Starring John Kerry

Back in January 2003, nearly a year before the Democratic primaries, I posted a blog entry on The Committee to Help Unsell the War, a mobilization of students and advertising agencies against the Vietnam War.

Without my realizing it, that representative I mentioned from Vietnam Veterans Against the War who “discussed war crimes and problems veterans faced” was, in fact, John Kerry.

Milton Rosenberg, the professor of social psychology from the University of Chicago cited in the piece as “perhaps the most influential speaker,” emails:

“I was ego-surfing yesterday as I tried out the new microsoft search engine---and I came upon your longish quotation from a book that deals with the ‘Unsell the War’ and the organizing meeting that was held at Yale....

Of additional--and rather risible--interest is the reference to ‘a representative of Vietnam Veterans Against the War.’ That was John Kerry!!-- of whom I had never before heard. He stood out for his skeletal frame, his hair and his plummy brahminical accent--but not particularly for his rhetorical skill.

I too was asked to judge the resulting TV spots---but in an advisory role rather than as one of official screening panel.”

Rosenberg notes it was his book that got him invited and on which he spoke. He co-authored of Vietnam and the Silent Majority: The Dove’s Guide in 1970:

“Our book was a quick effort designed to analyze the available public opinion data and to show that the ‘silent majority’ was silent in its opposition (rather than its support, as Nixon contended) of the Vietnam war. It also offered a design for how to propagandize for early withdrawal from the war, a policy strongly urged by the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy on whose National Board I served at the time.”