That really was something. Look at how carefully that speech was written. Sen. Kerry specifically laid out the justification for his actions in opposing the Vietnam War, after he came back from serving in it. It was not done in an objective and distancing manner. The passages are personal, the observations are personal, the memories invoked obviously still seering:
I believed then, just as I believe now, that it is profoundly wrong to think that fighting for your country overseas and fighting for your country's ideals at home are contradictory or even separate duties. They are, in fact, two sides of the very same patriotic coin. And that's certainly what I felt when I came home from Vietnam convinced that our political leaders were waging war simply to avoid responsibility for the mistakes that doomed our mission in the first place. Indeed, one of the architects of the war, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, confessed in a recent book that he knew victory was no longer a possibility far earlier than 1971.
By then, it was clear to me that hundreds of thousands of soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen-disproportionately poor and minority Americans-were being sent into the valley of the shadow of death for an illusion privately abandoned by the very men in Washington who kept sending them there.
Go back and read that speech and notice how many 'I' statements are in the beginning of that speech. That was personal and that sense that we were hearing something being shared that was not 'book-learning' but something learned first hand was palpable in the room at the time it was delivered. My Lord, read that paragraph above. This is a United States Senator, with 21 years of experience in the Congress talking. The condemnation of the government and it's wrongful and deceitful actions are extraordinary. (I just have never heard the like and I doubt I ever will.)
You can call this speech up on C-Span in their video library. Listen to the emphasis in the last line of the first paragraph. All the moral outrage, all that sense of betrayal and lives lost for no good reason is in the way that line "that he knew victory was no longer a possibility" is said. OMFG. (Again, this is a US Senator speaking. Think about that. No one else talks like this. No one.)
The rest of that speech is also amazing. It's almost prescient when Kerry talks about all the people in US history who have been marginalized, ridiculed and shunned for speaking out against the wrongs the Government has done. Lincoln was driven from the Congress for speaking out against the propaganda of the war in 1848. (And all the other examples.) Sen. Kerry knows the cost of speaking out. He understands this intimately. He enumerated all the ways that it can happen.
Even so, even against the vast power of the President and the entrenched powers in Washington, even against all that, there is one lesson to be learned from Vietnam and now, sadly, from Iraq:
Half of the service members listed on the Vietnam Memorial Wall died after America's leaders knew our strategy would not work. It was immoral then and it would be immoral now to engage in the same delusion.
It is not bad politics. It's not a scholastic problem that needs to be solved in some emotional vacuum, it's not something that needs to be handled so that there is no political fallout that damages the chance of holding Congressional seats. It is a situation "that cried out for dissent, demanded truth, and could not be denied by easy slogans like "peace with honor"-or by the politics of fear and smear."
Senator Kerry delivered this speech in front of that enormous picture of Sen. Daneil Webster, the great orator of the Senate in the first half of the 19th century. That pictures is captioned with the phrase, "Liberty and Union, Now and Forever." It depicts the moment when Daniel Webster staked his political career on the Great Compromise that brought Missouri into the Union. Webster lost his bet and the Union did not survive long after his compromise and his act of sheer political courage. It was unbelievable to see that speech in April and to know hear those words there. I don't think I will ever hear a finer speech or one that risked and meant so much.
My Lord, the speeches and the words only got more precise and more intent. The call to moral conscience only sharpened. We heard this in Sept in that same place.
It is immoral for old men to send young Americans to fight and die in a conflict without a strategy that can work -- on a mission that has not weakened terrorism but worsened it.
It is immoral to lie about progress in that war to get through a news cycle or an election.
It is immoral to treat 9/11 as a political pawn -- and to continue to excuse the invasion of Iraq by exploiting the 3,000 mothers and fathers, sons and daughters who were lost that day. They were attacked and killed not by Saddam Hussein but by Osama bin Laden.
And it is deeply immoral to compare a majority of Americans who oppose a failing policy and seek a winning one to appeasers of Fascism and Naziism.
WEL, I agree. There are other very strong voices opposing this war. There have been other Senators who have made impassioned pleas to end this and withdraw. But no one, no other United States Senator is calling this an immoral action and staking his future on it, not the way Kerry is. Not by a long shot. I very much doubt I will ever see anything like it again in my lifetime.