So what do we know so far about the Democrats’ presumptive nominee for president, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry?

Well, he’s been in the public spotlight for a long time now, beginning with his very public anti-war activities, undertaken after his return from a brief stint of combat in the coastal waters of Vietnam. He went on to get a law degree and then to make a career for himself in politics. From public prosecutor he became lieutenant governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis and then, in the mid-eighties, he won a seat in the United States Senate. There he quickly established himself on the left side of the political aisle, opposing the policies of Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, favoring cuts in defense spending and increases in social spending. Fair enough – that’s the Democratic position after all.

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Of course, Senator Kerry is also a shrewd and, as his supporters like to tell us, nuanced politician. And so he managed to take many sides of many issues, to find ways to avoid offending critical constituencies or risking his political capital, during his Senate years. He voted against the first Gulf War – although, famously, he wrote two contradictory letters to the same constituent, saying he both opposed and supported it! Of course that may just have been a staffer’s blunder, since office holders rarely write their own constituent correspondence.

On the other hand, you have to wonder how his staffers could have been so wrong about Kerry’s actual position because, surely, at least one of them would have had to be wrong – right?

This is the same John Kerry who is reported to have flaunted his Irish-sounding name in front of a Boston Irish audience, saying he was proud to be one of them, but who hasn’t any Irish in his ancestry to speak of. In fact, John Forbes Kerry can trace his ancestry back to English colonists who came over on the Mayflower (he’s a real Boston Brahmin) and one of his grandfathers apparently was Jewish (Americanizing his name to “Kerry” when he came over to this country). The senator also has relatives in France. Nothing wrong with any of this, of course – unless you’re trying to convey to people that you’re Irish when you’re not. Well, maybe Senator Kerry was speaking metaphorically?

What about the senator’s heroic war record? No one wants to challenge that and, in truth, it does seem an unlikely place to go, given his military decorations and the testimony of his “band of brothers.” But a little history is in order here, too. It seems that Kerry in his college days was actually anti-war. So why enlist? Well, like many of his generation, he was in danger of being drafted. Here’s a young guy with political ambitions facing a stint in the military, where he’d be fighting a war he’d said he didn’t believe in. What to do? You can’t simply refuse to go – that would not look very good in a future political campaign. And you can’t run off to somewhere like Canada and figure people will some day forget. Ever the nuanced strategist, John Kerry chose, instead, to enlist in the Navy where the risks were presumably more limited since Vietnam was mainly a land war.

He got himself a lieutenancy on a coastal boat and for four months led patrols and demonstrated his valor in the face of the enemy. Repeatedly he raced his boat onto the shore and led aggressive landing operations against the Viet Cong. He was decorated at least four times for his boldness and wounded three times. Then what? He invoked a military rule that if a combatant is wounded three times, he has to be taken out of the fight. And so Lieutenant John Forbes Kerry demanded from his superiors – and after some negotiation, got – reassignment from the combat zone, leaving his men after only four months in action.

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Stuart W. Mirsky, a former New York City official and longtime Republican activist, is the author of several books, including a historical novel about Vikings and Indians in eleventh-century North America (“The King of Vinland's Saga”); a Holocaust memoir about a young Jewish girl trapped in eastern Poland at the height of World War II (“A Raft on the River”), and a work of contemporary moral philosophy (“Choice and Action”) exploring the linguistic and logical underpinnings of our ethical beliefs.