The dilly on Kerry

[The One and Only...]

John Forbes Kerry celebrated his 60th birthday three days ago. Recently, he has lost some weight and developed an increasingly haggard appearance.

However, he still is articulate, with his graying dark hair immaculately groomed, even when riding his "Hog," his very own Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

Kerry has catered to a craving for personal publicity since the days he pretended to throw away three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star he had been awarded while in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War.

They weren't his; he borrowed others' medals to pitch.

But he still uses his service days as an excuse for his salty and profane language, recently spread out for the world to see in Rolling Stone. He often brags about his combat experience. But he avoids talking about the awards or his very obvious disrespect for Vietnam veterans and his support for communist Vietnam.

Sometimes Kerry recalls his days at Yale and Boston Law School, or the time he was a prosecuting attorney, a post that, with his service record, he parleyed into the Massachusetts' lieutenant governor's office. Two years was enough for him in that humble and inconspicuous job, and quick as a flash, he moved into the U.S. Senate.

For the past 19 years, Kerry has represented the Democrat voters of Massachusetts in the U.S. Senate. Now, he wants to be president.

Post-war rebel

After requesting a discharge so that he could run for Congress -- from Massachusetts in 1970 -- Kerry dropped out of that race when he found that he was destined to be a loser.

Then, Kerry found a new cause that already had been active for three years, and which he today claims as his own. This former naval officer abandoned his oath of office, joined up with the hard-communist left and now claims to have founded Vietnam Veterans Against the War, or (VVAW). He did attend their conference in February 1971 with Jane Fonda -- Hanoi Jane, their most successful promoter and fund-raiser.

The VVAW made its debut in 1967, in New York City at an anti-Vietnam war protest that was also planning the disruption of the 1968 Democratic Party National Convention in Chicago. By the spring of 1970, it numbered several hundred members and the organization had gone national.

All without John Kerry, who remained in Boston.

Kerry later arrived in Washington for an encampment to protest the war, and to provide evidence against his country on Capitol Hill, dressed in his fatigues. Much of the speech Kerry gave to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee painted his fellow GIs as brutal sadists.

He picked up on the testimony of one Marine Sgt. Scott Camil, who said the U.S. military had raped, cut off ears, heads and limbs and participated in many other atrocities. He said that he found the accounts of torture "shocking and irrefutable."

In the last week of April 1971, some 250,000 protesters were in Washington for massive protests against the draft and the war. They were preparing for their attack on the U.S.government on May 4, when they hoped to shut down the capital. Kerry was everywhere, now promoting the pro-communist People's Peace Treaty, drawn up in East Germany and developed by Tom Hayden and Rennie Davis. The treaty advocated the communist line to withdraw all U.S.troops from Vietnam and then negotiate with Hanoi for the release of our GIs who had been taken prisoner.

But Kerry lost his support base, even then, by playing both sides. He attacked the May Day rioters as criminals for the looting, tire-slashing and window-breaking.

Kerry turned himself from a nonentity into a national icon. Since then, he has married twice, and his partner today is Teresa Heinz Kerry, the widow of Pennsylvania's late Sen. John Heinz. Teresa, despite this marriage in 1995, is a very bright and accomplished woman who, notwithstanding her 65 years, would, without the encumbrance of her present husband, have had a remarkable career.

But it is John Kerry who has had a more than remarkable career.

As long ago as June 1971, a reporter for the Marxist Liberated Guardian described how Kerry was raising money from Wall Street's liberal elite, led by Edgar Bronfman, president of Seagram's Distillers, who gave $5,000 of 1971 money. The writer, a true Marxist, bemoaned that the donors had previously supported the Vietnam War, and wrote: "Most of these financiers of political movements are only interested in 'future access to the White House.' Does Kerry want to be in the White House someday? And if he were, how would he answer their calls?"

The Democrats of the left have waited 32 years to find out what makes John Kerry tick. Now, they are finding out the truth.

Dateline D.C. is written by a Washington-based British journalist and political observer.