The blogosphere is buzzing with reaction to Matt Bai's profile of John Kerry in the New York Times Sunday Magazine yesterday. So we looked him up, and found this biography at Newsweek.MSNBC.com. 1990 Tufts graduate, 1994 Columbia Journalism School product, so he knows his East Coast Liberals.
Bai's Kerry profile was genuinely interesting, and had some nice character moments, such as the time John Kerry told his aide to get rid of the Evian water and replace it with something American--Saratoga water, it turned out, after some prodding from Bai. "Sometimes I drink tap water," Kerry admitted. A Marie Antionette let-them-eat-cake moment, if there ever was one. The article quotes Yale's John Lewis Gaddis on the history of American pre-emption, and sketches out what a Kerry doctrine might look like, if Kerry could ever explain it. Basically, it's Bush-lite, the war on terror without the military.
Best of all is Bai's account of Kerry's apparent Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Symptoms include uncontrollable rages, generalized hostility and paranoia, and frequent flashbacks to killing people in Vietnam, a subject Kerry repeatedly raised with Bai.
Overall, an article well-worth reading, and not quite the sycophantic pablum that one has come to expect from The Times Magazine. Bai has a future ahead of him.
The same paper also has an almost pornographic front-page story of Kerry's wealthy childhood, summers spent in a French chateau, and Lifestyle of the Rich and Famous existence today as a neighbor of George Soros and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The Times story makes Kerry sound almost like Citizen Kane. All he needs is a sled called "Rosebud"...