Fraters Libertas

Understanding Kerry

Many on the left would claim William F. Buckley is a reactionary, looking to the past for his inspiration and models of behavior. But an article appearing in yesterday’s NRO proves he is simply a man ahead of his time. Approximately 33 years ahead of his time. Entitled “John Kerry’s America, What He Said About Us,” it’s the transcription of the commencement address Buckley made at West Point in 1971.

Buckley’s address was devoted to refuting the irresponsible antiwar rhetoric made in front of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations by the then young cynical/idealist John Kerry. Buckley’s eloquence was typically remarkable and spot on in accuracy. Amazingly it holds up over three decades and his specific points are every bit as applicable to the irresponsible antiwar rhetoric Kerry spouts now as a member of that same Senate Foreign Relations Committee he testified before so long ago. Maybe the amazing aspect isn’t that Buckley’s words are still relevant, but that Kerry’s rhetoric hasn’t changed since 1971.

This excerpt begins with Buckley’s quoting from Kerry’s Senate testimony (the original of which is located here):

"To attempt to justify the loss of one American life in Vietnam, Cambodia, or Laos by linking such loss to the preservation of freedom . . . is . . . the height of criminal hypocrisy, and it is that kind of hypocrisy which we feel has torn this country apart." It is then, we reason retrospectively, not alone an act of hypocrisy that caused the joint chiefs of staff and the heads of the civilian departments engaged in strategic calculations to make the recommendations they made over the past ten years, to three Presidents of the United States: it was not merely hypocrisy, but criminal hypocrisy. The nature of that hypocrisy? "All," Mr. Kerry sums up, "that we were told about the mystical war against Communism."

The indictment is complete.

It is the indictment of an ignorant young man who is willing to condemn in words that would have been appropriately used in Nuremberg the governing class of America: the legislators, the generals, the statesmen. And, reaching beyond them, the people, who named the governors to their positions of responsibility and ratified their decisions in several elections.

The point I want to raise is this: If America is everything that John Kerry says it is, what is it appropriate for us to do? The wells of regeneration are infinitely deep, but the stain described by John Kerry goes too deep to be bleached out by conventional remorse or resolution: better the destruction of America, if, to see ourselves truly, we need to look into the mirror John Kerry holds up for us. If we are a nation of sadists, of kid-killers and torturers, of hypocrites and criminals, let us be done with it, and pray that a great flood or fire will destroy us, leaving John Kerry and maybe Mrs. Benjamin Spock to take the place of Lot, in reseeding a new order.

Then Buckley addresses the Vietnam-bound cadets directly, with words that could be directed at the troops in Iraq right now, keeping in mind the Left’s perpetual rhetoric of “miserable failure” and ”Bush Lied”.

Gentleman, how many times, in the days ahead, you will need to ask yourselves the most searching question of all, the counterpart of the priest's most agonizing doubt: Is there a God? Yours will be: Is America worth it?

John Kerry's assault on this country did not rise fullblown in his mind, like Venus from the Cypriot Sea. It is the crystallization of an assault upon America which has been fostered over the years by an intellectual class given over to self-doubt and self-hatred, driven by a cultural disgust with the uses to which so many people put their freedom. The assault on the military, the many and subtle vibrations of which you feel as keenly as James Baldwin knows the inflections of racism, is an assault on the proposition that what we have, in America, is truly worth defending. The military is to be loved or despised according as it defends that which is beloved or perpetuates that which is despised. The root question has not risen to such a level of respectability as to work itself into the platform of a national political party, but it lurks in the rhetoric of the John Kerrys, such that a blind man, running his fingers over the features of the public rhetoric, can discern the meaning of it: Is America worth it?

Buckley concludes, not with the paint-by-numbers pedantry of modern political oratory, but by expressing his trust that the officer corps of the US military will make the right decision:

So during those moments when doubt will assail you, moments that will come as surely as the temptations of the flesh, I hope you will pause. I know, I know, at the most hectic moments of one's life it isn't easy — indeed, the argument can be made that neither is it seemly — to withdraw from the front line in order to consider the general situation philosophically. But what I hope you will consider, during these moments of doubt, is the essential professional point: Without organized force, and the threat of the use of it under certain circumstances, there is no freedom, anywhere. Without freedom, there is no true humanity. If America is the monster of John Kerry, burn your commissions tomorrow morning and take others, which will not bind you in the depraved conspiracy you have heard described. If it is otherwise, remember: the freedom John Kerry enjoys, and the freedom I enjoy, are, quite simply, the result of your dedication. Do you wonder that I accepted the opportunity to salute you?

Buckley’s speech is an important historical document in coming to understand the nature of the presumptive Democratic nominee. Despite the length of the excerpts above, they don’t capture the full extent Kerry’s troubling rhetoric or the breadth of Buckley’s brilliant, soaring remarks against. As such, I encourage you to read it all.