The Real Stories

Article II, Section 1, paragraph 5 declares, "neither shall any Person be eligible to [the presidency] who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five years." Implicit in this provision is an understanding that good deeds at age 25 do not qualify one for the White House and that a candidate who behaved rather badly at that age is entitled to claim, as George Bush did in 2000, that "when I was young and foolish, I was young and foolish." If you are convinced that the greatest risk to the United States is that we will refrain from using military force when necessary, and not that we will inappropriate use military force, you should not care very much about the extent to which Bush used political connections to limit service during the Vietnam Era. The real issue is the connections to be drawn being the young men and the candidates for president they became, an issue that to the best of my knowledge is barely being discussed by the candidates or the media. These connections are severalfold.

To what extent do the events of 30 years ago highlight enduring features of Kerry and Bush? One reason why many Kerry supporters do not go ga-ga is that the brave, intrepid soldier of Vietnam does not seem to have become a brave intrepid political actor. A perfect decent liberal Senator, and that’s good enough to get my vote, but if you were to write a Profiles in Political Courage over the past ten years, would Kerry be included? On the other hand, Bush the adult exhibits many traits of Bush the young man. He has virtually no personal achievements that were not procured through birthright connections. Worse, his fundamental interest seems to be politics (and making money). Bush the young man who left his original national guard unit to work on political campaigns seems closely related to Bush the president who seems more interested in using the war of terror for partisan advantage than actually figuring out what is moving the crucial political actors in the Middle East. And, to highlight a point Jack Balkin has made in previous post, Bush is quite intelligent when interested, and he is very interested in his reelection. He simply isn’t interested in learning about other nations. True then, true today.

The second connection is what the candidates have learned from their experiences as a 25 year old. Here, Kerry comes off better. Kerry has experienced military conflict in a divided society with mores quite different from the United States. It’s not pretty and very unromantic. It’s not five bad guys repressing a bunch of soccer mom wannabees and middle-class Joes. Frightened soldiers far from home are prone to atrocities unless very closely supervised. Bush, have never served and (as important) have little interest in the world outside of his election has no sense of what happens on the ground in such countries as Vietnam and Iraq, and with his romantic notions, has little sensitivity to the pressures that promote torture and other human rights violations. Kerry correctly predicted the postwar chaos partly because as a youth he had experiences that Bush throughout his life has avoided. A Kerry administration is less likely to have prison abuse scandals because members of that administration have some sense of what American soldiers in war-torn countries experience.


To a fair degree, I am putting words in Kerry’s mouth. It’s his job to make this case to the country, and so far neither he nor the Democratic Party has made it. But if there is a story here, the story is not how badly Kerry bled or the extent to which Bush pulled strings, but whether these events highlight permanent features of their characters and whether lessons learned in 1970 have any bearing on capacity to make intelligent policy in 2004.