Word: kerrey
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Restless by the spring of 1971, Kerrey went home to seek a new life in Nebraska. He tried out the antiwar movement but quit when rallies seemed antiveteran. Then he married and turned his attention to business. With his brother-in-law, he started a restaurant chain that made a pile of money. His dedication to the job took a toll on his marriage; he divorced after four years. Yet in those years came the first release from the psychic pain he said often made "it difficult to see." The moment he felt healed was when his son was born...
...When Kerrey took his first wobbly steps outside the hospital, he learned how the country was coming to view the war. The G.I. generation came home from World War II to a grateful, admiring nation. The boys of Vietnam were called baby killers. Kerrey heard it in Philadelphia, at a movie theater. "Somebody said something very ugly," he once said. "I don't remember the exact words, but very ugly and very hurtful...
Unsure what to do next, Kerrey headed to Stanford University, intending to get an M.B.A. He withdrew before class started and moved across the bay to Berkeley. Somewhere in his mind was the idea he might teach, but "the larger purpose was recovery," he said. There Kerrey learned to read, really read, not the science texts of his college years but the great literature of life. The love of literature has sustained him ever since. Before the Democratic debates in 1992, when the other candidates were deep in their briefing books, Kerrey spent time with moody poetry, especially the lines...
...didn't explain it then, but Vietnam was pulling at him again. Less than a week after leaving office in 1987, Kerrey was at the University of California at Santa Barbara as an instructor in a class on the Vietnam War run by Walter Capps, a religious-studies professor who would later serve a term in Congress. When they first met, Kerrey asked if Capps had ever read Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust writer. Capps said he had. "Then you know that when an event is unspeakable, it takes a while to learn the right words," Kerrey said. Capps, who died...
During the 10 weeks Kerrey taught with Capps, Nebraska Senator Edward Zorinsky died, opening up a seat in the U.S. Senate. Kerrey switched back into politics and won the race. Celebrating on election night, he sang a searing Australian ballad of a soldier whose legs were blown off at Gallipoli: "Then a big Turkish shell knocked me ass over head/ And when I awoke in my hospital bed/ I saw what it had done/ And I wished I were dead./ Never knew there were worse things than dying...