During Thursday night's debate, Democratic presidential front-runner John Kerry had his best moment when he was challenged over the major anti-war protest he organized in 1971 after returning from Vietnam.
"I could not be more proud of the fact that when I came back from that war, having learned what I learned," said Kerry, "that I led thousands of veterans to Washington, we camped on the [Capitol] Mall underneath the Congress, underneath Richard Nixon's visibility."
Kerry told the debate audience that while Nixon tried to "kick us off" the Mall, "we stood our ground and said to him, 'Mr. President, you sent us 8,000 miles away to fight, die and sleep in the jungles of Vietnam. We've earned the right to sleep on this Mall and talk to our senators and congressmen.'"
However, as noted Friday by top radio talker Rush Limbaugh, while the vast majority of protesters did spend the night on the Mall, Kerry himself relocated to more comfortable environs.
In December, the International Herald Tribune reported that "detractors" of the Massachusetts Democrat "have long claimed that Kerry himself slept comfortably in Georgetown. ... [Longtime Kerry friend George] Butler confirms that Kerry spent part of the time at his house in Georgetown, working the phones and lining up support."
The Democratic front-runner's accommodations during those nights of protest wasn't the only detail that set him apart from his fellow demonstrators in the group he ran, Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
Scott Camil, a former VVAW leader, told the Boston Globe last June that Kerry's patrician image was derided by others in the group, which was composed mostly of working-class veterans.
The ambitious protest leader, it seems, would show up for meetings in neatly pressed clothes, a look that irked his less aristocratic compatriots.
In one particularly revealing anecdote, Camil told the Globe that a VVAW member "had tried to reach Kerry by telephone and was told by someone, presumably a maid, that 'Master Kerry is not at home.' At the next meeting, someone hung a sign on Kerry's chair that said: 'Free the Kerry Maid.'"
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