Going Upriver 


Pretty darn good for a hagiography 

As we left Oakland's Piedmont Theatre a few nights ago Lina observed to me "You realize that we just paid $18.50 to sit through a campaign commercial." "What do you mean we, kemosabe," I responded "and didn't you like it?" "I liked it just fine," she said, "but it's too bad the story isn't available though other channels."

Going Upriver is directed by George Butler, an old friend of Kerry's (and co-director, it may be noted in passing of Pumping Iron, which helped to lodge Ah-nuld in the American mass culture, with the results that you may see), and is unabashedly sympathetic toward its protagonist. It begins with the undergraduate, painfully earnest Kerry at Harvard during the Kennedy administration, and the old footage makes clear that the stripling was in equal parts ambitious and idealistic. Today we deem these qualities largely irreconciliable, but I had the opportunity to observe an elder sibling during that period and remember, albeit imprecisely, how the young men of high school and college age under Kennedy responded to the rhetoric of that odd, doomed, complicated president. To strive for distinction in public service was not, in that vanished era, looked upon as mere self-aggrandizement, and there was a sense in the air that there were great and noble causes to be undertaken: the Peace Corps, the struggle for civil rights, the defense of freedom in (alas!) South Vietnam. Kennedy, not alone, tapped into a vast reservoir of energy and idealism among the young; when the idealism was recognized a few years later as betrayed the energy sluiced into the strange and unexpected channels we now remember collectively as "The Sixties."

Kerry went, via the Navy, to Vietnam, and elected for his second tour there to skipper a "Swift Boat." It seems likely that in doing so he was not expecting to go quite as directly in harm's way as Admiral Zumwalt's repurposing of these vessels to river patrol ended in placing him, but it also seems clear from both the film and from the testimony of his shipmates elsewhere, that he rose to the occasion. In an online group in which a participate another member, having seen the film, sneeringly compares Lt. Kerry to Niedermeyer, the ROTC martinet in Animal House. But as the sailors make clear in their various testimonies, Kerry was anything but a martinet, telling the crew when he came aboard "I know you don't need me, but I need you. How can we make this work?"

I don't propose to recapitulate the film. The meat of it deals with Kerry's participation in the antiwar organizing of the early Seventies, in particular the Detroit "Winter Soldiers" testimonies and the DC "Dewey Canyon III" protests in April 1971. The rap on Kerry at the time (and I remember reading that spring Trudeau's lampoon on him in the infant Doonesbury, which was—rather surprisingly—being carried in its first year by the Riverside Press-Enterprise) was that he was a self-promoter, and no doubt this was true, but it is also clear, and various of the other protesters confirm, that the articulate and relatively clean-cut veteran brought to the party a persuasive delivery that the movement needed and that many of his wilder and woolier contemporaries could not summon up.

I'd long known about JK's testimony before Fulbright's Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but I hadn't realized that Kerry arrived in Washington unaware that he'd be appearing before that august body: Fulbright having seen him on TV, and being impressed, invited him to testify a day or two in advance of the event. Kerry, at 27, is extraordinary—articulate, persuasive, eloquent, self-possessed. This is an exceptional young man: at a like stage in my own development I was just a skinny drink of water, and how about you, fella? If John F. Kerry a third of a century on, with twenty years' Senate barnacles clinging to him, is a tenth as good as he was in 1971, then he'll be twice the president this sorry co-enabling larval empire deserves.

Buy it. Or be a cheap bastard and download it. But watch the damn thing. 

Posted: Tue - October 19, 2004 at 06:59 PM          

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