Kerry, Kerry, quite contrary: the lifelong contortions of the Democratic nominee.

A MASSACHUSETTS state representative named William Reinstein approached John Kerry at a political event in early 1996 and introduced himself with the fictional name "Butchy Cataldo," just to test Kerry. The senator merrily slapped "Butchy" on the back and told him how good it was to see him again. The story was quickly passed around in Massachusetts political circles as a sign of Kerry's embarrassing lack of a common touch.

This incident is recounted in the new Boston Globe biography of John Kerry (John F. Kerry: The Complete Biography by the Boston Globe Reporters Who Know Him Best). Together with Douglas Brinkley's book, Tour of Duty, it provides a ready guide to the Democratic nominee, who is the kind of guy who would feign delight in being reunited with his good friend Butchy Cataldo.

Kerry has many virtues. He has physical courage, whether on his swift boat in Vietnam or in one of his outdoor activities. He is prodigiously talented. The excerpts from his Vietnam journals in Douglas Brinkley's book are impressively written. He wanted to write an autobiographical novel about Vietnam--it might not have been a terrible one. He is fiercely competitive and doesn't lose easily. These qualities will be on display during the campaign this year. So will his foibles.

Character tends to be enduring. If you were familiar with Bill Clinton's first two years as Arkansas governor, you had a pretty good idea of how his first couple of years as president would play out. So too with Kerry there are themes that have been apparent right from the beginning: the air of phoniness, and the exaggerations and minutely fine-tuned positions that come with it; the blatant-to-the-point-of-rank ambition; the wealthy wives funding his political career; the exploitation of his Vietnam service and his demagogic indignation at any questioning of his activities during or after the war; his belief that nearly any U.S. intervention is mistaken and driven by "pride."

Kerry has Al Gore's aloofness and his talent. Like Gore, it's possible to imagine Kerry a professor somewhere. Unlike Gore, Kerry has always unabashedly wanted to run for office. Gore had to force himself to be a campaigner. Kerry has been doing it more or less--debating, speechifying, etc.--since prep school. The awkwardness (some might say weirdness) of Gore seemed to come from the tension between what he truly desired, i.e., being off somewhere writing books on global warming, and the political career he foisted on himself. Kerry has no such tension. But there's the same sense of him trying too hard, of compensating for something missing.

A SENSE OF PLACE

That something may be a sense of place, of belonging. John Kerry has always had trouble fitting in. He had no real home as a child, because his diplomat father dragged the family around the globe. He wasn't rich or privileged enough to be one of the gang at the fancy prep schools he attended. Later, he wasn't working-class or locally grounded enough to fit into Massachusetts politics. If you combine Kerry's outsiderness with his naked ambition (and naked is the right word--he has never tried to hide it), you catch the particular scent that has always followed Kerry and offended many noses.

Kerry's anti-Vietnam activism was a picture of not fitting in. Nixon called him "sort of a phony," and Chuck Colson dubbed Kerry "quite a phony." Nixon-haters sensed much the same in Kerry. Doonesbury skewered him, once having Kerry think to himself after a speech, "You're really clicking tonight, you gorgeous preppy." There was resentment against Kerry among his fellow war protesters, who were a scruffier lot. One tried to call Kerry at home and was told, probably by a maid, "Master Kerry is not at home." Shortly afterward someone hung a sign on Kerry's chair at a meeting that read, "Free the Kerry Maid."

When Kerry, in his protest days, appeared with the families of some POWs, they were heckled by other women whose husbands were POWs: "You're stupid, Kerry is using you to run for office." They were not far off the mark. Kerry the itinerant political-climber was on stark display in his first run for Congress.

In 1972, he had mailing addresses in three different congressional districts in a two-month period. His first wife, Julia Thorne, bought a house in Worcester, where Kerry considered challenging a Democratic incumbent. His wife had the money he didn't, so she propped up his political ambitions. Sound familiar? But the couple never moved into the home. Kerry set his sights on a different district and rented an apartment in Lowell. One local newspaper editorialized, "If [Kerry] doesn't stop house-hunting soon, he'll not only need a campaign manager, but a full-time real-estate agent." Desperate to show he had roots in the district, Kerry would say, "I learned to walk in the Fifth District," referring to a year he had spent there as a toddler.

Kerry had to win a Democratic primary. He had celebrity support, from the likes of George Plimpton and Leonard Bernstein. He spent massively, making it the most expensive congressional primary in the country. He won, doing well in the upscale towns, but lagging in the working-class cities, where Julia cut a conspicuous figure. "Her distinctive, upper-class accent earned her the title 'La Professoressa' among residents," according to the Globe. She told Douglas Brinkley, "I was totally fluent in three languages, and considered myself European." Again, sound familiar?

The general-election race featured a dynamic that would often be repeated: Kerry using his Vietnam experience, but crying foul when anyone questioned his service or anti-war advocacy. The editor of the local, powerful Lowell Sun hammered Kerry for his high-profile opposition to the war. After he lost, Kerry complained in a letter he sent to contributors, "For two solid weeks, they called me un-American, new-Left anti-war agitator, unpatriotic, and labeled me every other 'un-' and 'anti-' that they could find." This sort of victimized outrage is now a Kerry staple--it is almost impossible to question any aspect of his record, from his Senate votes to his allegations of widespread war crimes in Vietnam, without supposedly questioning his patriotism.

After licking his wounds and going to law school, Kerry got a job in the office of district attorney John Droney. Droney was suffering from Lou Gehrig's Disease, and needed the boost that Kerry's energy and media appeal could give him in his race for reelection. As the Globe reports, "The only complication was that Kerry had his eye on his boss's job. Two sources from the period ... said Kerry approached them sometime in early 1978 and suggested Droney's ailment could cost him the election. Kerry asked them to talk to the D.A. about the possibility of bowing out and letting Kerry run." Later, when it was clear that Droney would win, Kerry let the powers-that-be know that he would be interested in being appointed as his replacement if Droney couldn't serve out his term. This was an instance of Kerry being, as one observer has put it, "a slick operator without the slick." Droney, on to Kerry, quickly forced him out of the office.

His experience there is the basis for his argument that he is tough on crime, and also an example of how Kerry can portray his experiences with groan-inducing exaggeration. The Globe writes, "Early in his campaign for the White House, Kerry often said he wiped out an inventory of 12,000 criminal cases. But a 1978 Droney election ad that Kerry helped write put the number at closer to 3,800 cases." According to the Globe, "The entire superior court caseload, including backlog, never exceeded 7,265 during Kerry's tenure."

Kerry won election as lieutenant governor and then ran for Senate in 1984. He had to win a tough primary against Congressman James Shannon. The race featured a vintage Kerry flipflop, involving a straddle that had to be readjusted to suit more snugly Kerry's political purposes. Anti-nuclear activists were a crucial constituency in the primary. Shannon outscored Kerry by 100-94 on the "Freeze Voter '84" questionnaire. Amember of the group's executive committee pointed out to a Kerry staffer why Kerry had gotten one of the answers "wrong." Kerry had hedged in his opposition to funding new submarines.

The Kerry staffer wrote a memo to the candidate: "You should explain how your position was misinterpreted so that he will correct the rating before it is distributed to the Board tomorrow evening ... [He] is favorably disposed to change the grading because he knows of your strong support for the Freeze and knows this is what you must have meant." Kerry changed his answer, and tied his opponent for a perfect score, thus preventing Shannon from getting the exclusive endorsement of the group. It was in his need to shift left to play to this constituency that Kerry called for many of the weapons-systems cancellations that still haunt him.

When Shannon said that Kerry shouldn't have gone to Vietnam in the first place if he opposed the war, Kerry quickly worked to make it appear that Shannon was insulting veterans. This, too, is now a familiar Kerry tactic--he hides behind the honor of the very veterans he accused of war crimes upon his return home. "You impugn the service of veterans in that war by saying they are somehow dopes or wrong for going," Kerry said. According to the Globe, "A band of Vietnam vets, all Kerry men, then wheeled into action," shadowing and harassing Shannon.

Kerry won the primary and coasted in the general election, but still felt the need to puff his record. He said in a flyer, "Ever since I worked as a young volunteer in John Kennedy's presidential campaign, I have been deeply committed to participation in politics and political issues ... Back then, I joined the struggle for voting rights in the South." But Kerry participated in one Kennedy literature drop--just a single one--while at prep school, and never traveled to the South as a "Freedom Rider" as his literature implied.

Kerry wouldn't be seriously challenged again until 1996, when the popular Republican governor William Weld took him on in a classic campaign. Kerry clawed his way to victory. He desperately needed legislative accomplishments. So Kerry bragged at one point that he had introduced a bill to provide health care to uninsured children. This was three months before he actually filed the bill, which had to be crafted for him by Ted Kennedy's staff. Thus another Kerry theme: using Ted Kennedy as a crutch at critical moments. For Kerry, the bill was just a prop. Kennedy was the one who shepherded it to passage.

Just as in the presidential primaries, the home bought for Kerry by his multi-millionaire second wife, Teresa Heinz, bailed him out against Weld. Before he married her in 1995, he basically didn't have a home, revisiting one of the main storylines of his life. He had six different addresses in three-and-a-half years. Kerry and Weld had agreed to a spending cap in their race. Kerry busted it by mortgaging his Beacon Hill house. According to the Globe, he "dumped the first $900,000 of what would be $1.7 million in personal funds into his campaign kitty." The agreement with Weld had been a signed contract. But there's no honor among thieves, or desperate incumbents.

Finally, when a newspaper column questioned whether Kerry had committed a war crime by finishing off a wounded Viet Cong, Kerry surrounded himself with veterans and complained that the column sullied "the honor of those of us who served." In beating Weld, Kerry achieved the trifecta, relying on Kennedy's political pull, Teresa's money, and the Vietnam card.

EVER KERRY

Over the last year, Kerry's position on the Iraq war has featured agonizing indecision, or as his supporters call it, "nuance." This intellectual temper seems woven into Kerry's very being. He may have absorbed it from his father. Richard Kerry once wrote, "Casting issues in the form of polar choices ... readily leads to the conclusion that if one is wrong, the other must be right. In a more relative view of the issue, both are likely to be wrong." Who does that sound like? As John Kerry put it more colloquially to Douglas Brinkley, "As Yogi Berra said, 'I came to the fork in the road and I took it.' Now that, to me, is real philosophy. That's one of my favorite philosophical statements."

This intellectual tendency is augmented by Kerry's sense of caution. An overweening political ambition is often associated with fear. So Bill Clinton was always scared of the choice that would end his career, or merely depress his poll numbers. Kerry trembles in the same way. According to the Globe, "As a student and later as a senator, Kerry often internally debated an issue before making up his mind in a process that could take weeks." It continues, "He often sounded as if he were talking himself out of the decision he had just made."

As Kerry meanders, he is prone to make two criticisms of any U.S. action: that it is alienating the world, and is the product of pride. These were staples of his father's foreign-policy thought, and Kerry can't resist returning to them in almost any circumstance. He made these criticisms, of course, of Vietnam. He also made them of Grenada. "The invasion only served to heighten world tensions and further strain brittle U.S.-Soviet and North-South relations," he said. He made them of the 1991 Gulf War. "There is a rush to war here," said Kerry. "We are willing to act ... with more bravado than patience." He added, "It sounds like we are risking war for pride, not vital interests!" Kerry even sounded some of these notes during the Afghan war.

In light of all this, we haven't seen much new or surprising from Kerry this campaign season and shouldn't expect it. But the glee with which Republicans have greeted his early stumbles is premature. The cliche about Kerry, that he is a "strong closer," appears to be true. He proved it against Weld in their tough race in 1996 and against Howard Dean just months ago. He is too competitive and too smart to run a campaign as stumbling as he has over the last several weeks. But for Kerry there is no escaping John Kerry, which may well prove the ultimate drag on his campaign.