I just finished reading the Atlantic Monthly's article made up of excerpts from the soon-to-be-released biography of Kelly. The article, which featured many snippets of Kelly's letters home during his tour of duty, gave a good sense of his good faith emotional investment in America's presence in Vietnam, and its steady erosion as Kelly became more and more aware of the moral bankruptcy of America's participation in this war. If nothing else, the article shows us that Kelly can sure write; some of his letters are tremendously eloquent, heartfelt accounts of his own moral struggle with his harrowing environment. They form a picture of a man with a profound sense of commitment to what he believes in.
And that's where we run into problems, because there's a tremendous gap between his fiercely idealistic vow to protest the wasteful expenditure of American and Vietnamese lives back then, and his less than fierce commitment to American and Iraqi lives in our time. His calculated vote in favor of Bush's war resolution in fall of 2002 -- designed, he said, to give the U.S. the mandate to negotiate from a position of strength -- seems sorta wishy-washy by itself, but it seems particularly egregious when placed alongside his outraged and embittered letters from 1968. His promise that he would devote his life to not letting another American die again for an unjust war was simply broken in fall of 2002, and this betrayal thereby seems far worse than that of other opportunistic Democrats who jumped on the pro-war wagon.
Don't get me wrong: there are Democratic candidates, I'm pretty sure, who have made principled stances in favor of the pursuit of war in Iraq (though who they are escapes me at present), and I respect their views. What seems unforgivable, or at least something of a letdown, is to see someone like Kerry, someone who shaped his political identity around the refusal to participate in an unjust war, suddenly turn around and jump on the bandwagon out of a shallow political calculus.
But that's just me.