'Just World News' with Helena Cobban

John Kerry in 'Atlantic Monthly'

After the end of the conference in Atlanta last week we went to the Martin Luther King, Jr., Center there. Interesting, inspiring, but also a bit disappointing (for me, anyway).

Then, a long wait at the airport. I bought the December Atlantic Monthly because they had an excerpt from Douglas Brinkley's upcoming book on John Kerry's (Vietnam) war years.

What Kerry apparently gave Brinkley for the book was wide access to the things he'd written at the time of his deployment in the US Navy in Vietnam, including letters he'd written back then, and extracts from a journal he'd been keeping then. Plus, some ability for brinkley to talk to people Kerry had known back then.

What Kerry apparently did not give Brinkley-- or if he did, it never appeared in the Atlantic excerpts-- was any present-day, restrospective reflections on the experiences he'd had in 'Nam, or any explanations of why, despite those experiences, he voted for Bush's war-enabling resolution back last year.

Which is a pity. Because one thing Kerry's contemporaneous reflections on 'Nam showed was a sharp analytical and ethical mind at work which was deeply disturbed by many, many aspects of what he saw there and able to express his disquiet in prose of a maturity unusual in a man as young as he was then.

Reading the piece made me want to go out and buy the book when it comes out January 6. It increased the admiration I had for the person Kerry was back in those days.

But it also forced me to question even more deeply why Kerry voted the way he did on the war vote of October 2002.

What does this all say about him as a potential future president? I'm not sure. I'm still leaning for Dean, but Kerry looks a bit more intriguing now.