JOHN KERRY'S DESPERATE HOURS

The One-Time Democratic Front-Runner Is Fighting for His Survival

On a Friday in November, at the end of a tough week, John Kerry
projects an aura of friendly confidence that suggests he is either out
of touch with reality or has the serenity of a Zen master. In the last
five days, Kerry has fired his campaign manager and then seen two
staffers walk out the door. He has decided to opt out of the public
financing for his campaign -- ostensibly to keep up with his chief
rival, blunt, plain-spoken former Vermont governor Howard Dean, who
made a similar decision earlier in the week, but also, as Time will
report a few days later, because his campaign is having trouble
persuading anyone to write a check. Until pretty much the moment he
started running in earnest earlier this year, Kerry's campaign for the
Democratic Party's presidential nomination had about it an aura of
inevitability. Most watchers attributed the four-term Massachusetts
senator's overconfidence to a hubris born of his patrician roots. The
shorthand became: Because this guy went to a fancy prep school and
then was tapped to join Skull and Bones at Yale, he just naturally
assumes the nomination is his. But in person, Kerry projects something
different: He doesn't seem elitist or aloof. Just the opposite, in
fact. He is eager to connect, intense and hopped-up, pulling
near-strangers in tight for old-friends-style handshakes, throwing
around a lot of "man" and "dude." In these moments, the detail about
Kerry that seems most important is not his elitist roots but the fact
that he's a sixty-year-old guy who likes to snowboard.

Kerry brings to the race a dramatic life story and a resume so
perfectly burnished that he seems almost a fictional creation. Born
into an old-line family of Boston Brahmins, he was educated at Swiss
boarding schools before attending St. Paul's and then Yale. As a
teenager, he sailed off Newport, Rhode Island, with President John F.
Kennedy. A few years later, as a young naval officer, he became a bona
fide war hero in Vietnam, then returned home in 1969 and emerged as a
prominent anti-war activist. He co-founded Vietnam Veterans Against
the War, testified in Congress, headlined a peace rally with John
Lennon and became a target of the Nixon White House ("Destroy the
young demagogue before he becomes another Ralph Nader," wrote Nixon
aide Charles Colson in a memo to the president).

Kerry was elected to the Senate in 1984 after working as a prosecutor
and serving as lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. In the Senate, he
became known for his high-profile investigations: He was one of the
first members of Congress to probe the Iran-Contra scandal; in 1988,
he helped uncover the massive BCCI banking scandal. In the Nineties,
he joined Arizona senator John McCain to investigate -- and put to
rest -- claims that American POWs were still being held in Vietnam.
More recently, he led the fight to protect the Arctic National
Wildlife Refuge from oil drilling.

But it's another recent vote that most seems to have gotten Kerry into
trouble with Democratic voters -- his decision to back the president's
resolution to go to war in Iraq. Kerry offers a logical and
well-reasoned rationale for favoring the war. But the stump is
probably not the best place for nuance, and so Kerry's
on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand stance has come off as overly
calculated when contrasted with Dean's sledgehammer anti-war bluster.

With less than two months to go until he faces voters in Iowa and then
New Hampshire, Kerry is refashioning himself as a bare-knuckled
longshot -- the insider as outsider. Neither a bleeding heart, an
insurgent, a new face nor a technocrat, Kerry is selling himself to
voters as the guy who knows how the game is played in Washington. His
challenge will be to show them that's not all he knows.

It seems that the fact that you voted in support of the president's
war resolution has caused you a lot of trouble in your campaign. Do
you regret supporting the president?

What I regret most of all is the way the administration dealt with it
-- the extraordinary failure of the administration to keep its
promises, to be mature and thoughtful about how you take a nation to
war. They misled us; they presented false intelligence to us. The
president made a series of promises to us -- number one, that he was
gonna make every effort possible to build a legitimate coalition. He
did not -- he built a fraudulent coalition. Second, he was gonna
exhaust the remedies of the United Nations and the inspection process.
He did not. And third, that he would go to war as a last resort. He
did not.

I voted to protect the security of our country, based on the notion
that the only way to get inspectors back in was to have a legitimate
threat of force and the potential of using it. They took that
legitimacy and bastardized it. If I were president, we would not be in
Iraq today -- we would not be at war. This president abused the process.

Had you thought of Bush as someone whose word you could trust at that
point?

It seems to me that we had a right to expect the president of the
United States to live up to his word. It was disgraceful, one of the
most egregious, fundamentally flawed moments of foreign policy that I
can think of in my lifetime.

You were highly critical of the way they conducted the Afghanistan
war, as well.

But that was a question of strategy, not whether we should be there or
not. They had Osama bin Laden and a thousand Al Qaeda fighters
cornered in the Tora Bora mountains and allowed them to escape.

Why do you think that was? Were they afraid of losing
troops?

I think, at that point in time, yes. They ran a risk-averse operation.
They didn't move any of our available legitimate forces into the area.
Instead, they sent Afghans -- who, a week earlier, were fighting on
the other side -- up into the mountains and said, "Hey, you go get the
number-one criminal in the world." It sounds pretty stupid to me, frankly.

Are you saying that Bush's conduct of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan
-- not to mention the way he has pissed off our allies -- has been
incompetent?

Oh, absolutely. Worse than incompetent. Clouded by ideological excess,
a misinterpretation of history, a willful denial of facts.

Is Iraq turning into another Vietnam?

Not yet, but it's on its way, absent major changes in the way they're
doing business.

The economy is clearly going to be the number-one issue in this
election -- it always is. Bush has certainly looked vulnerable on this
front. But in the past few weeks, it looks like we've started to see
some positive economic news. Does this take a big issue away from the
Democrats?

Whether the economy is good or bad, it doesn't change the fundamentals
of my campaign for the presidency. Because I believe this
administration is so badly out of touch with the needs of the American
people, I think it is so much in the pocket of powerful special
interests, I think it is so much working against the interests of
average Americans -- that having a stronger economy, in their
equation, is not gonna change life for a lot of Americans.

When the other Democratic candidates talk about Bush, they pretty much
just bash his policies. You not only do that, but you also question
his basic fitness to serve -- you just said he was incompetent. My
question is: When Republicans ran against Clinton, they made a huge
issue out of Clinton's character. Why isn't the character issue being
taken to George Bush?

If you're running for the presidency, there are other things you have
to focus on. I want to paint an optimistic, hopeful vision for the
country and open people's eyes to the things that we could be doing
with respect to, say, energy independence. In the 1930s, we thought it
was critical to get electricity out into rural America, right? I think
it's critical to get clean energy out to every part of America. Let's
help create the framework to do it.

Did you feel you were blindsided by Dean's success?

Well, not blindsided. I mean, when I voted for the war, I voted for
what I thought was best for the country. Did I expect Howard Dean to
go off to the left and say, "I'm against everything"? Sure. Did I
expect George Bush to fuck it up as badly as he did? I don't think
anybody did.

Do you see Dean as the next George McGovern? It's being said that the
Republicans are foaming at the mouth to go against Dean.

Republicans have been contributing to Dean's campaign on the Internet.
Look, Bush stood up in the White House Rose Garden a week ago and
said, "I'm gonna run for re-election on the basis of my pre-emption
doctrine and our ability to make the world safer." He has declared his
strategy. And unless we have a nominee who can go right at him on that
strategy, we're gonna be in trouble.

What do you think of Arnold Schwarzenegger becoming governor of
California?

Well, first of all, Arnold's a friend of mine. I've known him for a
long time, and he's a capable guy. I mean, he's smart and capable. I
would have preferred that there had been no recall. I went out and
campaigned against it. But I understand the anger that existed out
there.

Do you think that same anger is propelling Dean's candidacy?

Other people have to determine that. I'm not an analyst. I'm running
for president based on my vision for the country, and I think I have a
longer, stronger, deeper record of fighting against those interests,
and representing that anger, than Howard Dean.

You have talked in the past of smoking pot when you returned from
Vietnam. What do you think of the way the pot laws are prosecuted today?

We have never had a legitimate War on Drugs in the United States,
ever, and we won't until we have treatment on demand for addiction and
until you have full drug education in our schools. The
mandatory-minimum-sentencing structure of our country is funneling
people into jail who have no business being there.

And every year, the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses
goes up.

I've met plenty of people in my lifetime who've used marijuana and who
I would not qualify as serious addicts -- who use about the same
amount as some people drink beer or wine or have a cocktail. I don't
get too excited by any of that.

Would you favor decriminalization?

No, not quite. What we did in the prosecutor's office was have a sort
of unspoken approach to marijuana that was almost effectively
decriminalization. We just didn't bother with small-time use. It
doesn't rise to the level of nuisance, even. And what we were after
was people dealing with heroin and destroying lives, and people who
were killing people. That's where you need to focus.

What's most important to you in this campaign?

This is a critical time for the country. The stakes are just enormous.
We need a president, frankly, who has the kind of experience that I've
had: of being in a war, understanding its downsides but understanding
the nature of the threats in the world. Understanding that you
couldn't leave Saddam Hussein to his own devices, but you needed to do
this in a very responsible, thoughtful way.

Does this change the way we relate to the world?

I'm gonna lift this country up to a greater engagement in the world. I
mean, think of what we could do to reach out and begin to present a
different face of our country. Think of what we could do to advance
the interests of the developing world, so people would see the United
States as not just this aggressive, arrogant force that only thinks of
itself and doesn't really have a greater sense of humanity and
concern. We're just not embracing any of that stuff today, and it
drives me crazy.