A Swiss friend of mine just sent me a link to an article in the Swiss Weltwoche newspaper on John Kerry. It's title Können diese Initialen täuschen? calls attention to the fact that his initials JFK are shared with another well-known American leader. The article is by Matthias Rüb, the Washington correspondent for the conservative German paper, the Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung (FAZ).
I was particularly struck by the opening of the article, because it devotes its first seven paragraphs to Kerry's service in Vietnam and his active protests against the war.
At the end of April 1971, more than a thousand Vietnam veterans, most of them with uniforms and medals, protested all day long before the White House and the Congress for an immediate end to the war in Vietnam. Hundreds of thousands of people came to the huge demonstrations on the Mall in Washington. Oberleutnant zur See John Kerry [it sounds too cool that way to translate], then 27 years old and a member of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War group, was one of the organizers and main speakers at the protest action against the war, which had long since been lost in the jungles of Vietnam as well as on the "homefront." Just two days before the hearing [scheduled before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee] Kerry had learned that he was supposed to speak before the Committee. He prepared a text for a statement, and until shortly before the hearing was busy preventing an escalation between demonstrators adn the Capitol police. With the report Thomas Oliphant of the daily newspaper Boston Globe, Kerry fought his way through the throng around Congress and made it a little late to the room in which the Senators and camera teams had already taken their places. "Oh, shit," whispered Kerry to Oliphant as he spied dozens of TV cameras and microphones through the crack in the door, along with the Senators and the fully occupied observers' room. "Now get in there and become famous," Oliphant encouraged the nervous soldier in his olive-green uniform.
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