Missing in action
Review of _When I Was A Young Man: A Memoir_ by Bob Kerry
Christopher Caldwell finds Bob Kerrey's recollections of combat in Vietnam long on emotion but short on fact.
Financial Times; May 31, 2002
Just over a year ago, Nebraska's Bob Kerrey was still a top contender for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004. He had recently retired from the Senate after two terms and assumed the presidency of the New School for Social Research in Manhattan.
Most Americans knew three things about Kerrey, each of which they liked. First, he had been a centrist, backing Republicans on welfare reform and Bill Clinton's new Democrats on the budget. Second, he was a bohemian - bookish, blessed with a cynical sense of humour, and indifferent enough to convention to have shacked up with the actress Debra Winger for several years.
But what Americans liked best about Kerrey was that in 1969, as a commander of the Seals (Navy special forces) in Vietnam, he had extracted his whole platoon from a horrifying night-time ambush atop a cliff, an exploit that cost him much of his right leg and won him the country's highest military decoration, the Congressional Medal of Honor.
All that kudos vanished overnight in April 2001, when a New York Times exposý cast Kerrey as a war criminal. Days before he was wounded, the article alleged, Kerrey had led his Seal team to the Vietcong-controlled hamlet of ThanhPhong on a mission to assassinate a local rebel leader. When they got there, the Seals found only 18 women and children. Panicked that witnesses would reveal their presence to nearby guerrillas, Kerrey, according to the account, ordered the villagers lined up and shot.
Suddenly Kerrey had become a symbol of - rather than a remedy for - America's enduring moral embarrassment. He made matters worse when he issued a defence that was implausible to the point of absurdity: his team, he said, had fired on the village only to find the inhabitants lying dead in a heap when they entered it. It is largely to set matters straight that he has written this memoir.
"In truth, I remember very little of what happened in a clear and reliable way," Kerrey writes. But he lays out a narrative of the incident that has little in common with the one he offered last year. Kerrey now claims his group were shot at from behind a group of women and children they had just rousted from their grass huts.
The Americans shot back, catching their captives in a crossfire. "I saw women and children in front of us being hit and cut to pieces," he recalls. In other words, Kerrey has come around to a slightly less likely version of the narrative put forward by his accusers.
To reach this brief and unsatisfactory account, the reader must virtuously traverse the long desert of Kerrey's Nebraska upbringing: his membership in a "full-immersion" Baptist church, his military forebears, his asthma, his political apathy (he cast his first votes for Goldwater and Nixon), and his exploits on the football field ("the place where a boy learns as much about the game of life as he does about the game of football").
The passages in which Kerrey describes his convalescence in a military hospital are marked by a few moments of acute description, as of being injected with so much Demerol that he could taste the drug in his mouth. But only a few. The great Vietnam memoirist Lewis Puller recovered from his wounds in the same ward as Kerrey - and Puller's memoir Fortunate Son offers a considerably more intimate portrait of Kerrey than this book.
At no point is Kerrey's voyage of self-discovery rendered frankly or elegantly enough to engage. The book is sub-literate and error-prone, even by the forgiving standards of US political autobiography. Kerrey tells of his ancestors' arrival from "Lincolnshire, England, a few miles south of London". He thinks "anthropomorphic" means muscular. There are careless sentences on almost every page.
Given not just the stakes of this apologia but also Kerrey's reputation as an intellectual and a university president, why should his book be so slovenly? Is Kerrey, like his former Senate colleague Bill Bradley, merely a politician who has mastered the art of feigning depth and introspection? Or has he been badly served by a ghost writer?
One of the celebrity friends who has blurbed this memoir for Kerrey describes it as "ruthlessly honest" but that is untrue. Indeed, it is a shining example of a particularly American kind of intellectual corruption. Kerrey is never honest about what he knows, only about what he feels, and he cannot tell the two apart.
Emotionally, this book is a geyser. Factually, it is as buttoned down as a defendant's affidavit. Kerrey's idea of candour is: "Wars are not what our slogans, propaganda and childhood fantasies have taught us to believe." Or: "The hard work of learning something new can bring about the need for personal change."
No one was better positioned than Kerrey to enter the still-roiling water of America's Vietnam experience and say something valuable. Instead, he has chosen to scamper across it on a pontoon of clichýs.
The reviewer is a senior editor of the Weekly Standard magazine in Washington