AMONG DEMOCRATS, it is fashionable to remember the Cold War as a bipartisan effort. “Until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989,” former senator Bill Bradley has said, “we were sure about one thing: We knew where we stood on foreign policy.” The world was simple, according to President Clinton’s secretary of state, Madeleine Albright. “There were the Communists, run out of the Soviet Union, and there were us; the good guys and the bad guys . . . it was fairly easy to understand.”
We’re all Cold Warriors now–now that the Cold War is over.
What about John Kerry? He was definitely not a Cold Warrior, though you wouldn’t know it from his campaign, which seldom (if ever) mentions his consistent opposition to Ronald Reagan’s foreign and defense policies during the 1980s. Back in those days, Kerry defined himself as the anti-Cold Warrior. At the 1988 Democratic convention, he characterized the Reagan presidency as a time of “moral darkness.”
The best place to look for evidence of Kerry’s views on the Cold War is his first campaign for the Senate in 1984. Packaged as a candidate who rarely met a weapons system he wouldn’t cancel or an international dispute in which America was on the right side, he won.
The race began in mid-January of that year when Massachusetts senator Paul Tsongas announced he was retiring. The foreshortened Democratic primary campaign quickly turned into a four-man race, with Kerry, then lieutenant governor, finding his chief rival in congressman James Shannon. Kerry and Shannon were quite a pair. State secretary Michael Connolly, who was also running, nicknamed them “the liberal twins,” while candidate David Bartley, the former state House speaker, referred to them as “litmus-test liberals.”
Kerry’s platform was among the most liberal of its day. As his Boston Globe biographers write in John F. Kerry, “the main thrust of Kerry’s candidacy was an attack on Reagan’s economic, foreign, and military policies.” On the three big Cold War issues–the nuclear freeze, military spending, and support for the Nicaraguan contras–Kerry was pro-freeze, anti-defense buildup, and anti-contra aid.
The nuclear freeze in particular was a cause celebre. Kerry and Shannon both courted the pro-freeze crowd intensely. This came easily to Kerry, who in June 1982, while running for lieutenant governor, had spoken at a massive antinuclear rally in New York’s Central Park. In that race, Kerry had indeed tried to make the freeze his signature issue, but it never gained traction.
Two years later, as Reagan sought reelection, the political action committee Freeze Voter ’84–which called for a U.S.-Soviet moratorium on nuclear weapons–released a questionnaire for national and statewide candidates. Paul Walker, a former Freeze Voter ’84 executive, says “Every point you won or lost” on the questionnaire, “potentially represented thousands of voters.” Kerry and Shannon each filled it out, and Walker graded their responses. Shannon scored a perfect 100, while Kerry scored a 94. So Shannon would receive the group’s endorsement.
Or not. Soon afterward, Walker, though he was supporting Shannon in the primary, contacted Kerry campaign manager Paul Rosenberg and explained how Kerry could modify his answers to gain a perfect score. Rosenberg then sent Kerry a memo–dated May 23, 1984–that was made public by the Boston Globe last year. “According to Paul Walker,” Rosenberg wrote, “your stated position on the Trident is what marked you down.” He continued:
I think it is critically important that we get a 100% rating from this group. You should explain (or Jonathan should explain to Paul Walker) how your position was mis-interpreted so that [Walker] will correct the rating before it is distributed to the board tomorrow evening. . . .
Rosenberg noted that “Walker is favorably disposed to change the grading” because he knows “what you must have meant.”
Just like that, Kerry revised his questionnaire and tied Shannon with a perfect score. Freeze Voter ’84 decided to split its endorsement between the “liberal twins.”
When the Globe published Rosenberg’s memo, Kerry told Globe reporter Brian Mooney he did not recall his amendments to the questionnaire. “I wasn’t trying to be on both sides of it,” Kerry said. The other candidates knew at the time that Kerry had revised his answers, though Shannon says he didn’t learn of the memo until the Globe publicized it. Freeze Voter ’84, Shannon recalls, “had a lot of adherents in Massachusetts.” But, he is quick to add, “I don’t think you can say [Kerry] was elected by the nuclear freeze movement.”
Kerry naturally opposed the Reagan defense buildup. The Bush campaign loves enumerating the weapons systems Kerry has voted against in the Senate. Recently, some have defended Kerry’s record as less dovish than it appears. Voting against a massive defense appropriations bill, the pro-Kerry camp says, is not the same as voting against the specific weapons contained therein.
Perhaps. But what’s beyond debate is that Kerry, in 1984, said he would cancel at least 27 different weapons systems. He recommended cancellation of, among others, the B-1 bomber; the B-2 stealth bomber; the AH-64 Apache helicopter; the MX missile; the cruise missile; the Patriot air defense missile; the Pershing II missile; the Trident nuclear submarine; the Aegis air-defense cruiser; the AV-8B Harrier jet; and the F-15, F-14A, and F-14D fighter jets. Meanwhile, he advocated reductions in 18 other systems, including the Bradley fighting vehicle, the M-1 Abrams tank, the Tomahawk cruise missile, the F-16 jet, and the joint tactical air system.
Some of these positions, Kerry admitted to the Globe last year, now look “ill-advised” and “stupid.”
Kerry proposed cutting at least $54 billion from Reagan’s proposed $289 billion defense budget for fiscal year 1985; his long-range plan was to slash $200 billion over the next four years. “The biggest defense buildup since World War II has not given us a better defense,” Kerry said at the time. “Today, Americans are more threatened by the prospect of war, not less so.” He also worried that Reagan’s defense spending was siphoning funds from domestic programs. The president “has mortgaged our future in order to pay for a bloated military budget,” he declared in February 1984.
Kerry was especially scornful of the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). Like many SDI critics, he derided the antimissile program as “Star Wars,” and said it was “crazy.” He also blamed Reagan, not the Soviets, for the failure of arms control talks. The White House, Kerry explained, had placed unreasonable demands on Moscow.
As for Vietnam? Well, yes, Kerry referenced it frequently in the 1984 campaign. Back then, Central America was a hot-button issue. There were Communist-backed civil wars raging in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras; and a Soviet client state was emerging in Nicaragua. Kerry saw it all through the prism of Vietnam. Calling himself a “soldier for peace,” he claimed his war service would help him prevent Washington from “making the same mistake again.” Kerry told Newsweek that Reagan’s Central America policies threatened to produce “another chapter in the Vietnam legacy.”
He was most dismayed by the administration’s Nicaragua strategy. In supporting the anti-Communist contra rebels, Reagan hoped to push Managua’s Sandinista dictatorship toward free elections and greater civil liberties. Conservatives viewed it as totalitarianism versus democracy–the Soviet bloc versus the Free World. Kerry (and many Democrats) did not. “Our policy in Nicaragua is in violation of international law,” he said. By aiding the contras, Reagan was damaging America’s “moral credibility.” And the Soviet-funded Sandinista regime? “We should not be overthrowing that government,” Kerry said. He blamed Marxist-Leninist uprisings in Central America not on the Russians, Cubans, and Sandinistas, but rather on socioeconomic factors such as poverty.
Kerry also considered the 1983 U.S. liberation of Grenada an unfair fight. In an October 1984 debate, he compared it to “Boston College playing football against the Sisters of Mercy.” The American invasion, he told the Cape Codder newspaper, “represented a bully’s show of force against a weak Third World nation. The invasion only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle U.S.-Soviet and North-South relations.”
Did his anti-Cold Warrior posture propel Kerry into the Senate? It was certainly a factor. But James Shannon thinks Kerry won the ultra-tight Democratic primary largely because of his better name recognition and experience running statewide. Kerry then faced conservative Republican Ray Shamie in the general election. Shamie, a self-made millionaire who stood to the right of most Bay Staters, never had a chance. When the returns came in on November 6, 1984, Kerry won by a 10-point margin.
Speaking to an overflow crowd at the Sheraton Boston hotel that night, Kerry said his victory had shortened the distance between the Vietnam memorial and the U.S. Capitol. He also recalled his unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1972, when he ran as a radical antiwar candidate. “Like this campaign, that campaign was about peace,” Kerry said. “For at least the next six years, that campaign for peace is going to continue.”
Duncan Currie is an editorial assistant at The Weekly Standard.
