm
Kerry, The average guy or the average chicken chit elitist, socialist fake???
I Vote For Elitist Pig Of A Fake!!! And one with a socialist wife woth between 550-600 Million!!! Average my azz!!!!
Note: Also posted on the NOLIB board.
... Onebgg
From: The 'Pewter Guy (A US Nval Verteran)
John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943 at a military hospital in Denver, Colo., while his father Richard Kerry, a pilot in the Army Air Corps, was being treated for tuberculosis. Soon after his birth, the Kerry family returned to Massachusetts. This, however, was only a temporary residence for young Kerry, who was destined for an unusually privileged upbringing. Kerry's father was a diplomat in the Foreign Service and his mother, Rosemary, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family, whose wealth is drawn primarily from its land holdings on Cape Cod. They made certain that Kerry received the best education that their positions could afford him and Kerry was educated at Swiss boarding schools and attended an elite private school in New Hampshire, before enrolling in Yale University.
At Yale Kerry was actively involved in sports and the student social life. He was a member of the exclusive club Skull and Bones, to which George W. Bush, two years younger than Kerry, also belonged. Kerry was chairman of the Political Union and later, as Commencement speaker, urged the United States to withdraw from Vietnam and to scale down foreign military operations. And this was way back in 1966.
When he approached his draft board for permission to study for a year in Paris, the draft board refused and Kerry decided to enlist in the Navy. The Navy assigned him to the destroyer USS Gridley which, between December 1966 and July 1968, saw four months of action off the Vietnam coast. In August through November, 1968, Kerry was trained to be the skipper of a patrol boat for Vietnamese rivers. For about four months, until April of 1969, Kerry was the commanding Lieutenant of a "swift boat" in the Mekong Delta and thus was in charge of ferrying soldiers and supplies up the Mekong River. While doing this he was wounded slightly on three different occasions and his boat took part in Operation Sealords, mostly scouting out Viet Cong villages and transporting South Vietnamese marines to various destinations up and down narrow rivers covered with heavy foliage on either side. One time Kerry was ordered to destroy a Viet Cong village but disobeyed orders and suggested that the Navy Command simply send in a Psychological Warfare team to befriend the villagers with food, hospital supplies, and better educational facilities. The small boats were easy targets for ambush from enemy soldiers on the banks of the river, and often took fire as they sped through hostile territory. On February 28, 1969, his swift boat came under a rocket attack. A subsequent military report about the engagement, quoted by a 1996 article in the New Yorker, stated: "Kerry's craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions . . . (his craft) then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from (Kerry's craft) and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber." About the incident Kerry recalled, "It was either going to be him or me. It was that simple."
For his actions that day, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. Some controversy would arise with concern about the incident years later though when during a close election with William Weld in 1996, the Boston Globe's David Warsh questioned the circumstances of Kerry's heroism that day. Evidence emerged that the Viet Cong who had fired the rocket was alone and had already been wounded by the gunner on the Kerry's boat.
In addition to his Silver Star (the citation for which indicates he could have possibly disobeyed standing orders for his type of duty), other decorations he received during his four months of service 'in country' included a Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts (for which he missed only one or two days of duty as a result of all three 'injuries'). He also received two Presidential Unit Citations and a National Defense Service medal.
Because he had received three Purple Hearts he qualified for an early transfer out of country which he promptly requested, thus cutting his tour of duty in Viet Nam short by eight months. Returning home early in 1969, Kerry made an about face in his position on Vietnam. Disillusioned, angered, and feeling an onerous sense of betrayal by Washington's handling of the conflict, he became a prominent anti-war protestor. Referring to the involvement in Vietnam as the "biggest nothing in history," Kerry became a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America and the spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW).
Jane Fonda and John Kerry at an anti-war
rally in Valley Forge, Pa. (Leif Skoogfors/Corbis)
On Labor Day weekend 1970, Kerry - then a rising star with Vietnam Veteran Against the War - teamed up with Fonda as the two headlined an ugly anti-war in rally in Valley Forge, Pa., railing against U.S. policy in Southeast Asia from the back of the same flatbed truck. The photo shows "Hanoi Jane" listening raptly as speakers denounced American soldiers for committing "genocide" in Vietnam and accusing the U.S. of "international racism." Three rows behind 'Hanoi Jane" sits a man who bears a striking resemblance to the Democratic presidential front-runner. According to Corbis Images, which owns the image, the photo was taken at the same 1970 Valley Forge protest that turned Sen. Kerry into an anti-war star.
Douglas Brinkley's biography "Tour of Duty" chronicles Kerry's exploits at Valley Forge, where he reportedly followed Fonda onto the back of that pick-up truck to deliver his own diatribe against the war in Vietnam. "We are here because we above all others have earned the right to criticize the war on Southeast Asia," Kerry shouted into the microphone, as Fonda and the crowd cheered wildly. "By the time [Kerry] hopped off that pick-up truck to thunderous applause," writes Brinkley, "he was the new leader of the VVAW by popular default." The Massachusetts Democrat's speech also cemented his alliance with Fonda, and the two traveled to Detroit to organize a January 1971 event they called the "Winter Soldier Investigation."
At a Detroit motel, Kerry and Fonda assembled a myriad of disgruntled witnesses claiming to be Vietnam vets, each with his own story of American atrocities. According to Jug Burkett, whose landmark Vietnam war history "Stolen Valor" chronicles some of Kerry's anti-war misadventures, Fonda played a key role at the Detroit event. "There's no doubt that Jane Fonda financed the Winter Soldier hearings," Burkett told NewsMax on Monday. He said that several of the witnesses who testified at the protest's "hearings" later turned out to be complete impostors. The event prompted "Hanoi Jane" to "adopt" Kerry's group "as her leading cause," writes Brinkley. It was at Kerry's Winter Soldier protest that the anti-American actress met her future husband, Students for a Democratic Society radical Tom Hayden.
The next year Fonda was off to Hanoi, where she mounted an anti-aircraft battery and pretended to shoot down American pilots.
It was in this capacity with the VVAW that Kerry achieved national renown and laid the nascent groundwork for a career in politics. In April 1971 while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Vietnam, he asked a question that echoed throughout the country: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" A day after delivering this simple question, he led a group of veterans that hurled their war medals onto the Capitol steps to protest the war. Though it later became clear that Kerry had only thrown his ribbons on the steps (to this day his medals are proudly displayed in his office), the events cemented Kerry's position as a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Morley Safer praised him as "a veteran whose call to reason . . . seemed to bridge the Abbie Hoffman's of the world and [then-Vice President Spiro] Agnew's so called "silent-majority.'"
John Kerry addresses veteran and
other anti-war demonstrators on the
Mall in Washington, D.C., in April, 1971.
Kerry's involvement in the antiwar movement marked the opening steps in his political career. Some analysts and writers thought him precociously ambitious. In a 60 Minutes television interview during this period, Morley Safer asked Kerry point blank, "Do you want to be president?" Kerry replied with a "no" and a laugh.
The cover of "The New Soldier," an out-of-print collection of speeches by John Kerry and other members of Vietnam Veterans Against the War edited by David Thorne and George Butler, consisted mainly of a photo of a half-dozen bearded protesters, some of whom were carrying an inverted U.S. flag. It's a safe bet the image was selected (by whom we don't know) because of its provocative resemblance to the Marine Corps War Memorial. Whether or not it constituted a mockery of that memorial, however, not to mention a desecration of the flag, is an open question. According to the U.S. Flag Code, the flag can legitimately be displayed "union down" as a distress signal, which is arguably just the symbolic meaning the protesters intended.
In 1972, after what political analyst Michael Barone called "some widely observed district shopping," Kerry ran for a Massachusetts congressional seat and lost. After the campaign he entered law school at Boston College, and after graduating in 1976 went to work as an assistant district attorney for Middlesex County, Massachusetts and earned a reputation as a "top prosecutor" for leading the prosecution against a prominent New England organized crime boss and for modernizing the district attorney's office.
In 1982, Kerry was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts (he served under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis) and in 1984 he ran for Paul Tsongas's vacant Senate seat. He was supported by the nuclear freeze movement and feminists, and won election while refusing to accept contributions from political action committees. During his first term, he became a critic of government waste.
Today Kerry is serving his third consecutive term on Capitol Hill. Throughout he has broached contentious issues that many others, even from his own party, avoided.
He was an integral player in the Oliver North Hearings, having launched an investigation in 1987, known as the "Kerry Committee," that exposed the diversion of drug money from counternarcotic operations to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras. In 1992, Kerry coauthored a report for the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), "an elaborate corporate spider-web" that defrauded depositors of billions of dollars, engaged in money laundering, arms trafficking, and allegedly facilitated the development of Pakistan's nuclear arms program. Kerry pursued the charges against the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International," as it became known, despite the involvement of the late Clark Clifford, an advisor to four Democratic presidents. Clifford was the president of First American Bank, a Washington, D.C.-based, federally regulated bank that was secretly and illegally bought by BCCI with Clifford's aid in the mid-1980s.
In 1991 the Senate created the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to investigate the possibility that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam. Acting as chairman, Kerry helped persuade the group to vote unanimously that no American servicemen still remained in Vietnam. In doing so, he helped begin the process of normalizing U.S.-Vietnamese relations.
But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992 when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.
Kerry was a delegate to the Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, Teresa Heinz, the widow of former Republican senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania an heir to the Heinz fortune), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000.
Kerry has continuously criticized the Bush administration for its abandonment of the Kyoto protocol and encouraged the United States to promote what he views as sound and sustainable environmental policies. In an August 2002 Time article Kerry asserted, "American's deserve better choices than this Administration is offering. The United States must stop being an environmental isolationist and once again work with our global allies…First and foremost, we must lead at home, where American's unrivaled ability to drive economic growth through innovation can protect the environment and create jobs."
Kerry has said in the past that if other candidates launch media attacks against him during the campaign, he might use some of his wife's money to respond, but it is unclear how much would be available. Teresa Heinz controls a reported $550 million to $600 million, but much of that may not be available for Kerry's political use.
"A big chunk of Mrs. Kerry's fortune could be off-limits," Business Week reported in the summer of 2003. "Campaign finance analysts say candidates are allowed to use unlimited amounts of their own cash, but they cannot spend assets that belong to a family member."
In February 2003 Kerry left the campaign trail to undergo surgery for prostate cancer. He has reportedly made a full recovery.
http://www.pewterguy.com/MiscDocuments/MilitaryOnKerry.htm
Kerry, The average guy or the average chicken chit elitist, socialist fake???
I Vote For Elitist Pig Of A Fake!!! And one with a socialist wife woth between 550-600 Million!!! Average my azz!!!!
Note: Also posted on the NOLIB board.
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