Sunday, October 31, 2004
Copyright © Las Vegas Review-Journal

VIN SUPRYNOWICZ: Who was John Kerry's father?

I never liked Richard Nixon.

I grew up in a New England Democratic family. To us, Nixon was the gravel voiced, spastic dark prince of the conservatives, smug upper-crust types who wanted to suppress your ability to get ahead if you were Jewish, Polish, Italian, Irish -- anyone who hadn't come over on the Mayflower.

As I grew older, I heard a more specific critique of Nixon: He was one of those Red-baiters, like Joe McCarthy. They saw communists hiding under every bush.

The problem is, it turns out the Roosevelt-Truman State Department really was heavily infiltrated with leftists, ranging from the merely naive to outright, document-passing Russian spies -- just as Dick Nixon always said (Look up "Alger Hiss").

This gang, in the most generous interpretation, saw the Soviet Union as primarily a localized political threat in the European theater, rather than a threat to capitalism and freedom on a global scale. Thus, they wanted to make cooperative world government via the United Nations a higher foreign-policy priority than containing or rolling back communism.

Chief of this appeasement crowd was Dean Acheson, who -- along with my dad -- hailed from Middletown, Conn., and went to Yale. Most of Acheson's crowd was dumped shortly after Eisenhower and Nixon arrived in 1953, Acheson being replaced by John Foster Dulles, who started a Cold War with communism that our side would eventually win.

A rising star in the Acheson State Department -- an attorney for the Bureau of United Nations Affairs from 1951 to 1954 -- was one Richard Kerry, who in 1954 was sent to Germany as legal adviser to the U.S. Mission to Berlin, where he became involved in European unification issues, establishing relationships with prominent European politicians including Jean Monnet.

The foreign policy views that French-reared Richard Kerry developed while working in the State Department, as expressed in his later book, "The Star-Spangled Mirror: America's Image of Itself and the World," reflect the influence of Acheson and his associates.

These views put John Kerry's father, who died four years ago, at increasing odds with Dulles and later with the Kennedy administration. In 1962, he retired from the diplomatic service, feeling no one was listening to his opinions, and became a disgruntled critic of U.S. foreign policy.

From 1965, Richard Kerry opposed American involvement in Vietnam. In 1990, he wrote a book that attacked the premises of American foreign policy during the Cold War. He characterized the Dulles brothers' ideological opposition to the Soviet Union as an oversimplified "either/or" dualism, advocating what in his eyes was a more sophisticated relativism.

As he put it, "Casting issues in the form of polar choices (for example: isolationism vs. interventionism) readily leads to the conclusion that if one is wrong, the other must be right. In a more relative view of the issue, both are likely to be wrong."

"A number of things we're seeing today were also laid out in a book by Kerry's father, Richard Kerry," writes Philip Gourevitch in the July 26 New Yorker.

" 'On occasion we seemed to be telling them that we understood their vital interests better than they did,' Richard Kerry wrote, adding, 'On many occasions the need to consult them in advance before taking unilateral action was simply ignored, and we often showed visible impatience with consultation.' "

Sound familiar?

"What troubled him," Gourevitch writes, "was what he perceived as an 'ethnocentric' strain in the spirit of American exceptionalism, an approach to the world based on a stubborn conviction that 'everyone ought to be like us.' Although the book was published after the Berlin Wall was breached, it was obviously completed while the wall still stood, and at its core it is an argument for what is known as a 'realist' foreign policy ... with respect for other sovereignties, however alien or unsavory their values may be."

A lot of folks have moaned that the current presidential campaign has us "re-fighting the war in Vietnam." It goes deeper than that. This campaign, in many ways, is a replay of the isolationist debate of the 1930s, as revived in the "Better Red Than Dead" leftism of the 1950s.

President Bush believes the way to defeat Islamic terrorism is pretty much the way we defeated first Hitler and Tojo -- and then Russian communism. Use a full-court press; take the war to them on their own turf.

But John Kerry doesn't see the need to fight a war at all. That's what all this "nuance" business is about. It's all a misunderstanding, you see, based on American "ethnocentrism" -- on the notion that America is somehow "exceptional," that we can or should set some kind of shining example of freedom to the other cultures in the world.

That's all wrong, apparently. It represents an oversimplified "either/or" dualism, when what we need to do instead is embrace "a more sophisticated relativism."

Whether it be the communists murdering millions in pursuit of the lunatic collectivist vision of a couple of German crackpots, or Islamic mullahs beating women who go out in public with their arms uncovered and executing college professors who theorize that Mohammed might once have shaved his armpits -- and clownishly blowing up our occasional skyscraper -- we have to get over this "us vs. them" nonsense. The answer is to consult, to negotiate, to reach a compromise.

With Joe Stalin. With Mao Tse-Tung. With Pol Pot. With Osama bin Laden.

Branding these people "communists" or "terrorists" or "mass murderers" is "just name-calling," see. No one culture is superior to any other. And these guys are reasonable; they'll compromise. Maybe if we just offer them Czechoslovakia. ...

Vin Suprynowicz is assistant editorial page editor of the Review-Journal and author of the books "Send in the Waco Killers" and "The Ballad of Carl Drega."