Kerry in Congress: an investigator's rise

Later, he turned his investigative attention to how to spend the "peace dividend" after the end of the cold war. Kerry warned that a more dangerous war was already taking shape, with global crime organizations that corrupted entire governments, especially the "Big Five" - the Italian Mafia, Russian mobs, Chinese triads, Japanese yakuza, and Colombian drug cartels. "It will take only one megaterrorist event in any of he great cities of the world to change the world in a single day," he wrote in his 1997 book, "The New War: The Web of Crime that Threatens America's Security."

Nearly absent from Kerry's watch list are Islamic terrorist groups, including those affiliated with Osama bin Laden, who reconstituted a network for terrorist money laundering in the Sudan after the collapse of BCCI.

But by then, Democrats had lost control of the Senate and Kerry had lost his mandate for pursuing investigations. As the Kerry operation wound down, Blum says Kerry wanted to get into "the whole bizarre relationship between US intelligence and Muslim radicals who were training in Afghanistan and Pakistan, but time ran out. And on both the Democratic side and the Republican side, there was no stomach for it, because we were winning the cold war. It turns out that was a grotesque mistake."

Kerry's last investigations before Democrats lost control of the Senate exposed abuses of federal multifamily housing incentives. "It was very difficult for Kerry in the minority during a Democratic administration to do investigation," says Mr. Winer, a former Kerry aide during Noriega and Iran contra investigations.

But if he has tried to take on the role of a Senate private eye, Kerry has also revealed his approach to issues through votes on policy - amassing a record that is not as reflexively liberal as some portray.

In his first year in the Senate, Kerry was an early supporter of the 1985 Gramm-Rudman-Hollings Act, which required Congress to work within deficit-reduction targets. Backers credit Kerry's decision to support the plan as a turning point: "We got a lot of Democratic support when I got John Kerry [and Sen. Christopher Dodd of

Connecticut] to sign on," says Sen. Ernest Hollings (D) of South Carolina. Kerry has voted consistently for free-trade agreements, while now calling for a review of trade policy.

He opposed much of the Reagan defense buildup. He voted against the Persian Gulf War in 1991, but backed the 2002 resolution to use force in Iraq. GOP opponents hope to use such votes to define Kerry as soft on national defense. "He seems to think that because he is a war hero, that he gets a free pass on national security issues. The fact is he voted to gut American intelligence-gathering capacity and fought every meaningful new weapons system since he has come to Washington," says House majority leader Tom DeLay.

The liberal label may be most apt on environmental and social issues. He has supported gun control, abortion rights, and legislation promoting the civil rights of homosexuals. On this year's hot controversy, he says he opposes gay marriage and supports civil unions.

Page: 1 | 2 | 3