In their biography of John Kerry, a trio of Boston Globe writers takes a stiff brush to the life and record of the Massachusetts senator and soon-to-be Democratic presidential nominee. Kerry's fans will say they were too hard on the man. His detractors will say they weren't hard enough. For those of us in the middle, they've produced a useful work.
The concept is familiar: A newspaper profile series is strung together and fleshed out later into a book. The book traces Kerry from his grandfather's move to the United States through his current campaign. It paints a portrait of a smart, calculating, and ambitious politician. In meticulous detail, the authors go through Kerry's lifelong ambition to be president, his twists and turns on a variety of policy questions during his career. Controversies surrounding Kerry's service in Vietnam and his days as a war protester are all explored here.
The picture the book paints of Kerry is often not very flattering. He comes off as a driven politician with no compass, only a finger to the wind. With polls showing many Americans don't yet know Kerry, the mushiness outlined by the Globe could prove Kerry's undoing in what is expected to be a close presidential campaign.
For example, the authors write that while Kerry clearly supported the war in Afghanistan, his ''thinking on Iraq would never be so clear-cut.
''And Kerry's personal decisionmaking style made it even murkier. For John Kerry, all major decisions were Socratic exercises. He would seek advice from many quarters, examine all the angles, and raise every doubt. . . .
''On policy matters, these exercises provided him a lawyerly command of the arguments pro and con, and gave him great peripheral vision in the political arena. But this due diligence often manifested itself in Kerry's propensity for windy explanations, with nuance layered upon nuance. He often sounded as if he were talking himself out of the decision he had just made."
