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By the time John Kerry's father, Richard, published his only book, The Star-Spangled Mirror, in 1990, he should have been a mellow man. Nearly 30 years had passed since his retirement from the Foreign Service, where he'd filled mid-level posts in Washington, Berlin, and Oslo. His central issue, the cold war, had followed him into retirement with the crumbling of the Berlin Wall and rise of glasnost in Russia. When the 75-year-old Kerry wasn't working on his book, he could be found building model ships and sailing off Cape Cod. If he had any reasons for professional bitterness, they should have long since faded. None of these facts, however, becalmed him. His book has a young man's brash, polemical tone. The Star-Spangled Mirror is a critique of moralism in America's foreign policy -- and, more than that, it is a critique of America's national character.
"Americans," he writes, "are inclined to see the world and foreign affairs in black and white." They celebrate their own form of government and denigrate all others, making them guilty of what he calls "ethnocentric accommodation -- everyone ought to be like us." As a result, America has committed the "fatal error" of "propagating democracy" and fallen prey to "the siren's song of promoting human rights," falsely assuming that our values and institutions are a good fit in the Third World. And, just as Americans exaggerate their own goodness, they exaggerate their enemies' badness. The Soviet Union wasn't nearly as imperialistic as American politicians warned, Kerry argues. "Seeing the Soviet Union as the aggressor in every instance, and the U.S. as only reacting defensively, relieves an American observer from the need to see any parallel between our use of military power in distant parts of the world, and the Soviet use of military power outside the Soviet Union," he writes. He further claims that "Third world Marxist movements were autonomous national movements" -- outside Moscow's orbit. The book culminates in a plea for a hardheaded, realist foreign policy that removes any pretense of U.S. moral superiority.
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From the start, Richard Kerry turned his oldest son into his foreign policy protégé. As Newsweek's Evan Thomas has written, "The Kerry dinner table was a nightly foreign-policy seminar. While other boys were eating TV dinners in front of the tube, (John) Kerry was discussing George Kennan's doctrine of containment." His father introduced the adolescent boy to such luminaries as Monnet and West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Later, when he was at Yale, John Kerry traded letters with Clementine Churchill, Winston's wife. As early as prep school, John Kerry showed signs that he shared his father's suspicions about America's cold war foreign policy. In a debate at St. Paul's in the late '50s, he argued that the United States should establish relations with Red China. During his junior year at Yale, he won a speech prize for an oration warning, "It is the specter of Western Imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." And, when he was tapped to deliver a graduation speech in 1966, he used the occasion to condemn U.S. involvement in Vietnam, intoning, "What was an excess of isolationism has become an excess of interventionism."
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There are differences, to be sure, between Richard and John Kerry. Over the course of his political career, John Kerry has occasionally endorsed the use of force, as in the cases of Panama and Kosovo, and he has always found a rhetorical place for morality in his foreign policy pronouncements. But, more often than not, even as John Kerry stumps for president, the similarities shine through. Last month, for example, Kerry charged that the administration's "high-handed treatment of our European allies, on everything from Iraq to the Kyoto climate-change treaty, has strained relations nearly to the breaking point." It should be no surprise to hear John Kerry worry about European allies and to strike such liberal internationalist notes. These ideas aren't just deeply felt; they're in his blood.
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/03/02/opinion/main603542.shtml |
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