Customer Reviews

John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best (Publicaffairs Reports)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

As one might expect from a book expanded from a series of newspaper articles, this biography of John Kerry is a fairly dry and straightforward presentation of the facts of his life. The Globe did an admirable job in assembling, and in some cases uncovering, primary source material on Kerry. (Those expecting a local paper to do a fluff job on the local hero should be aware Kerry has had a strained relationship with the Globe's news staff for thirty years.) As such, this is a very good introduction to the man who would be president, and in a way a sort of skeleton for some as-yet-unwritten future biography that might explore him as a person and public figure in greater detail.

The Globe series pulls no punches in presenting Kerry's career, warts and all. It does a particularly good job at examining the controversies in Kerry's biography and sorting out the facts from the innuendo, the verifiable from the speciously speculative. Vietnam medals, his conservative role in the radical Vietnam Veterans Against the War, his controversial first stabs at elected office, and the basis of his at-times confusing stances on the Iraq and Gulf Wars are all covered from "both sides" with analysis limited only to a reasonable calculus of what version of disputed events is most likely to be true.

As a political biography, this book distinctly has no point of view. Very little in the way of historical context, as might be expected in a more erudite biography, intrudes upon the basic narrative of Kerry's public life. Supporters and detractors of Kerry will find plenty to grab onto within its pages. At the same time, the book should raise questions about Kerry to his partisans as well as underscore his strengths of character, intelllect, and executive abilities to his opponents. The book does a fairly good job at getting at the complexity of Kerry's manner of thinking and public stances, which both explains the allegation of "flip-flopping" in its nuanced contexts and reveals the essentially political nature of Kerry's character.

Those looking into insights into John Kerry's character will find plenty of revealing instances, although this is no "up close and personal" celebrity portrait. Kerry's alleged aloofness comes across more as a person uninterested in wearing his inner psychology on his coat sleeves than as indicative of a person truly cold and removed. It's very difficult to imagine Kerry engaging in, say, Bill Clinton-like sharing of the deep recesses of the soul which so endeared the latter to the electorate; at the same time it's abundantly clear Kerry is the type of person highly unlikely to fall into personal pecadilloes like those which dogged Clinton.

Particularly enlightening is the coverage of Kerry's youth and student days: we see the emergence of a careful thinker, ambitious and sometimes ego-driven from the earliest. Kerry's closest relationships are barely covered, however. We learn he was unhappy and morose following his divorce, but learn little of the nature of his relationship with his first wife. We learn of the pain he felt at having five friends killed in Vietnam, including one of his closest (Dick Pershing, grandson of the General, "Blackjack" Pershing), but the direct way it affected his character and motivations is less clear.

The book spends a bit too much time and space on Kerry's grandfather's Jewish-Austrian roots and death by suicide, given that Kerry himself had no knowledge of this part of his ancestral story until the Globe itself informed him of what it had uncovered. It's an interesting twist, but one which hardly illuminates his half-patrician, half-immigrant rags-to-riches family tree in a way which might've affected the formation of his character.

The tone of the book is uneven, as one might expect from an assemblage of articles written by different journalists, and there are occasional abrupt gaps in the narrative sequence. The notes on sources are usefully quoted with the exact phrase, but do not have enough detail to provide much help for those wishing to research further.

All in all, I'd recommend this as a very good start for those with the time and interest to delve more deeply into Kerry. It certainly compares extremely favorably with the sparse material available on President Bush immediately prior to his election in 2000. Readers strapped for time may wish to concentrate on the story of the young Kerry and the Vietnam-era Kerry, which is a riveting portrait in the trials of character and reads more breezily than the drier details of his Senate career. The definitive portrait of Kerry, of course, awaits at least one or two more chapters as yet unwritten.

Skip the self-congratulatory preface, by the way: the Globe editors being smug and self-righteous about their objectivity does not illuminate the subject of the book to any additional degree.

I have read many biographies of political candidates. Almost all such biographies are either puff pieces or hatchet jobs. This biography by contrast is of a different sort, a detailed "who," "what," "when," "why," and "how" the Democratic presidential candidate arrived where he is today. The look is a revealing one that will be helpful to those who want to make a more informed decision about whom to vote for in the coming election. It's well worth your time to read this book.

The authors are three reporters who developed a detailed series on Senator Kerry for the Boston Globe last year. Since then, the series has been expanded and extended to create this volume. The work is much more complete than I expected.

Although I am from Massachusetts, I didn't feel like I knew very much about Senator Kerry before reading this book. Now, I realize why I had this feeling. Senator Kerry hasn't really spent a lot of time in the state except during the period from when he first ran for the House of Representatives until he was elected to the Senate. His father was a foreign service official, and Senator Kerry often lived in foreign lands or at prep schools in either Switzerland or New Hampshire (the Saint Paul's school). He attended college at Yale (where he was a member of the select Skull and Bones) and left there for Vietnam. After he became a senator, most of his time was spent in Washington or in foreign travel. Senate President Billy Bulger used to kid Senator Kerry that part of his district was in Nicaragua.

The book told me quite a few things I didn't know. To me, a man named John Kerry is probably an Irish Catholic. Well, that's not the case. Senator Kerry knew that his father's parents came from Austria and had changed their names. But until the Globe did their research, he did not know that these grandparents had been Jews who converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution. In addition, and also not known to the senator, his paternal grandfather had earned and lost three fortunes and in despair committed suicide in the Copley Plaza hotel in Boston. I also didn't know about what his duty had been in Vietnam, and came away amazed that he survived the suicidal mission of running the small boats on small rivers to draw enemy fire. How awful it is that our men were asked to do that! During the primary campaigns last winter, I thought that the senator looked like someone suffering from cancer. But I didn't realize that he had just been operated on to remove an early stage cancer of the prostate. His family connections fascinated me, as well as his many contacts with famous politicians at an early age.

I also learned that Senator Kerry is a thorough, nuanced thinker who has trouble articulating his complex views into a three word "sound bite" that is so popular with television and newspaper reporters. That matched the impression I had of him when I spent a day at the U.S. Senate in 1987 meeting a number of the leaders there. My host was a Republican and Senator Kerry was the only Democrat invited to attend the function. Clearly, Senator Kerry had made an impression on his colleagues . . . with whom he often differed on foreign affairs.

I enjoyed reading about his visible role in the anti-Vietnam war movement, his attempt to broker peace in Nicaragua, his support for intervention in Serbia and questioning about the first Iraq war.

The book portrays Senator Kerry as an opportunist who is consumed totally by his passion to become president of the United States. I think that portrayal would probably apply to almost everyone who ever ran for president, so I didn't take much away from that point. I was more impressed by the way that he has been a conscience for our country in avoiding foreign conflicts (something George Washington also warned against), opposed institutional forces that can drive a nation to war against the will of its people and sought novel solutions to long-standing problems (such as normalizing relations with Vietnam).

I looked in vain in the book for a sense of his political platform during this election campaign. I had been very impressed by his thinking in reading the new book by Senator Kerry, A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, and looked in vain for references to his ideas in this book. I graded the book down one star for missing this obvious part of his biography.

I also faulted the book for failing to compare Senator Kerry to his obvious peer, the President of the United States, who followed him by two years at Yale. Those comparisons would have made the book fascinating reading.

May our nation make a brilliant decision in choosing who will lead us beginning in 2005.

Overall this book is "fair and balanced" but tends to be slightly more negative than positive (whoever said this is Pro-Kerry "propaganda" has obviously not read it). The authors do a good job of using different sources and weighing their credibility to come up with a reasonable consensus of what happened. I found the chapters concerning Kerry's youth, college years, and Vietnam experience very interesting. However, some of the chapters seemed too long (family tree, 1996 Senate race). I definitely recommend this book for those who want a better understanding of John Kerry.

What a great concept! Rather than the loaded in-favor auto biographies or biased-against unofficial biographies common to politics, this is the work of those members of the press who have followed Kerry for most of his career, know him inside and out, and continue to maintain neutrality as members of the press. While Kerry's approved biography paints him as a hero, it is expected. The pleasant part about this book is that even through the warts, this guy really is the real deal.

This book isn't written in flowing prose and it doesn't seem to have any political ax to grind. They just want to present the facts about John Kerry's life for the eventual judgement of the reader.

They present both sides of the controversies Kerry's been involved in (his desire for a negotiated settlement with the Sandinistas, his peace activities after getting back from Vietnam, his first Purple Heart, etc.). However, the authors have a great deal more respect for what is part of the documented historical record and try to compare that to what Kerry or his critics say.

With that said, I liked the guy I read about. I felt that the resume the book ended up presenting was impressive- Kerry volunteered for Officer Training, commanded two swiftboats and won five medals in Vietnam with only his First Purple Heart having any question about it(Kerry got hit by shrapnel and was a little to aggressive in getting a Purple Heart for it). He came back, traveled all over the Eastern U.S. talking to Vietnam Vets and presenting their stories to Congress and anyone else who would listen. He tried unsuccessfully to run for the House, then attended law school, and worked for the DA's office of Middlesex County where he racked up an impressive conviction rate and left because he started vying for the DA's job. He then established his own successful law practice, then ran for and won a Senate seat in 1984. He's spent the last 19-20 years doing mostly investigative work for the Senate, from Iran-Contra to Latin American Drug Smuggling to the BCCI banking scandal and then investigated claims that POW's were still in Vietnam (his work on this gained the respect of John McCain). There are a lot of government scandals we know about because he took the initiative to investigate them, even if it exposed fellow Democrats (BCCI). During Clinton's terms, he helped Clinton get a major crime bill putting more cops on our streets, and also helped get the assault weapons ban thru Congress.

The book is just under 400 pages but is an easy read, in that no-nonsense prose you usually find in newspapers. It's a good introduction to the guy who will hopefully be our next President.

Most well-read Americans are familiar with John Kerry, given his history as war hero, antiwar activist and two decades in the US Senate. However, this book fills in many gaps. I had heard Brinkley's book was a puff piece and thought this would be more balanced or even critical. Indeed, after reading an exchange between former Kerry campaign manager Jim Jordan and the authors, I was expecting a hachet job, but that isn't what I got.

On the whole the book left me with a favorable impression of Kerry. He has the negative attributes we associate with politicians, but what candidate doesn't? He also comes across as bright, patriotic and driven. I'm more comfortable with the thought of him as President after reading this book.

Full Title: John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography By The Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best -- I got this book the same day that I received a piece of hate e-mail about Kerry talking about the day in Viet Nam where he got "a bandaid and a Purple Heart." So I was interested to see what this book said about this incident.

I was pleased to see that the authors, reporters all, reported the incident in a manner that reflects cautious research. They seem to report, without a personal bias, what everyone they could find had to say. The book contained neither the venomous hatred of the e-mail, nor the gushing praise of a political press release. They do make the ocassional comment, 'we asked the Kerry campaign about this but received no reply.'
The rest of the book is done the same way, it neither praises nor condemns, it reports. It appears to be an excellent summary of the man's life. We will see, in the political silly season of the second half of 2004 lots of claims, accusations and downright lies. This book provides a good basis for trying to come up with the truth.

I enjoyed this book. I agree with other reviewers that it was a bit dry in places and seemed to sail along at a fairly quick pace. It gives a broad view of Kerry's childhood, education at Yale University, service in Vietnam, and then goes into quite a bit of detail about his Senate Career and then race for the White House. A great book for any student of Political Science or just anyone interested in learning about a person who has led an amazing life.

This book is recycled from the Globe's coverage of Kerry over the years, and is fairly comprehensive. But there's precious little analysis, and virtually no new "digging"; it's pretty much the reader's task to put things together. The reader should not think of this book as a biography, but as an edited scrapbook of newspaper clippings. Bush partisans will find it pro-Kerry; Kerry partisans will see it as a hatchet job. It's neither, although it does provide plenty of ammunition for both sides. But a lot of reading between the lines is required to get a sense of the man's character.

This biography is an essential one for those planning to vote in November 2004--or anyone looking for a complete, thorough biography of this complex man. The authors have mastered turning the careful and precise reporting done on the June 2003 Boston Globe special series on Kerry into a full biography. This is a detailed, specific account of every aspect of Kerry's life.