Kerry’s book full of falsehoods
Serves as reminder for failures of Bay State pol
John Kerry — how can we miss him when he won’t go away?
But he won’t, and now Liveshot has a new book coming out, titled “Every Day Is Extra,” perhaps because the more appropriate title — “Just a Gigolo” — is already claimed by Louis Prima.
I’ll bet you can figure out how Liveshot came up with the replacement title. But just in case, the book is 624 pages long and Kerry manages not to bring up his service in Vietnam until the third line of the first page, in his Author’s Note explaining the title.
“It is an expression that summarizes how a bunch of guys I served with in Vietnam felt about coming home alive.”
Vietnam? Who knew that John Kerry served in Vietnam? You learn something new every day, don’t you?
Mercifully, this $35 “candid memoir” has an index, so I was able to immediately check out the one reference to myself. I’m on page 256, identified as a “right-wing columnist” who described the location of the St. Patrick’s Day breakfast in South Boston as “Halitosis Hall,” a line I borrowed from the British magazine Private Eye.
Anyway, in 2003, Kerry writes, he drove to South Boston.
“The morning of the breakfast, I covertly sat in the parking lot outside Florian Hall.”
Florian Hall, of course, is not in South Boston. It’s in Dorchester. As far as I can recall, the breakfast has never been held outside Southie. In 2003, it was held at the Ironworkers Local 7 hall, on Old Colony Ave.
Two errors on the first page I looked at.
OK, even the best ghostwriter can make a mistake or two. So I went back to the index to check out some more of my favorite supporting players in the life and not-so-hard times of JFK — Just For Kerry.
But among the MIA’s is Wesley Finch, who cut Liveshot in on that windfall condo deal. And Bob Brest, the Buick dealer on the Lynnway who gave him the, ahem, sweetheart car lease. Other no-shows include Hollywood Blist gal pals Morgan Fairchild and Catherine Oxenberg.
Then there’s Kerry’s all-time favorite Red Sox player — “Manny Ortez” — nothing.
How about future judge Roanne Sragow, whom even his bowtied bum-kissing lickspittles at the Globe described as his “girlfriend?” Roanne is now reduced to “another assistant district attorney from Middlesex County.”
In private practice very briefly with La Sragow, Kerry wins the release of a thug, George Reissfelder, who had been convicted of a murder he didn’t commit. But then he neglects to chronicle Reissfelder’s lustrous post-prison career — he went on to be a suspect in the greatest art heist in history, $500 million worth of paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. The art is still missing after 28 years and Reissfelder is dead.
Kerry runs for lieutenant governor in 1982, but doesn’t mention how he won the primary — by throwing enough of his convention delegates to a woman named Lois Pines so that she could get on the ballot and split the women’s vote with Evelyn Murphy, enabling Liveshot to finally win a race.
On page 135, in his first campaign for Congress, Kerry is torpedoed by the publisher of the Lowell Sun, “John Birch Society zealot Clem Costello.”
But 13 pages later, Liveshot gets his revenge, winning a Senate seat over Ray Shamie, “a former John Birch Society conservative.” Is there an echo in there? A book signing will be held in Boston in a couple of weeks. According to the bookstore — “no personalization, no photography and no memorabilia.”
What a shame. So he won’t sign an unpaid excise-tax bill from the town of Nantucket? I’m sure there’s a guy in Newton who would like him to personally autograph the two letters Sen. Kerry sent him over the course of three days during one of the Iraq wars — one supporting the conflict, the other opposing it.
Would he initial a fire hydrant, like the one he had removed from outside his second wife’s first husband’s trust fund’s mansion in the old Episcopalian nunnery in Louisburg Square? How about a box of penis straws like the ones some tipsy coeds handed him one summer evening after last call down on Nantucket?
One final missed opportunity by Kerry in “Every Day Is Extra.” He notes how pleased Richard Nixon was when Clem Costello and the Sun defeated him in his 1972 race for Congress against Paul Cronin. But he doesn’t quote the actual taped discussions Nixon and his aides had about him in the Oval Office back in 1971.
On April 23, H.R. Haldeman speculates that the preening Kerry is planning to run for office.
Nixon: “He’s from Massachusetts.”
Haldeman: “Oh.”
Nixon: “Mmm-hmmm.” A couple of months later, Nixon is again talking about Kerry as he delivers perhaps the most prescient prediction ever of the political future of America’s Gigolo.
“Kerry may start to wear a little thin in time.”
Thank goodness Nixon was right. Can you imagine three more frightening words than “President John Kerry?”