Kerry’s views on war have shifted dramatically

More than 42 years ago, a charismatic 28-year-old Vietnam War vet gave one of the most riveting congressional presentations ever before Sen. William Fulbright’s Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Representing the Vietnam Veteran’s Against the War (VVAW), John Kerry, a decorated, twice-wounded vet, gave impassioned witness to the utter futility of our senseless Vietnam War which had been claiming millions of lives since the 1950s when the U.S. tried to succeed where the French had failed, preventing the inevitable unification of Vietnam under the North Vietnamese.

Kerry looked the distinguished Sen. Fulbright in the eye and uttered these immortal words that will forever reverberate in American history: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn’t have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can’t say we have made a mistake.

Last Sunday, the 69-year-old Kerry, who parlayed that 15 minutes of fame into a five-decade career as prosecutor, state lieutenant governor, senator, presidential candidate and now secretary of state, shuttled between five news shows. He looked all 310 million of us in the eye and flat out lied about the need to bomb Syria and kill people as part of our taking sides in their horrendous civil war.

As an avid opponent of the Vietnam War from 1963, I still vividly recall Kerry’s inspiring “who will be the last man to die” testimony in 1971. I was shocked and sickened by Kerry’s coming full circle Sunday, to champion, not the end to a criminal war, but tragically, the call for another.

Walt Zlotow

Glen Ellyn