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Within weeks of his arrival in the Senate in early 1985, when he was still learning where the bathrooms were and how to make his way around the cavernous Russell Senate Office Building, Kerry got a tip from a Vietnam veteran that the Reagan Administration was illegally providing aid to the contra rebels, circumventing a congressional ban. Within weeks he was on a plane to Nicaragua with another freshman Senator, Tom Harkin, for a 36-hour fact-finding trip. Secretary of State George Shultz accused the rookies of being "used" by the Managua regime. "It was a very painful time for us," recalls Jonathan Winer, Kerry's general counsel at the time. But that did not stop Kerry from spending the next 18 months trying to discover what White House aide Oliver North was up to in Central America.
Kerry and North were both sons of Vietnam, both winners of Bronze and Silver Stars and the Purple Heart (three for Kerry, two for North). But North viewed Vietnam as an honorable crusade against communism, and aiding the Nicaraguan contras as the next chapter in that fight. Kerry, for his part, had no tolerance for deception in pursuit of that goal. Kerry boasts on the campaign trail that he "led the fight to expose Oliver North and his private aid network," which is true up to a point. But "he wasn't the only one blowing the whistle," says William LeoGrande, dean of the School of Public Affairs at American University, who was tracking the issue at the time.
Once the entire arms-for-hostages scheme unraveled, it became clear there would have to be a full, formal Iran-contra investigation. But Kerry was kept off the resulting panel. His high profile and relentless digging had made him a little too radioactive by that time. As a consolation prize, he was given the chairmanship of the Subcommittee on Terrorism, Narcotics and International Operations, which led to the next wave of investigations into Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega's drug trafficking, and money laundering through the Middle Eastern Bank of Credit & Commerce International.
All that experience in investigations and oversight didn't give Kerry anything especially useful to take home to hungry Massachusetts voters. But it does allow him to say now that he was among the first in the Senate to combat the growing threat from transnational forces--the money launderers, drug smugglers and arms dealers who have become prime targets in the war on terrorism.
--THE SENATE VETERAN