Reply #10: I would recommend this program from PBS: Frontline [View All]

[TayTay]

The Choice in 2004. The video is all up and free online and the online interviews are superb. they discuss, in detail, the Iraq War vote, and why Sen. Kerry voted the way he did. They also discuss his life and give some genuine insight into what makes the good Senator tick. I particularly recommned the interview with Jonathan Winer. He knows Sen. Kerry about as well as anyone on the planet.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2004/

Winer: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/choice2004/interviews/winer.html


Frontine: What kind of a man is he (John Kerry) when he's attacked?

Winer: Methodical. I mean, first instinct is to defend. Second instinct is to figure out what to do about it. The instinct to defend is not the right instinct, because then you're on the territory the other side wants you to be on. … What you do instead is, you figure out thematically where you want to go. You respond to the attack, maybe with a counterattack, maybe with a finesse. It just depends on the issue. But you need to go back to your territory, not to what they're trying to do to you.

Or the Jack Blum interview:

Frontline: Perhaps you can put him in historical context. I mean, you don't often get investigators of his type in Congress...

Jack Blum: Well, there are very few people who come to the Senate with a beginning as prosecutors who are also war veterans, who have a burning interest in foreign policy because they've come out of a war that was fought on dubious grounds for dubious reasons. And are motivated to try to make an issue of that. To try to follow their own instincts.

This guy had a certain set of skills and a capacity to do things that very few members of the Senate have. Most people who come to the Senate get there by a kind of chair-sitting which is in the state legislature or they come up through the ranks -- maybe they've been a governor of a state. But they haven't been the prosecutor or the investigator, the person who picks the case apart. And he did have that background. …