Interview: John Kerry with William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Interview
Monday 22 December 2003
http://truthout.org/docs_03/122203A.shtmlThis interview is formatted somewhat differently than the one I did with Governor Howard Dean this past May. Senator Kerry and I spoke for about 20 minutes in a minivan that was flying down some back road in New Hampshire on the way to a gathering at Hopkington High School. Kerry was slated to speak about environmental issues to a science class that was constructing an electric hybrid car as part of the curriculum. Because our one-on-one time was constricted due to his campaign schedule, I have decided to add a portion of his comments from that classroom.
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WRP: Senator Bill Nelson revealed last week that he and some 75 other Senators had been given an intelligence briefing by a Bush administration official just before the Iraq war vote, during the time frame of those quotes I just read. In that briefing, they were told that Iraq had not only chemical and biological weapons, but had the technical capability to strike American cities on the East Coast with unmanned drones filled with these poisons. Nelson refused to divulge who gave the briefing. I want to take you back to this time, to September and early October of 2002. What were you thinking about during this period, in the days and weeks before the Iraq resolution? I know you can’t reveal classified briefings, but were you getting at the time data that persuaded you that a yes vote was the proper course?
JK: Absolutely. More than that. I attended one particular briefing at the Pentagon. The Secretary of Defense was there, as well as the Admiral in charge of all intelligence. They passed photographs around showing us very specific locations and places where, they said, their intelligence confirmed that weapons of mass destruction were being held. This was in addition to those unmanned drones, which we were told about, and in addition to the 45-minute deployment capacity, which we were told about.
WRP: I wrote a book last September called ‘War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know,’ which stated that Iraq’s WMD capabilities had been grossly exaggerated by the administration, and therefore their rationale for war had no standing. That book, over the last fifteen months, has been proven to have been absolutely correct on this point. A lot of people read that book, and have subsequently turned away from your campaign for one reason: These people believe this data was out there before the Iraq vote, that it was available to you, and they believe you chose to ignore it or disregard it and vote in favor of the war. How would you answer that charge?
JK: There were a number of people offering contrary opinions, but this was compared to the overwhelming evidence that was put in front of us in very specific and factual terms. When someone shows you a photograph and says, “Our intelligence tells us that in this building is the following, and we have the following sources to back up these determinations,” it is pretty compelling.
What’s more, what I thought was equally compelling was not just the evidence, but were the very direct promises of Colin Powell and others within the administration about how they were going to proceed, about working with the United Nations, about using weapons inspectors, and about war being a last resort. In foreign policy, traditionally, we have worked across party lines to try to have one voice to speak with as a country in the interest of our national security. Obviously, the President, we now know, broke every single one of those promises and disregarded his own word. He is not a man of his word.
Given the information we were given at that time, however, a lot of very smart people made the same decision. Bill Clinton thought we ought to do what we did. He was the former President of the United States, and made his judgment based on eight years of experience. Hillary Clinton voted for it. Tom Harkin voted for it, as did Joe Biden. A lot of people made the judgment that this is a serious threat, and made the judgment that the administration was committed to going through the international process, build a coalition and do this right.
They didn’t do it right. They did it wrong. I was one of the first Senators to stand up and hold them accountable for it. In fact, I forewarned them each step of the way about what they needed to do to legitimately live up to their obligations
WRP: How do you feel now, after all this time has passed, when you hear these stories about unmanned drones striking the East coast, and other threat stories like that?
JK: It is one of the worst intelligence lapses, or deceptions, in modern history.
WRP: True or False: A solution to the Iraq problem, particularly the need to bring international cooperation into the conflict, and into the repair of that country, will never be found as long as Bush is in the White House.
JK: True. The solutions are very specific and very achievable, but depends on the United States not acting arrogantly, not acting unilaterally, and being willing to share power, authority and responsibility. If you are willing to transfer that to the United Nations, or to a coalition working under an umbrella – it doesn’t have to be directly U.N., but has to be approved by the U.N. – so that you are giving real shared authority over reconstruction and governmental transformation, and it’s not a Paul Bremer/U.S. decision-making process but a legitimate international accord as to how you empower the Iraqi people to decide their own future, then you absolutely have the ability to get additional help on the ground.
I’ve talked to the ambassadors and the other people involved. I know Kofi Annan and the U.N. are prepared to be involved. But you have to invite them and share with them appropriately, and this administration has refused to do that.
WRP: Do you feel a kinship with the peace movement that exploded around this Iraq invasion, given your background? Or do you feel alienated from them because of that vote?
JK: I felt enormous understanding, empathy, sympathy and respect for the voice they were articulating. I completely understood it. I came from there. I understood the confusion over why someone with my long history, why there was confusion over my position, why people were questioning it.
But I felt my decision was absolutely consistent with the counter-proliferation efforts I have been making as a Senator for my entire career. I felt proliferation was a critical issue. I thought a President ought to get inspectors back into Iraq. I thought a President ought to hold Saddam Hussein accountable. But I knew how to do it right, and my regret is that this President proved he not only didn’t know how to do it right, but was prepared to go back on his promises, be deceptive, and mislead the nation. I regret that he did that, and I regret that I put any trust in him at all. I shouldn’t have, obviously.
Put it this way: Given the circumstances we were in at the time, the decision was appropriate, but in retrospect I will never trust the man again. That’s why I am running against him. He deserves to be replaced with someone who is trustworthy.
WRP: In terms of the 2004 campaign, the central argument put up by a lot of people in the Democratic base who are against you is that you don’t “get it.” They see other candidates as fighting for their progressive values, and they see you saying “Get over it” after the election debacle in Florida, as quoted by the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. In contrast, your voting record in the Senate is clearly as progressive as the day is long. Where do you stand with the progressive community? Do you “get it”? Can you be their leader?
JK: I believe that I am the most consistent, most accomplished progressive fighter in this entire field. My record over 35 years of standing up and fighting for progressive causes is clear on with respect to women, with respect to the environment, with respect to children, education, health care, our role in the world, human rights, civil rights. My record is stronger, longer and deeper than any other candidate in this field with respect to the progressive agenda of this party.
When I say “Move on” from 2000, I’m as angry as anyone else. Votes ought to be counted. But my objective is to win. My objective is “Don’t get mad, get even.” They way you get even is to go out and take that agenda to the country and build a coalition around it. I think if you compare my record to the people in this field, I think it’s clear that I am the progressive candidate. I am the one who has stood up and taken the risks and fought for the agenda of my party with consistency.
I think the progressives in our party need to look and see who has the ability to take that progressive agenda and still stand up and beat George Bush. We don’t need to send the country a message. We need to send the country a President.
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Upon arrival at the school, Senator Kerry inspected the hybrid car the students were constructing, and then sat down with them in their classroom. A portion of the comments he made are below:
JK: After you get out of school here, after you finish college, most of you are going to be looking around asking, “How am I going to find a job that is going to excite me and do some good?” I believe that one of the great possibilities for your generation is to make America safer – safer in terms of our dependency on oil from the Middle East, from Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, etcetera, but also safer in terms of our health and our long-term future on this planet.
Give me a show of hands: How many of you have studied global warming? Almost all of you. How many of you believe, after studying it, that global warming is a serious issue? All of you. How many of you think we’re doing anything about it? None of you. There you go. And you’re right, we’re not doing anything about it. We’re going backwards.
One of the biggest contributors to global warming is carbon dioxide, in addition to sulfur dioxide, mercury and so forth. All the ice core studies and all of the analysis – there are 1,500 scientists at the United Nations, all of whom have agreed that this is a serious issue. 160 nations worked for ten years to come up with a solution, and the United States under George Bush was the first country in the world to say, “To hell with all of you, we’re walking away from the solution, we’re declaring it dead.” In the last weeks, some of President Bush’s friends were working hard in Washington to get $50 billion of subsidies for oil and gas drilling instead of helping you get better batteries for that car out there, so you can do more research into electric cars, so we can begin to do some of the things we need to do to clean up our air, water, you name it.
This is your future. This is real stuff. It really wasn’t so long ago that I was sitting where you are sitting, and I was probably daydreaming half the day away, trying to figure out what to do with my life like a lot of you are. And then, after college, along came a war, and I wound up fighting in it, and a lot of young students got active in politics. The first speech I ever gave in politics, I was exactly the age some of you are here today. This is when it begins. So you all can help us make a difference.
God only gave the United States of America three percent of the world’s oil reserves. That’s all we have. We import almost 60% of our oil. Saudi Arabia has 46% of the world’s oil reserve, and we have three. All of the Middle East has 65% of the world’s oil reserves. So we are very dependent on an unstable area, and on relationships we don’t particularly like, and I don’t care how smart you are, there is no way you can figure out a way for the United States of America to drill it’s way out of this predicament. We have to invent our way out of it. I think it’s time we got about the business of really trying to do that.
So I’m going to create a $20 billion energy conservation trust fund. I’m going to create a hydrogen institute, where one of you may wind up working after you graduate. Which one of you said you wanted to be an electrical engineer? There you are. You could go to work at that hydrogen institute, and help us discover – it may not be hydrogen, but there is something out there that is going to be the clean energy source for the future and for your generation. We’ve got to start finding it.
That’s why I’m here. That’s why I’m running for President. That’s why I want to talk to all of you today. Can we open this up? Can I get some questions?
STUDENT: Global warming is pretty much, like, the most important issue for me. We’ve denied it’s a problem for so long that it’s now this huge problem. You said this is one of the reasons you want to be President. What is your record as far as environmental stuff?
JK: I’m happy to share that with you. I have the strongest environmental record of anyone who is running for President. I began my involvement with the environment, it was pretty much against my will, when my mom got me up at four in the morning and dragged me out for a so-called nature walk. She told me to stop and listen, and I did, and I heard things I hadn’t heard and saw things that I hadn’t seen. She began to explain all of that to me, and I’ve never forgotten it, because that connection is what started it.
When I came back from Vietnam, I became involved in Earth Day. This was 1970, and then I was chairman of Earth Day in New England in 1990. We actually painted Storrow Drive biodegradable green, and we had hundreds of booths up and down the Charles River showing people what the technologies of the future could do.
I’ve been chairman of the Oceans Committee in the Senate. I’ve written our fisheries laws, I’ve written our plastics pollution laws, our marine mammal protection laws, our flood insurance laws, our coastal zone management laws. I was in Rio for the Earth Summit in 1990. I was at Buenos Aires, Kyoto, The Hague for the global warming conferences. I’ve helped negotiate with the less developed countries on those issues. I led the fight to stop Newt Gingrich from literally killing the Clean Air Act. I led the fight as a Lieutenant Governor to make acid rain a national issue, and it’s now in the Clean Air Act. I led the fight to stop the drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. I come to this race with a long and passionate record of caring about the environment.
Sometimes in America, the environment becomes a really bad discussion. People like George Bush and his friends will say, “You have a choice. You can have a job, or you can have a clean environment.” Have you ever heard that argument? Jobs or environment, right? It’s a false choice. Cleaning up the environment can be jobs. In Massachusetts, the fastest-growing part of our economy is environmental companies that do clean-up of toxic waste and chemicals, and to consult with companies so they don’t spit out dirty water and the like.
I’m convinced that a good President can help bring the country together in a way that doesn’t lose us jobs, and in a way that helps create a better future, and that’s why I’m running. That’s why I’m here.
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The Trial of John Kerry
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective
Wednesday 10 December 2003
http://truthout.org/docs_03/121003A.shtmlOne of these days, this will be a textbook case for political science professors to use as a teaching tool.
Here is a Democratic candidate for the Oval Office in a year when the liberal base of the party is almost completely unified in its disgust for the sitting Republican President. The candidate, a Senator, has a 20-year liberal voting record to admire: He is peerless on the environment, a staunch defender of a woman’s right to choose, completely reliable across the whole spectrum of gay rights issues, totally solid on education, an advocate for campaign finance reform and health care reform, and will fight to the death to keep Social Security fully funded and reliable. It is the liberal base of the party that turns out to vote in the primaries, so the candidate’s record gives him an immediate advantage.
Add to the scenario a campaign season dominated by foreign policy issues. The candidate is a Vietnam veteran who wears Purple Hearts next to a Bronze and Silver Star, giving him a ‘real deal’ quality compared to the sitting President, who used family influence to avoid that conflict. The candidate served for several years on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, affording him the justifiable claim that he is a seasoned professional when it comes to dealing with the rest of the world.
This experience is tempered by wisdom and hard knowledge; the disgust and horror experienced by the candidate during Vietnam had an almost mythic quality, and led him to become a prominent voice against the war upon his return home, so much so that he earned a spot on Nixon’s infamous “Enemies List.” His service in combat, coupled with his principled stand against the Vietnam war and his time on the Foreign Relations Committee, has forged a whole man. This serves him well in the primaries with fence-sitters, and with people who might think Democrats are “soft on national defense.”
This is the point at which the professor will lean against his podium and ask his class to theorize on how well such a candidate would do in a crowded field in the run-up to the primaries. Would he run away with the nomination? Dominate the conversation? Be way ahead in many states and tightly competitive in others? Of course that candidate will win, the class will respond. The professor, with a puckish grin, will instruct the class to turn to page 214 of their textbooks, and read the history of John Kerry’s Presidential run in the fall and winter of 2003.
John Kerry’s liberal record in the Senate is remarkable in its depth and consistency. His public stand against the Vietnam war, augmented by his status as a decorated veteran of that conflict, made history. His attacks on the Reagan administration, his fight to expose the Iran-Contra/BCCI scandal, are among the main reasons the public became schooled on those travesties. His time on the Foreign Relations Committee places him head and shoulders above the other Democratic candidates in terms of real-world foreign policy experience.
Yet today, John Kerry teeters on the edge of total irrelevancy in the race for the White House. Former Vermont Governor Howard Dean holds a double-digit lead over Kerry in New Hampshire, and is leading or surging elsewhere. Kerry’s campaign suffered a blowout several weeks ago when he fired his campaign manager, an act that led to the resignations of several other prominent staffers. While this may have ultimately been a healthy bloodletting, it caused the national press to write stories about “The Ailing Kerry Campaign,” obscuring any and all policy discussions that would have served his run.
On Monday night, the Associated Press reported the huge news that Al Gore had decided to publicly endorse Howard Dean. Was Gore’s endorsement a repudiation of the DLC? Is he publicly distancing himself from the powerful Clinton-controlled wing of the party? Or does Gore just think Howard Dean is the best man for the job? Slice those issues whichever way you please, but at the end of the day it was yet another brick in the ever-growing wall standing between Kerry and the nomination.
How did this happen? Kerry has all the components of a flat-out frontrunner. When did the wheels come off?
Ask virtually anyone who accounts themselves a member of that liberal Democratic base, and they’ll answer in a heartbeat. The wheels came off on October 11, 2002, the day John Kerry voted ‘Yes’ on George W. Bush’s Iraq War Resolution. The occupation of Iraq, the mounting American casualties, the skyrocketing cost of the conflict, and the still-missing weapons of mass destruction have become a significant liability to Bush. Amazingly enough, however, the Iraq situation has been far more damaging to Kerry than to Bush.
The same liberal base that flocks to the polls during the primaries took to the streets in vast, unprecedented numbers last fall and winter to oppose the push towards war in Iraq. Any politician who voted for the resolution was of no account to these people, worse than useless, an enabler of Bush’s extremist agenda, and not at all to be trusted. Dean’s passionate yet nuanced positions against the war drew legions of fiery supporters to his campaign, despite the fact that he is far less liberal than Kerry. The fact that Kerry had served in Vietnam, and then become an anti-war activist, was an added twist of the knife for those working against the invasion of Iraq, a betrayal of his own history and his people. For Kerry, keeper of that extraordinary liberal record, this one vote amounted to a couple of torpedoes below the water line of his campaign. He has been sinking, sinking, sinking ever since.
There are but a few weeks to go before the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary. Time has grown short. In an effort to galvanize the message Kerry wants to deliver in the time remaining, he convened a powerful roster of journalists and columnists in the New York City apartment of Al Franken last Thursday. The gathering could not properly be called a meeting or a luncheon. It was a trial. The journalists served as prosecuting attorneys, jury and judge. The crowd I joined in Franken’s living room was comprised of:
Al Franken and his wife Franni;
Rick Hertzberg, senior editor for the New Yorker;
David Remnick, editor for the New Yorker;
Jim Kelly, managing editor for Time Magazine;
Howard Fineman, chief political correspondent for Newsweek;
Jeff Greenfield, senior correspondent and analyst for CNN;
Frank Rich, columnist for the New York Times;
Eric Alterman, author and columnist for MSNBC and the Nation;
Art Spiegelman, Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist/author of ‘Maus’;
Richard Cohen, columnist for the Washington Post;
Fred Kaplan, columnist for Slate;
Jacob Weisberg, editor of Slate and author;
Jonathan Alter, senior editor and columnist for Newsweek;
Philip Gourevitch, columnist for the New Yorker;
Calvin Trillin, freelance writer and author;
Edward Jay Epstein, investigative reporter and author;
Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who needs no introduction.
We sat in a circle around Kerry and grilled him for two long hours. In an age of retail politicians who avoid substance the way vampires avoid sunlight, in an age when the sitting President flounders like a gaffed fish whenever he must speak to reporters without a script, Kerry’s decision to open himself to the slings and arrows of this group was bold and impressive. He was fresh from two remarkable speeches – one lambasting the PATRIOT Act, another outlining his foreign policy ideals while eviscerating the Bush record – and had his game face on. He needed it, because Eric Alterman lit into him immediately on the all-important issue of his vote for the Iraq War Resolution. The prosecution had begun.
“Senator,” said Alterman, “I think you may be the most qualified candidate in the race, and perhaps also the one who best represents my own values. But there was one overriding issue facing this nation during the past four years, and Howard Dean was there when it counted, and you weren’t. A lot of people feel that moment entitles him to their vote, even if you have a more progressive record and would be a stronger candidate in November. How are you going to win back those people who you lost with your vote for this awful war?”
There it was. Your record is the best, Mr. Kerry. But you voted for the war, Mr. Kerry. Howard Dean was right, Mr. Kerry, and you were not. Your campaign has been wounded, perhaps mortally, because of this. Explain yourself, and while you’re at it, explain how you are going to win back enough Dean voters to keep you from becoming a footnote in this race.
For over a year now, Kerry has struggled to respond to that question. His answers have seemed vague, overly nuanced and evasive. On Thursday, seated before the sharpest knives in the journalistic drawer and facing the unconcealed outrage of Alterman, the Senator from Massachusetts explained why he did what he did. The comments below reflect Kerry’s answers over the course of a long conversation and debate on the matter.
“This was the hardest vote I have ever had to cast in my entire career,” Kerry said. “I voted for the resolution to get the inspectors in there, period. Remember, for seven and a half years we were destroying weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. In fact, we found more stuff there than we thought we would. After that came those four years when there was no intelligence available about what was happening over there. I believed we needed to get the weapons inspectors back in. I believed Bush needed this resolution in order to get the U.N. to put the inspectors back in there. The only way to get the inspectors back in was to present Bush with the ability to threaten force legitimately. That’s what I voted for.”
“The way Powell, Eagleberger, Scowcroft, and the others were talking at the time,” continued Kerry, “I felt confident that Bush would work with the international community. I took the President at his word. We were told that any course would lead through the United Nations, and that war would be an absolute last resort. Many people I am close with, both Democrats and Republicans, who are also close to Bush told me unequivocally that no decisions had been made about the course of action. Bush hadn’t yet been hijacked by Wolfowitz, Perle, Cheney and that whole crew. Did I think Bush was going to charge unilaterally into war? No. Did I think he would make such an incredible mess of the situation? No. Am I angry about it? You’re God damned right I am. I chose to believe the President of the United States. That was a terrible mistake.”
History defends this explanation. The Bush administration brought Resolution 1441 to the United Nations in early November of 2002 regarding Iraq, less than a month after the Senate vote. The words “weapons inspectors” were prominent in the resolution, and were almost certainly the reason the resolution was approved unanimously by the Security Council. Hindsight reveals that Bush’s people likely believed the Hussein regime would reject the resolution because of those inspectors. When Iraq opened itself to the inspectors, accepting the terms of 1441 completely, the administration was caught flat-footed, and immediately began denigrating the inspectors while simultaneously piling combat troops up on the Iraq border. The promises made to Kerry and the Senate that the administration would work with the U.N., would give the inspectors time to complete their work, that war would be an action of last resort, were broken.
Kerry completed his answer by leaning in close to Alterman, eyes blazing, and said, “Eric, if you truly believe that if I had been President, we would be at war in Iraq right now, then you shouldn’t vote for me.”
Pointing out Bush’s mistakes is relatively simple, but what of solutions to the Iraq mess? Kerry was questioned at length on this, and gave the same answers delivered during his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations on December 3: “Our best option for success is to go back to the United Nations and leave no doubt that we are prepared to put the United Nations in charge of the reconstruction and governance-building processes. I believe the prospects for success on the ground will be far greater if Ambassador Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority are replaced by a UN Special Representative for Iraq.”
“I understand that the United Nations is reluctant to return to Iraq,” continued Kerry in his CFR speech, “for good reason. But I believe if the UN role is absolutely clear and substantively real, the Secretary General and members of the Security Council will support this course of action. But one thing is beyond doubt: We will continue to have difficulty persuading other countries, particularly those with meaningful military capabilities, to contribute troops and funds for reconstruction unless and until we vest real responsibility in the hands of the United Nations and the international community.”
Alterman, for one, was sold. In his MSNBC blog report on the meeting, he wrote, “It was all on the record and yet, it was remarkably open, honest and unscripted. Let’s be blunt. Kerry was terrific. Once again, he demonstrated a thoughtfulness, knowledge base and value system that gives him everything, in my not-so-humble-opinion, he could need to be not just a good, but a great president.”
The most revealing moment of the entire event came as it was breaking up. Kerry was slowly working towards the door when he was collared by Art Spiegelman. Though Kerry towered over him, Spiegelman appeared to grow with the intensity of his passion. “Senator,” he said, “the best thing you could do is to is to just come out and say that you were wrong to trust Bush. Say that you though he would keep his promises, but that you gave him more credit than he deserved. Say that you’re sorry, and then turn the debate towards what is best for the country in 2004.”
Kerry nodded, bowed his head, and said, “You’re right. I was wrong to trust him. I’m sorry I did.” And then he was gone.
In the end, that is perhaps the greatest obstacle for Kerry to overcome. Liberal base voters never trusted George W. Bush from the beginning, and believed in their hearts that he was approaching the Iraq situation with bad intentions. The fact that Kerry trusted him, and trusted him enough to ignore Senator Robert Byrd’s dire warnings of constitutional abrogation of Congressional responsibilities which was inherent in the resolution, makes it hard for those voters to trust Kerry.
Yet for a Senator like Kerry – who believes in bipartisanship, who chose to honor the office of the Presidency by practicing that bipartisanship, who trusted a number of publicly-made administration promises, who thought getting weapons inspectors into Iraq required the threat of force – the choices presented in this vote were far more complex than those being made down on the street by the protesters. It can be argued that the best thing to happen to Howard Dean in his campaign was the fact that he was not a Congressman, and was not obligated to vote on the resolution when the chips were down.
None of this solves the immediate problem for Kerry. The nomination of Howard Dean takes on more and more each day an aura of inevitability. Kerry is still trailing Dean in key primary states, and Al Gore isn’t going to take back his endorsement. In order to regain any momentum and take the nomination, he will have to convince Dean supporters, more than anyone else, to switch to his camp. Dean’s stand on the war is not the central reason for the support he has gained, but it was what drew the attention of so many would-be Kerry people. That attention, with time, became support. With all the time that has passed, and with Dean’s campaign picking up such momentum, engineering a wholesale switch seems highly unlikely.
The punditocracy spent a good portion of their TV time on Tuesdsay declaring Kerry’s candidacy all but dead, while anointing Dean as the sure-fire eventual nominee. This may prove to be true, but not one primary vote has been cast yet. January becomes the proving ground. In the interim, you’ll find John Kerry on the campaign trail. His performance in Franken’s living room last Thursday, the tenor of his recent speeches, and his gladiator memories of his 1996 Senate race against William Weld, all indicate one simple thing. If John Kerry is going down, he is going down swinging.
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