"Kerry’s story is impressive… Kerry’s extensive diaries… are at the least insightful and at best arresting." – New York Times Book Review

"Doug Brinkley succeeds in humanizing John Kerry, something the senator often has trouble doing himself. Tour of Duty is an incisive look at a man who would be president." – Bill O’Reilly, Fox

"No one weaves narrative more deftly with analysis than Douglas Brinkley, and never has he had a more compelling and important tale to tell. The river war in Vietnam, the making of a hero, the education of a public man – Tour of Duty has it all. Splendid!" – H.W. Brands

"[Doug Brinkley’s] treatment of the hitherto little-chronicled riverine war, and Kerry’s role in it, is well-researched and often gripping." – Washington Post Book World

"Tour of Duty is a fresh and welcome retelling… that Brinkley tenders in a lengthy, highly readable, and well-researched biographical history. Brinkley inserts many details to enhance the verisimilitude of his portrait of both the era and the man." – Boston Globe

The Boston Globe Review
January 19, 2004 | By Michael Uhl, Globe Correspondent

How little the John Kerry celebrated in Douglas Brinkley's "Tour of Duty" as the quintessential Vietnam veteran typifies in educational or social status the vast majority of his contemporaries who also fought in that theater of conflict.

Christian Appy has demonstrated persuasively in "Working-Class War" the blue-collar composition of the American fighting forces in Southeast Asia, including the corps of young officers, among whom, even in the military academies, only 10 percent came from the professional class or above. Yet like another senator - the good Republican played by Derek Jacobi in the film "Gladiator" - Kerry might with equal grace proclaim, "I am with, not of, the people."

Therein lies the tale that Brinkley tenders in a lengthy, highly readable, and well-researched biographical history that draws generously from the diaries that Kerry, a young naval lieutenant, kept to document his wartime experiences, and from his extensive correspondence home. We learn that Kerry, a product of St. Paul's prep school and Yale University, chose to fight in Vietnam and did so bravely. He led with distinction the five-man crew of a small craft that patrolled and provoked the Viet Cong enemy in a web of inland waterways throughout the Mekong Delta. Kerry was wounded three times and decorated for valor. And, like many GIs in Vietnam, Kerry found that his conscience began to trouble him in the execution of his duties, especially the incessant, indiscriminate fire directed at apparent noncombatants.

Kerry killed an enemy under circumstances that are not entirely clear, but probably sanctioned by war's ambiguous rules of engagement. The incident, finessed somewhat clumsily in Brinkley's account, surfaced during Kerry's reelection campaign for the Senate in 1996 when he was questioned about having shot a wounded guerrilla who had already fallen. Kerry rallied several high-profile Vietnam veterans to defend his lightning decision to shoot an adversary who, while down, remained armed and potentially deadly.

Coming home, Kerry, according to his former wife, suffered nightmares and flashbacks. In this sharing of first the dangers and now the lasting sorrows of war, Kerry could authentically personify, if never truly represent, the Vietnam veteran community. As for his politics, Kerry had already developed while in-country cogent arguments for opposing the war. His decision to join Vietnam Veterans Against the War was a gesture of solidarity with veterans he called "brothers," as well as a risky tactical move for a man who had begun to plot his career in public service while still in high school.

His personal ambitions notwithstanding, Kerry gave clear public voice to the same position taken by the veterans group. In his appearance before William Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April 1971, Kerry volunteered this straightforward testimony: "I committed the same kinds of atrocities as thousands of others in that I shot in free fire zones, used harassment and interdiction fire, joined in search and destroy missions, and burned villages. All of these acts were established policies from the top down, and the men who ordered this are war criminals."

Brinkley reports that Kerry parted company with the antiwar vets in the months immediately following his moment of celebrity, and over the years he has been called a betrayer of the cause by some former comrades. But Kerry had always taken pains to emphasize that he was "never outside the system." The difference is that those Vietnam veterans who have kept faith with Kerry's antiwar arguments before the Senate still continue to advocate for that historical interpretation of their war, whereas Kerry has never been able to bring that piece of his ideals to the table for serious examination within the system. And yet, the boogeyman of Vietnam still haunts the corridors of power where war policy is forged, and its lessons never seem to fall from fashion.

"Tour of Duty" is a fresh and welcome retelling of these lessons, and of how acutely Kerry once wrestled with them. Brinkley inserts many details to enhance the verisimilitude of his portrait of both the era and the man. Nonetheless, a number of gaffes and bizarre formulations underscore a suspicion that the Vietnam era is not one in which the author is deeply positioned. Jolting references to Kerry's fellow combatants as "colleagues" are one thing. But the potboiler rhetoric used to describe the National Liberation Front - the Viet Cong are "treacherous," they "infest" the Delta - and its struggles for reunification with Hanoi is amateurish.

Brinkley carries the story forward to Kerry's present drive for his party's presidential nomination in which voters, it seems, can't decipher Kerry's stance on our current war with Iraq. And indeed, if Brinkley's skillful profile of his subject is accurate, one can easily imagine the anguished content of Kerry's interior monologue as he struggles to disentangle any scruples about Iraq from his memories of Vietnam. As a young, disaffected warrior, Kerry once dissolved such ambiguities in a rush of insightful empathy, asking himself "what it would be like to be occupied by foreign troops, to have to bend to the desires of a people who could not be sensitive to the things that really count in one's own country?" To what degree Kerry sets his politics today by this internationalist benchmark, no one, not even he, seems to know.

Chapter One: Up from Denver

The sun was glaring through the windshield of Richard J. Kerry's single-engine light aircraft as he prepared for takeoff from a runway in northern Virginia on February 27, 1954. Mild, with temperatures in the mid fifties, no clouds in sight, it was a perfect day to fly. During World War II Kerry had served the United States government as a pilot in the Army Air Corps, flying DC-3s and B-29s. Now he was based in Washington, D.C., serving as an attorney for the State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs. This was, however, to be his final flight. With his eleven-year-old son John sitting in the rear seat, Kerry, now a civilian, started the engine and checked his navigational charts. Everything was in working order. "Don't touch the stick," he cautioned his son before takeoff. "Not until you're older."

Anybody who knew the austere and hardworking Kerry well thought of him as a man with an intense, careful disposition, a pilot whose logbook was as tidy as an accountant's ledger. This particular book, beige in color and three-quarters full, had been kept since 1940. During World War II he had crisscrossed America numerous times, including long stints in Alabama, Ohio, California, and Colorado. Today was no different from any other flight day: he carefully scrawled "Alexandria Local Aeronca" in his book. He was hoping to give his son an aerial view of metropolitan Washington sites. Usually Kerry never editorialized in his log: just the no-nonsense facts. But on this last flight he made an exception, writing something personal: "Flight over Mt. Vernon with Johnny." The flight lasted for only a brief forty minutes. But forty years later he sent the logbook and wings to his son with a note on his law firm stationery: "Is this last entry prophetic?" Richard Kerry was probably referring to his son's passion for flying, but the flight over Mt. Vernon may inadvertently touched a different prophecy.

Even when he was an eleven-year-old boy, there was a feeling that John Forbes Kerry was touched with destiny — or, more accurately, that public service was instilled in him by his parents. There was, however, a touch of the parvenu in all of this, a fierce family belief, not unlike that which Joseph Kennedy imposed on his four sons, that the Kerry boys — John and Cameron — could accomplish any feat, no matter how dif ficult. But to do so would take discipline. A touch of old-fashioned chauvinism, however, prohibited Richard Kerry from fully instilling the same attitude in his two daughters, Margaret (Peggy) and Diana. What was important was that his two sons were not slouches. Concepts like diligence, duty, and loyalty were instilled in them, with tenderness usually coming last. Like the fathers in so many second-generation immigrant families, Richard Kerry believed his boys could accomplish anything in America, even following in the oversized footsteps of George Washington, making it all the way to the White House. "Excelling was the Kerry family ethic" is the way Washington Post reporter Laura Blumenfeld explained it. She gave an example as a case in point: Richard Kerry taught his sons how to steer a boat under a blanket, so they would learn to navigate in the fog. "He definitely promoted tough love," Peggy recalled. "He wanted us to be equipped with the harsh realities of the real world."

The story of Richard Kerry's rise is one of overcoming obstacles. Born in 1915 in Brookline, Massachusetts — the same Boston suburb where John F. Kennedy was born two years later — Richard Kerry was a handsome, erudite boy, always fighting against the odds. His father, Fredrick A. Kerry, was actually a Czech Jew named Fritz Kohn who had fled the aggressive Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1905, brutalized by anti-Semitism. Three years before his arrival in America he married Ida Lowe, a beautiful Jewish musician from Budapest. According to the Boston Globe, the young couple simply studied a map of Europe, found County Kerry in Ireland, and chose it as their last name. Baptized as Catholics, they moved to Chicago with their young son Eric, where Fredrick (or Fred as he was called)earned a living as a business manager. Eventually they moved to Brookline, known as the "town of millionaires" in the early 1900s, had two additional children, Richard and Mildred, and earned a reputation as good neighbors. The local newspaper deemed Fredrick "a prominent man in the shoe business"; his shop was located at 487 Boylston Street in the Back Bay neighborhood of Boston. He seldom missed attending Catholic church services on Sunday. (He kept it secret that he was of Jewish descent.) With a two-story, Arts and Crafts-style house in Brookline — designed by John C. Spofford — located at 10 Downing Road, a black Cadillac parked in front and three healthy children running happily about, it seemed, to the outside world, that the Kerry family exemplified the American dream.

That notion was brutally dispelled on November 23, 1921, when a depressed Fred Kerry, wandered into the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, walked into the men's room, and shot himself in the head. The Boston Globe published a short story about the suicide, which took place at 11:30 A.M., claiming he had died instantly. "Kerry had been ill for some time, and he became despondent as a result," the obituary read. "He left his home about the usual hour this morning, and his spirits seemed to be low. After going to his place of business he came out and went to the hotel where he took his life."

It's hard to fully understand how such a grisly death affects a six-year-old boy, but Richard seemed to internalize the suicide. Thinking of it as a badge of shame, he coped with the loss of his father by ignoring it.