The two most flattering photographs ever taken of John F. Kerry

I've published (and will probably continue to publish) mocking photographs of Sen. John Forbes Kerry.  But in this post, you'll see what I believe to be the two most flattering pictures of him ever made. 

The first is famous and has been widely seen:  It's on Sen. Kerry's campaign website, for instance, and on the cover of Douglas Brinkley's Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, and shows Kerry in his Navy dress whites, receiving one of his medals:

The second photograph is comparatively obscure, although it appeared (without the cropping I've imposed here) in Kerry's 1971 book The New Soldier:

Scot Lehigh's Boston Globe op-ed from April 28, 2004, describes this second photo thusly:

The photograph shows a man sitting hunched on the lawn near the Capitol, his head bowed. Sitting beside him is a woman.

The picture, in "The New Soldier," a book of photographs and essays about the April 1971 antiwar protest in Washington, is of John Kerry.

The woman comforting him is Julia Thorne, Kerry's first wife. The photograph was taken just minutes after veterans tossed their war decorations over a wood-and-wire fence erected to keep protesters off the Capitol steps.

Kerry was overcome with emotion at the time. Both David Thorne, Julia's brother and one of Kerry's best friends, and George Butler, the documentary filmmaker [and another of Kerry's lifelong friends since Yale] who took the picture, recall him being in tears. He had come to Washington to try to wake America up about the Vietnam War, and he had returned ribbons commemorating war heroism [that] he was proud of [in order] to make a statement.

My blogospheric friend the Carnivorous Conservative points out that Ms. Thorne knew in advance of young Kerry's plan to throw his (or someone's) medals (and/or ribbons) over the Capitol fence, having told of the plan while lunching "one day in 1971 at the Italian Embassy with a group of elegant Washington women."

In the years since 1971, Kerry has grown defensive over this "return" of his medals — a highly publicized symbolic act that has been used by his opponents in many of his previous political races, and now again (as I've previously written about) in the fourth and fifth of the SwiftVets' ads.  I continue to believe that he has good reason to be defensive — that the symbolic act, though sincere and heartfelt, was profoundly foolish and offensive.  That it provoked young Kerry at the time to tears, and to seek comfort in his young bride's arms, however, actually speaks better of him to me than anything he has said or done since, although I don't know whether his mix of powerful emotions then included any shame or regret.  Michael Kranish et al.'s biography of Kerry tells us (at page 127) that just "days earlier, Kerry had been quoted in the Washington Post as expressing distaste over 'medals for nothing.'"  But the sight of Kerry weeping seems rather more consistent with the look of pride on Kerry's face in the first picture than such a cynical statement by him, even then, would suggest.

I'm not suggesting now that candidate Kerry should contrive an "Edmund Muskie moment."  Not everyone would react to this old picture with the same degree of sympathy that columnist Lehigh did in his above-quoted op-ed.  John Kerry continues to strike me as, on the whole, a particularly unsympathetic person.  But I will allow that this obscure second picture strikes a sympathetic chord in me.  It makes it all the more a pity that as he's aged and progressed through his political career, John Kerry has done so little to apologize to others, or redeem himself, for the symbolic act that brought him to tears in this second, obscure photograph, and so little to justify the honor that was being conferred upon him in the first, more famous one.