Any Older DU'ers Remember KERRY in '71?

I wanna know who on this site remembers Kerry from his VVAW days. Do you remember his testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee? His group? How well-known a figure was he? I'm curious.

My husband was VVAW.

Ooops. Hit the button too fast.

It was a very well-known antiwar group of the day. Kerry was a well-known activist, as well, but was considered nuanced even then - :)

"considered nuanced even then"

at the time he was not as loud as others, made less of an impression than VVAW did as a group.

But the c-span tonight made him look wise beyond his years in 71.

i have heard a bit from a few people. but would like to know how things were in those days. i was born after the vietnam war was over but am curious about how things were like in the past.

It was like this only everywhere.

But, yes it was like here, but you didn't need to be tucked away on a liberal discussion board to express your views. You could talk about things in the open and discuss. Plus there were some TV outlets where more discussion took place.

One didn't feel as alone then as one does in today's America in those disturbing times. IMHO, anyway.

It was a very tribal thing among the young that grew to include older people, too, who shared the sensibility. There was the underground press, so people felt connected all over the country to what was going on everywhere. You could just walk outside and find somebody to talk politics with, in the coffee shop, on the corner, anywhere. There were groups, lectures, exhibits, performances, events in the streets, everything expressed in a political context. Every single act was political, every decision, every observation. One was very conscious of growth, of becoming liberated from straight America, of becoming free. Something about that era that seems to surprise younger people is how naturally men and women of different ethnicities or races, economic backgrounds, sexual preference, age groups, or whatever, mingled on an ordinary basis, partied together, debated each other, protested, made art, made love, got high, and so forth. It was the war. It unleashed a torrent of questions about who we were and what the hell we thought we were doing as a society. It was horrible and wonderful. It's a shame it couldn't last, not the war, the time, in a way, because it was quite a time to be alive. Okay, so it was politics, politics, politics, and sex. :D

I was 13 or 14 at the time and had just taken an interest in the news. I wasn't too aware of Kerry, though -- most of the commentariat focused on Jane Fonda, who was not part of the project at all. Having grown up in a conservative community, it was a natural thing to think.

I expected my father, a life-long Army warrant officer, to declare that Winter Soldier and VVAW were treasonous, but he was very concerned about the situation and had an amazing amount of interest in it. Later on, I learned that he had lost several friends in Vietnam in the course of the 60s, including a few he met as 17-year-old boots with fresh crew cuts.

He was a highly patriotic guy, having founght in WWII and Korea, but was appalled at the stupidity and waste of warfare. Korea had been bad enough, but Vietnam was strictly a criminal waste of life.

It took me years to realize that patriotism didn't mean you had to be a wingnut. The Old Man passed on a few years ago, but strangely enough, he's taught me as much in his absence as when he was around.

--bkl

interview with Dick Cavett was on CSPAN tonight. if you haven't already caught it, you might want to check and see if it is on again. He was very, very good even at that young age.

I must say in all honesty that as much as I have fought against this nomination, Kerry seriously used his connections to drop the Veteran Peace bomb on the country.

The Vietnam vet organization of antiwarriors was awesome. Their efforts were the nail in the coffin of that war.

When finally the veterans like Kerry came home and said the war was sick and perverted and awful and senseless, finally the power elites in Washington could no longer contain the lie of Vietnam.

It was the straw that broke the Republican camel's back.

I admired Kerry tremendously and was awestruck by his testimony in Congress. Few knew who he was until that day. But THAT movement - at the very end of the 60's "movement" - which was destroyed by cointelpro - could not be stopped by the powers that be. The revolting veterans were too much for the system to destroy and America HAD to listen to them.

The draft was halted by Nixon (which ended the peace movement of the time because suddenly no one was at risk anymore) and the war drew to a whimpering whirl;ybird ending.

And the antiwar R&B music, love, peace and rock and roll fell to DISCO and cocaine and the commercialization of the "alternative" movement.

It was an incredible last gasp of the '60's by an incredible brave group: antiwar veterans. We all knew vets and people who came back with PTSD and drug habits and acid trips and tails to make your guts churn (or nearly became casualties of the war ourselves - I was lucky and had a high lottery number in the draft and was saved by that, though I had resisted the draft myself)

So Kerry was big news for about a week. BIG news. Kinda like the Clarke media deal only with only three news networks reporting twice a day.

I had actually wanted him to run for Prex for years because of that time.


So YES it was a heady time and a last gasp of the counterculture being run by the boys who were coming home wounded and scarred in the insanity and vast swampy mental asylum called Vietnam.

And we all marvelled.

THEN Watergate happened and we kinda forgot all about it.

Then Carter and the gas crisis which led to Reagan and the Bush fascist takeover.

and he wasn't the best known, or the most active or effective of the antiwar activists.

among the antiwar vets. It was a different movement, in a way.

but I went for the SDS because they really wanted to shake the system.

I thought the Moratoriums against the war were the most effective.

I was more for shaking the system than he ever was, though. 1969, the black armbands and candlelight vigils, the Moratorium was earthshaking for me, but he had just come home and it took him a little while, into 1970, before he joined VVAW, but once he did, he stuck with it until the end.

And I can tell you a lot of my friends were quite interested in Kerry's leadership position against the war. There may have been others, but Kerry had the highest profile of all vetrens that I can remember.

as many thought he should be. I think that's what IG means, but he was out there in front, no question. There was the larger antiwar movement and then the vets started coming home and getting organized. Naturally, their experience was outside anything the rest of us could know, so it was its own movement within the larger one, always separate and different.

I do give Kerry and his group a huge amount of credit, though. I think the fact that they served there, gave the VVAW a huge amount of credibility and made it ok for the far more moderate middle class to accept the changing attitudes on the war's justification.

I suppose that speaks to his well known-ness

throwing those medals away, that was a turning point for me. I had not been opposed to the War but seeing that really gave me food for thought and I realized how wrong it was. :think: