Quotes of the Day

John kerry is trying to be helpful, but it just isn't working. The topic is tough decisions he has made, specifically the grueling series of choices forced upon him last autumn, when his campaign was sinking fast. Kerry is sitting in a blue leather swivel chair in the front cabin of his spiffy new campaign plane. He is wearing a blinding white shirt and a soft pink tie, and he leans forward intently, elbows on knees. But he doesn't really want to talk about this. "It's just a process," he says, at one point, of his decision-making style. In this case, a humbling process. He was forced to fire his campaign manager, Jim Jordan. He was forced to abandon his campaign in New Hampshire, where Howard Dean was clobbering him in the polls, and concentrate his assets on the uninviting cornfields of Iowa. And, speaking of assets, he was forced to go into hock, despite his wife's millions, and mortgage his primary possession—his Boston town house—in order to pay for the campaign. "I knew I was caught up in a dynamic that wasn't working," he says halfheartedly. "It was a big roll of the dice," he says perfunctorily.

Kerry has changed in recent months. He has become more presidential, if such a thing is possible for a fellow who has seemed prematurely presidential ever since prep school. But the portentous nature of the prize—he will accept the nomination of the Democratic Party this week—has enveloped him like a shroud. He is more cautious than in past conversations, less willing to play with ideas. Or maybe this is just his famous homestretch focus kicking in. My questions are a distraction. His mind is on the big speech. He doesn't want to think about painful times. I try a different tack and ask, "What was the most difficult decision you've ever made?"

"The most difficult decision?" He emits a slightly frustrated snort and slowly sets the gears in motion. To enlist in the Navy? No, Vietnam was just a distant cloud on his horizon when he did that. To oppose the war when he came home? No, he had seen too much. Two weeks after he left Vietnam, his close friend Don (Dinky) Droz was killed—Kerry still has a photo in his Senate office of the tangled mess of Droz's exploded swift boat—and Kerry felt compelled to speak out. "There have been so many tough decisions." He sighed, then conceded, "But I guess they were really piling up on top of each other last fall."

"He had three impossible decisions to make," says John Sasso, Kerry's old Boston political friend who is his liaison to the Democratic National Committee. "If he'd made the wrong choice on any one of them, he wouldn't be here today. I don't think two out of a hundred politicians would have been able to make all three correctly under such intense pressure—but those are the sorts of situations where John is at his best." That is, of course, the party line among John Kerry's friends. He is great when his back is against the wall. He is studious, thorough and engaged when making policy decisions. He is independent to the point of being something of a loner. He takes on tough issues with little political upside—investigating drug running by Nicaraguan contras using CIA planes, investigating money laundering at the corrupt, Abu Dhabi—owned Bank of Credit and Commerce International, doing the scut work necessary to prove that no American prisoners of war were still being held by the Vietnamese.

All of which is true but incomplete. Kerry is an oddly elusive character for a national politician. There are nagging questions about his steadiness, especially on issues located at the jittery intersection of politics and policy. His contradictory votes on Iraq—giving the President the authority to go to war, then voting against the $87 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for the occupation—have been at the heart of the Republican attacks against him this year. And Kerry's most notable asset—his grace and clear thinking under pressure—comes and goes with maddening irregularity. "He always scares you at the beginning of a race," says a Boston politician who has watched Kerry for decades. "He's unfocused, ineffective—and then, at the last minute, he gets his act together and wins." That was true in his race for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts in 1982 and for the U.S. Senate in '84, and it was certainly true in Kerry's toughest campaign before 2004, his Senate race against Governor William Weld in '96. It is an enigma that cuts close to the essence of an intensely private man: Why does John Kerry require a near death experience to be an effective politician? I have a theory.

Early last summer, Kerry told me—off the record—that his sister Diana had been laid off from her job as a Boston public-school teacher because of budget cuts. Kerry had recently staged a press conference with the teacher of the year in South Carolina, who had also been laid off, and I asked him whether he planned to hold a similar event with Diana. "Oh, no," he said. "I wouldn't want to embarrass her."

Eventually Kerry did mention Diana's situation in some speeches but only after his sister began to talk about it publicly. That confirmed something I had long suspected: Kerry is a very proper Bostonian. His apparent aloofness is actually an antique form of New England propriety. His reluctance to wear his religious faith on his sleeve is part of this ethos, as is his formal, hortatory Sunday-sermon speaking style. A strong sense of honor comes with the territory, a discomfort with swagger and braggadocio. "I once was with Kerry watching Bob Dole on television," recalls David Wade, an aide who is usually found in Kerry's immediate proximity. "Someone was asking Dole about how he was wounded in World War II. Dole wouldn't do it. He said, 'You just don't talk about those things.'" Kerry, who was wounded three times in Vietnam, nodded his head vigorously, as Wade remembers, and said, "That's how it is."

Kerry talks all the time about the lessons he learned in Vietnam but rarely about what he did there. The story of how he saved Green Beret Jim Rassmann from the Bay Hap River under fire in 1969 would never have been told if Rassmann hadn't offered to tell it—dramatically, on the eve of the Iowa caucuses. Years ago, three of the Vietnam combat veterans Kerry served with in the Senate—John McCain, Bob Kerrey and Max Cleland—told me something that Kerry had never even hinted at: that Kerry had come to their rescue on occasions when they had been publicly attacked. He organized Op-Ed pieces and television appearances to defend his colleagues; he wrote a letter during the 2000 South Carolina primary, signed by Vietnam combat veterans of both parties, calling on George W. Bush to stop associating with veterans' groups who said McCain had abandoned vets; when Kerrey was accused of participating in a massacre of civilians in Vietnam, Kerry called some mutual friends and had them hang out with Kerrey until the storm passed. "I just love the guy," Kerrey once told me.

Military honor certainly accounts for some of Kerry's overactive sense of propriety, though not all of it. "The reticence, or whatever, came from both our parents but from my mother most of all," Kerry's younger brother Cameron told me a few weeks ago. "She was vehement about civic duty and personal correctness. Once, when I started talking about winning a ski race, she said to me, 'Shrink it down'—meaning my head. That was one of her expressions. John was more of a rebellious adolescent than I was. He had some real knock-down, drag-outs with our father. But he never rebelled against what Mom taught us."

Actually, Kerry didn't rebel all that much against his father either. Richard Kerry was a career foreign-service officer who saw public service as a priestly calling. He was vehement in his beliefs, a foreign policy realist who disliked U.S. attempts to remake the world (and disagreed with his son's decision to go to Vietnam). Family discussions around the dinner table were dead serious and high-minded; irony doesn't seem to be a Kerry family specialty. At an early age, John had to act like a member of the Council on Foreign Relations to get his father's attention and perhaps his affection. That may have caused some rebellious moments, but young Kerry never renounced the foreign policy priesthood. He is, to this day, very much a diplomatic traditionalist.

"It is sort of like dealing with Averell Harriman or one of the wise men," says former Kerry speechwriter Andrei Cherny, speaking of the Brahmins who dominated U.S. foreign policy after World War II. "On policy issues, he will grill his advisers in a way that seems a throwback: What will this mean for America 10 years down the road? How will it affect the global economy? It made me feel good to be working for someone that serious."

Harriman was a dreadful politician, though. After one dour term as Governor of New York, he was trounced by the ebullient Nelson Rockefeller. Politics doesn't seem to come naturally to Kerry either. His mother's civic propriety and his father's diplomatic propriety are a crushingly noble legacy. They haunt his every move. My guess is that Kerry's near death process works like this: He starts a campaign trying to do the right thing, but successful politics requires all sorts of creative roguery. His sense of civic propriety limits his ability to act ruthlessly (firing his campaign manager, for example) or flamboyantly (giving an entertaining, personal, red-meat stump speech). Kerry's sense of policy propriety renders his attempts at political expediency—the promises and compromises necessary to woo constituencies—tortured and unconvincing. He writhes about, descends into rhetorical abstractions, spends too much time thinking about what he is doing wrong and comes across as distanced, distracted, aloof. A perfect phony. And then Kerry's primordial sense of survival on the battlefield, honed and burnished in Vietnam, kicks in, and he does what he must to win: he acts like a real politician. From a distance, the process seems like a comic-book-hero transformation. Kerry enters the phone booth sipping French wine and emerges with a knife in his teeth, ready for battle.

In the 2004 democratic primaries, Kerry's near death experience had everything to do with his vote to support the war in Iraq. I remember seeing Kerry at a Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) cattle show a few months before the Iraq vote, in the summer of 2002, and he stood out among the various Democratic pretenders for one simple reason: he talked clearly and concisely about the war against al-Qaeda. He blasted "a new conventional wisdom of consultants, pollsters and strategists who argue ... that Democrats should be the party of domestic issues only." He then criticized President Bush for not using U.S. troops to capture al-Qaeda leaders trapped at Tora Bora after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan. Instead Bush had "turned to Afghan warlords, who only a week before were on the other side," to make the attack. It was a bold stroke by Kerry, challenging Bush from the right, calling for a more vigorous military strategy. And it worked. The Senator from Massachusetts—not John Edwards or DLC favorite Joe Lieberman—was the candidate who made the deepest impression that day.

And then he disappeared. On Oct. 11, Kerry cast his vote to authorize force in Iraq—and a very different, cautious, incoherent Kerry emerged on the other side. Before long, he was sucked into that "conventional wisdom of consultants, pollsters and strategists," having hired what seemed to be several thousand of them. But it wasn't the consultants or Jim Jordan or even Howard Dean who was poisoning his campaign. It was Kerry and his utter inability to explain his vote on Iraq.

The problem may have been that the ghost of that old idealism-averse Richard Kerry was sitting on his shoulder, whispering tsk-tsk-tsk. Before making up his mind, Kerry had done his usual high-minded wise-man process. He asked his staff for detailed information, grilled them on it, consulted with a legion of foreign policy Pooh-Bahs—almost always keeping his own counsel, never tipping his hand.

Jonathan Winer, a former Kerry staff member, says the policy process usually involves a political component: "He always asks, 'Who else likes it?' 'Who doesn't?' 'Why don't they?' 'Why haven't we addressed that argument?' And when all those questions are answered, he goes off and makes his decision." Sometimes, however, it takes a while. According to advisers, the decision-making process on all three crucial votes he has cast on Iraq, starting with his vote against the first Gulf War in 1991, was brutal.

There was good reason for this. In each case, there was a fair amount of political gamesmanship going on. In each case, the outcome was known before a single vote was cast. In 1991, Kerry managed to twist himself into a pretzel trying to figure out the political angles on the first Gulf War vote. "The Bush people were saying it was going to be a tough war," recalls a former staff member. "John thought they were setting us up. He thought it was going to be relatively easy and the Administration wanted the Democrats to make fools of themselves by voting against it. He was probably right about that. On the other hand, his constituents were very much opposed. If he voted in favor, the people of Massachusetts would see him as someone who'd voted for a war that wasn't essential." In the end, Kerry voted with his constituents and perhaps with his memories of Vietnam. A second staff member offers an account that emphasizes the emotional quality of the vote. "It was too close [in time] to Vietnam. He just wasn't ready yet to send young Americans off to die."

Kerry's second Iraq-war vote was in part a reaction to his vote against the first. "Bush was saying, 'I dare you to vote against this war,'" says a Kerry adviser. "Of course, John had his substantive reasons for voting for the war. He believed the intelligence about the WMD. He had called for regime change in 1998, after Saddam forced out the U.N. inspectors. But I'm pretty sure there was a political calculation too. John decided not to give Bush what he really wanted: a no vote."

Kerry's yea was hedged. The United Nations had to be involved, he said on the Senate floor. There had to be a broad international coalition in favor of war if the use of force proved necessary. He tried to gain some control over the process by supporting an amendment offered by Senators Joe Biden of Delaware and Richard Lugar of Indiana: to require the President to go back to the Senate before actually going to war. "A legislative vote is different from an executive decision," Kerry told me. "When I'm in an executive position, I can call the shots hard, straight and true. When I'm faced with a legislative vote, I'm not in total control of the outcome. That makes it far more difficult."

As the military situation deteriorated in postwar Iraq—it was not for nothing Winston Churchill once called the region "an ungrateful volcano"—Kerry's efforts to explain his vote became downright inchoate. At one point, reported the New York Times, Kerry spent 40 fruitless minutes trying to defend his position. And there was one more Iraq vote to come, perhaps the most embarrassing of all. The vote on $87 billion to continue the Iraq mission, in October 2003, was yet another reaction to the previous vote. Having voted for the war, Kerry now said he didn't want to give Bush another blank check. "I'm sure John felt that way," says a Kerry confidant. "But that vote was all about Howard Dean," who had become the Democratic front runner with an antiwar message.

Once again, Kerry tried to shape the outcome by co-sponsoring a Biden amendment—to pay for the $87 billion by increasing taxes on the wealthy. Once again the amendment failed—and it provided the most damaging line that Kerry has uttered in this campaign: "I actually did vote for the $87 billion before I voted against it." Bush has been using it in nearly every speech as an example of Kerry's fecklessness.

"John's judgment when it comes to the substance of policy is excellent," Biden told me. "We're usually in agreement. We don't even have to talk about it much. The truth is, he usually spends more time talking about the politics of a vote—at least he does with me—and that was certainly the case on the $87 billion. That told me this: John doesn't have as much confidence in his political judgment as he does in his policy decisions."

It certainly seemed that way at the time, but the vote on the $87 billion marked the end of Kerry's awol period. Within two weeks, a mild-mannered warrior emerged from the phone booth. While Kerry was preoccupied with the war, all sorts of problems, great and small, were festering within the campaign. Some arguments had been festering, unresolved, for months. The biggest problem was Jordan, who had a positive genius for alienating Kerry's closest associates, including wife Teresa and brother Cam. Managing the various layers of consultants, personal friends, political cronies and Vietnam buddies that formed the Kerry safari was never going to be easy, but Jordan ignored Kerry's old Boston pals and dismissed their concerns about the Dean campaign. "There isn't a single f______ vote to be had on the Internet," Jordan said at one point, according to several Kerry friends and staff members. "We don't need the f______ grass roots. We've got the grass tops," he said at another. "Shouldn't there be a statute of limitations on this stuff?" asks Jordan, who denies making those statements. "Clearly, Dean's success was causing a huge institutional frustration within the campaign."

It is impossible to know the specific moment that Kerry's fugue state lifted, but he was clearly in combat-survival mode by the second week in November. He consulted Ted Kennedy, who suggested his own chief of staff, Mary Beth Cahill, to replace Jordan. On Nov. 7, Kerry called Cahill and offered her the job without an interview. On Nov. 9, he sacked Jordan. It was as if a dam had burst. Within a week, Kerry began planning to abandon New Hampshire and transfer 100 staff members to Iowa. He demanded that the reluctant Michael Whouley, a genius organizer, take over the Iowa field operation. He decided to opt out of the federal campaign-finance system, which limits the amount that can be spent in each primary state, even though he had always been a supporter of public financing. Dean, flush with cash, was going to spend as much as he could in Iowa. Kerry, broke, needed to compete. He overhauled his stump speech and, in doing so, resolved an endless staff argument about how to deal with Dean. "Bob Shrum was on one side," says Cherny, referring to the famous, infamous political consultant, "and all the rest of us were on the other. And Shrum was right. He said that if you attack Dean in a multicandidate field, 'you wind up with John Edwards as the nominee.'"

But Shrum had also opposed a Cherny attempt to slip an attack on Bush—for the President's puerile "Bring 'em on" challenge to the Iraqi insurgents—into Kerry's September announcement speech. Now the candidate decided to bring it back as part of a lacerating attack on the President, and it became the Kerry campaign's signature. He launched the new speech at the Iowa Jefferson-Jackson dinner on Nov. 15, which marked the rebirth of his campaign. "Suddenly, the decision-making process was incredibly crisp," says a staff member. "It was like dealing with a different guy."

There still were plenty of problems. The campaign had no money. "There was a day in December when we received not one contribution, not a penny," says Cahill. "I felt so bad that I wrote out a check for $2,000 and rushed it downstairs so we wouldn't have a completely dry day." Kerry had to make one last big decision—whether to take out a $6.4 million loan on his Boston home, which represented most of his personal fortune, to finance the campaign. His wife may be heir to the Heinz-family fortune, but campaign-finance laws prevent her giving to his campaign more than a $2,000 donation. By law, Kerry could lend himself only his, rather small, share of their joint assets. If he lost and couldn't repay the loan on his home, he would be far more dependent on Teresa's fortune; his daughters might receive no significant inheritance from him. Several advisers suggested that he might even have to leave the Senate to make enough money to avoid foreclosure. Since then, Kerry's fund raising has been so successful that he was able to announce last week that he would use campaign money to repay the debt. But David Wade remembers driving along one night in Iowa, listening to one of Kerry's oldest financial supporters trying to persuade the candidate not to take out the loan. Even with the money, the supporter argued, Kerry's prospects in Iowa were dim. But without it, Kerry pushed back, there was no chance that he could overtake Dean. "You see," Kerry told me last week, with killer cool and without a flicker of irony, "I always believed I was going to win, so there really wasn't much choice but to do it."

In time, Kerry even came up with an answer on the war. He stopped being defensive. He described how he would have gone about it—waiting for the U.N. inspectors to do their work, patiently putting together a real coalition if war was necessary. And then, defiantly, he said, "If you don't believe I would have gone about it that way, then don't vote for me."

It is a surpassing American oddity that a proper Bostonian who seems so profoundly uncomfortable with the rude ceremonies of the public square can transform himself into a sleek political warrior, eager for the havoc of pitched battle. But I wonder how many of these visits to the phone booth are matters of desperation and how many are matters of strategy.

Kerry seemed to stand down after he marched through the primaries. To the consternation of many Democrats, he played rope-a-dope as the Bush campaign spent more than $80 million on mostly negative ads against him. Kerry muted his attacks on Bush during the Abu Ghraib prison-abuse scandal and the Marines' embarrassing retreat from Fallujah. I suspect these moves were intentional—part of the newly confident Kerry's grand design for the campaign: to lie low until July, when he announced his running mate in exactly the manner that he intended, and then to make the grand step onto center stage when he accepts his party's nomination in Boston. Still, Kerry is about to enter far more difficult political terrain than he has ever encountered before, and one wonders if there are more near death experiences to come.

There is a larger question too: Are these phone-booth episodes merely a campaign phenomenon, or would they be an essential part of John Kerry's governing style? It is difficult to say. Certainly, his steadiness and intelligence were roundly applauded—by members of both parties—when he chaired the pow-mia committee. And there is not the slightest evidence that Kerry has ever panicked in a crisis. On the contrary, that seems to be when he is at his best. But we have never really seen him in a purely executive role—and his job over the next hundred days will be to convince the nation that he can be more than a legislator and more than a warrior, that he can be a President.

After I left the candidate last week, I remembered a story that one of his old Navy buddies named Paul Nace once told me. Nace bumped into Kerry as the candidate walked into Boston's Faneuil Hall for one of his last debates with Weld in 1996. Nace was amazed by the look in his friend's eye. Kerry was cool, calm, bloodthirsty—and thoroughly enjoying the moment. "I thought," Nace recalled, "'Bill Weld has no idea what's about to hit him."

I wonder if I saw that same look when Kerry said to me, "You see, I always believed I was going to win."

• JOE KLEIN