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9/20/1984 Boston Globe:
Richard Viguerie, publisher of the Conservative Digest who runs a direct- mail advertising service for conservative causes, called Shamie's victory the biggest surprise of the 1984 election. "Today, conservatives across the country have a big smile on their faces because of Ray Shamie," said Viguerie. "He's a real hero to do what he did - win in Massachusetts, the land of the infidel. He was David marching into Goliath's neighborhood.
"This reconfirms the Republican platform," Viguerie continued. "Ronald Reagan and the Republican Party are very much in the mainstream. Ray Shamie is where the country is."
Viguerie said he planned to make a personal donation to the Shamie campaign, and representatives of conservative political action committees said they would back the candidate if he requested funds. Both Shamie and Kerry refused political action committee money in the primary.
James Ellis, assistant director of the Committee on the Survival of a Free Congress, a conservative political action committee, said he hoped Shamie would accept funds because "there are a lot of people here who want to help him."
Ellis said he felt Shamie stood a better chance of winning against Kerry than against Kerry's opponent in the primary, Rep. James Shannon, because "Shannon is more moderate and Kerry is farther to the left."
3/4/88 boston Globe, Michael Kranish article:
WASHINGTON
NBC News anchor Tom Brokaw looked sternly into the camera and gave the late-breaking headlines: Panama in crisis, the United States might have to take military action, Cuban president Fidel Castro denying his connection with Panama's drug economy. Brokaw last week turned to his monitor, where Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry, one of the Senate's chief critics of Panama's strongman, stood on the Capitol steps.
While it is hardly unusual for most senators to be interviewed on network news live, it was an extraordinary moment for Kerry, who by most accounts is little known outside of Massachusetts and Washington. He is the other senator from Massachusetts. The senator conservative groups still call a "communist sympathizer." The senator who, according to a Wall Street Journal profile last year, is "hardly ever on television and isn't usually quoted in newspapers outside his own state."
So here was Kerry responding to Brokaw, live at the top of the network news. Kerry, his trademark thatch of hair and lean jaw filling the screen, said Fidel Castro is involved in drug trafficking. Kerry, acting like the former prosecutor that he is, held up a fuzzy photograph that supposedly showed Castro and an alleged drug dealer, and Kerry said it proved a "narco" conspiracy. Kerry even suggested Castro take a lie-detector test.
The spree of national attention continued, with Kerry on the Sunday television talk shows, on the radio, on the Washington local news, the most sought-after interview in town. "Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, who chaired the committee that investigated Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega . . ."
It all seemed so far from Kerry's far-left image, and that was exactly what Kerry wanted: mainstream credibiilty. There was Kerry, joining forces with far-right Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) to denounce Noriega. There was Kerry, being the first senator briefed by the Reagan administration about the possibility of Noriega's ouster.
For Kerry, the last four weeks have been among the best in his political life. In one swoop, he is taking on drugs, communism, the fate of Central America and the Reagan administration -- all while his conservative critics have little choice but to squirm in silence. He is at the center of attention as chairman of an obscure Senate narcotics subcommittee's hearings on Panama's alleged drug-dealing leadership. Kerry's basic charge is that the Reagan Administration knew Noriega was a murderer and drug king but did nothing to stop Noriega, and that it proves Reagan was leading a "phony" war on drugs.
This, it seems, is John Forbes Kerry's dream come true. It is his moment, his 15 minutes of national fame and more, his rebut to all those years of being ridiculed for wearing the JFK monogram on his shirt and his heart on his sleeve.
Kerry, perhaps remembering former Speaker Thomas P. (Tip) O'Neill's advice that "all politics is local," spent much of an interview this week stressing his devotion to Massachusetts issues, saying at one point, "Look, I'm equally happy fighting for the handicapped parking issue." But those who have watched Kerry say he is in his element in the Noriega drug hearings.
It came to this: one of the most conservative commentators in town, John McLaughlin, asked on a television interview last week whether Kerry is interested in a cabinet post in a Dukakis administration. Kerry said he would not.
"As a senator," Kerry replied, "I'm having too much fun."
To understand how this came to be Kerry's moment, and how this has symbolized his effort to change his far-left label and win respect, a quick history of the most famous Kerry anecdote is needed.
It was 1971. Kerry, who received three Purple Hearts during his Vietnam service, had become a leader of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, leading protests in Washington. He testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee against the war, saying in a memorable line, "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?"
The performance was covered glowingly by the Boston and national news media, including a comment by Sen. Claiborne Pell (D-R.I.), who said at the time that he hoped Kerry someday would join him as a senator on the committee. When Kerry tossed over a fence a set of war medals -- he later admitted they were not his own -- the reviews were not as favorable.
Nonetheless, Kerry, the son of a diplomat who was raised partly in Europe and educated at a New Hampshire boarding school and Yale University, seemed on his way to Washington the very next year. He beat nine primary opponents in the race for a US House seat but lost the general election. The former Massachusetts lieutenant governor finally made it to Washington in 1984.
But his entry into Washington was sometimes rocky, with some stories focusing on the fact that he was rich, handsome, separated from his wife and a regular on the party circuit. The Washington Post created a stir in a lengthy 1985 profile by reporting that Kerry's surgery to straighten his jawbone from a hockey accident "coincidentally made him more attractive to the cameras." The story went on to say that Kerry had been arrogant, even "downright disrespectful" to congressional colleagues.
"Kerry had not run for the House and he was new and unknown in the Senate, so he had not yet gotten the respect of his colleagues," a Kerry friend said. Under the image-conscious guidance of his advisers, Kerry largely quit the social scene. From that point on, Kerry slowly built his niche that led to his role in the Panama hearings this winter.
One of the first things that Kerry did after entering the Senate was to tell the leadership about his ambition to join the committee he once testified before. When he was asked to list his three preferences for committee assignments, he wrote: "Foreign Relations, Foreign Relations, Foreign Relations."
He got the assignment.
And he began to change. He began to appreciate the importance of the clubby atmosphere of the Senate, of getting things done by working with fellow senators. In a move that shocked some observers, Kerry, known as an "outsider," took the ultimate Senate insider-establishment position, chairing in 1986 the Democratic Party's Senate Election Committee. Although Kerry is one of three senators who refuses contributions from Political Action Committees -- he says there is a public perception of undue corporate influence by the PACs -- he did not hesitate to take millions of dollars in PAC money for the election committee. And because the committee disburses its money to all Senate Democrats, Kerry immediately won friends among his colleagues and collected many political IOUs.
"It's important because it helps determine the political well-being of many of Kerry's political colleagues," said Sen. Pell, a Kerry benefactor who is in his 24th year on the Foreign Relations Committee, and is its chairman.
"That was the turning point for John Kerry in the Senate," said a long-time Kerry friend of the election committee chairmanship. "It enabled him to win respect on his side of the aisle among Democrats that he didn't have before."
And Kerry began making waves in his Foreign Relations position. Although Kerry has received little national credit for it, he was among the first to publicly accuse former White House aide Lt. Col. Oliver North of funneling secret military aid to the Nicaraguan contras in apparent violation of US law.
But when the Senate leadership picked the Iran-contra committee membership, Kerry's name was missing. Kerry said it was because the leadership wanted him to devote time to his chairmanship of the Election Committee. Others say it was because Kerry was a freshman.
In any case, Kerry says it was one of the most frustrating times of his political career. He said that he learned through a variety of sources not only about North's secret aid program, but also that the contras raised much of their money from drug operations. Yet when Kerry released a December 1986 report about North, he made an agreement with then-Foreign Relations Committee chairman Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) not to mention the drug allegations. It was just too murky, too sleazy, too unsubstantiated.
But soon it became clear that the Iran-contra committee was not going to seriously investigate the drug allegations either. At one point, Kerry privately gave the allegations to Sen. David Boren (D-Okla.), an Iran-contra committee member whom Kerry trusted because the two senators were Yale classmates and friends. But, still, the allegations were barely mentioned at the hearings.
"I gave Kerry's information to my staff, and the reason we didn't go any further into it is, they simply were not able to verify enough of the conclusions to proceed," Boren said.
Said Kerry: "I was disappointed the Iran-contra committee didn't go into the drug story. I thought they had the resources and the staff to do it. I don't know why they didn't go into it."
Kerry, meanwhile, had one staffer, Jonathan Winer, working on it. Based on a series of allegations, Kerry began to believe not only that contras were involved in drugs, but also that the CIA financed dictators who condoned drug dealing in their countries. Kerry said he became obsessed with what he describes as the "shocking, unconscionable fact" that the Reagan administration was professing to fight a war on drugs while propping up governments in Panama and elsewhere that he said catered to drug traffickers.
He took his information to Sens. Pell and Lugar, the chairman and ranking minority members of the Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry laid out his allegations and asked for permission to investigate. The two senior senators were skeptical, with Lugar suggesting that investigations were better left to the Justice Department and a grand jury. It was a sensitive discussion: Lugar was one of the Senate's most outspoken supporters of the contras, and Kerry one of the loudest opponents. If Kerry's allegations were true, it could devastate the contra effort. And Lugar, who was committee chairman at the time, had the Republican majority power to squelch Kerry's effort.
As Lugar recalled it in an interview this week, "Kerry did not have any particular standing and was just a member in the wilderness. I said his charges cried out for a federal investigation. I was concerned about turning the Foreign Relations Committee into an investigative body. Kerry's point was that the Department of Justice was part of the problem. It turned out Kerry was correct, because when the Justice Department refused to give us information about this, I came to share Kerry's view. I admit to you that Justice was not performing its duties. So I think Kerry deserves a great deal of credit for all of this coming out now in the hearings."
Around the time of Lugar's conversations with Kerry in late 1986, Kerry began to get a bit paranoid. And that was understandable. The Iran-contra committee has since discovered that North had asked the Justice Department to find information that, Kerry said, was meant to discredit him.
Kerry alleged this week that the Reagan administration in early 1987 began to apply pressure on him in other ways. He said the White House orchestrated a series of negative stories about him, including the March 1987 Wall Street Journal piece that quoted a number of conservative activists being highly critical of him as being "pro-communist." At the same time, the Conservative Digest labeled him "the most peculiar man in the Senate," and the conservative Washington Times alleged that Kerry covered up drug dealing by the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. And a Justice Department spokesman, in a rare swipe at an individual senator, said at that time the department just didn't believe Kerry's drug stories.
"The administration was trying to personally discredit me," Kerry alleged this week. "They were looking for a way to throw mud and discredit me, stop us, scare us and intimidate us. They were trying to 'fringe me' because of the track we were on with respect to Oliver North, narcotics and the whole thing. We were getting word back secretly through our sources that the single most worrisome thing to the administration was the narcotics. They thought they were over Iran-contra except for that."
Nonetheless, the inability of Kerry to get the drug story before the Iran-contra committee, combined with the critical stories about him, took a toll.
"There were some shaky moments and this office went through some hard times," Kerry said. "It wasn't always upbeat and smiley. There was some introspective questioning about whether what we were up against was impossible to crack . . . that, God, something awful is going to happen to us if we continue down this road."
But, according to numerous accounts, Kerry began privately to rejoice that the Iran-contra committee had left the sleaziest part of the story to him. He began to see it as the ideal project for himself, as the former prosecutor and foreign relations expert, being given the task of investigating the untold part of the story.
"I began to look at it as a case, like a prosecutor . . . that I could reopen Iran-contra," Kerry said. He convinced the Foreign Relations Committee to hire one of the best investigators in town, Jack Blum, who had worked on Senate investigations ranging from the disappearance of financeer Robert Vesco to the CIA involvement in the 1973 ouster of Chilean president Salvador Allende. Blum said of Kerry: "In 11 years of Senate investigations, I have never seen a senator get so involved in the detail of an investigation. Usually hearings are purely a staff effort, but the amount of time he puts in on this is phenomenal."
And Kerry applied the lessons he says he has learned in his political life. Rather than blurt unsubstantiated allegations, he made a "very frustrating" decision to keep quiet for more than 18 months. He told his staff that he wanted to build a case step by step against Noriega, proving that the CIA had been in bed with a dictator who was responsible for allowing drugs to be shipped into the United States.
Kerry had become chairman of the Foreign Relations subcommittee on terrorism, narcotics and international operations, a little known committee that previously had delved into such topics as the role of the Voice of America. Although the subcommittee sounds important, it was one that more senior senators chose not to chair.
Just days before Kerry's hearings were set to begin last month, Kerry was both upstaged and vindicated.
The Justice Department, which a year earlier said it didn't believe Kerry, announced the Florida indictment of Noriega on drug charges. Kerry said that the Reagan administration only went ahead with the indictment because of his upcoming hearings, but the administration has denied any such connection. Kerry reportedly was furious at the Justice Department for stealing the thunder of his hearings, but in retrospect he acknowledges the indictment gave instant credibility to himself and the hearings. Nonetheless, some critics have questioned the motives of some convicted felons who have testified about Noriega and the alleged involvement of Cuban communist leader Fidel Castro.
Most of all, the indictment enabled Kerry to criticize drug lords, communists and the Reagan administration all at once -- and to have the support of all members of his committee, including Helms, who is trying to use the charges to revoke the United States' agreement to turn over the Panama Canal. As one observer put it, "it was perfect because he can go after the administration and they can't criticize Kerry without seeming soft on drugs."
Kerry, told of that assessment, said, "that is exactly right. That is a very perceptive comment."
Even conservative activist Richard Viguerie, who last year called Kerry a "very dangerous radical," is at a loss to criticize Kerry's role in the hearings, sputtering that "this is an unusual, unique issue where conservatives and liberals work together, the kind that comes maybe once every five years." Viguerie then suggested that Kerry "still was soft on communism," but admitted that he couldn't remember exactly why, other than his opposition to the contras and "something to do with his being a Vietnam veteran against the war."
Now Kerry, the man who formerly was best known as an opponent for sending US troops to Vietnam, is suggesting troops be used in the dangerous business of interdicting drugs on foreign soil. The senator accused of being soft on communism is taking on the hemisphere's top communist, Castro. The liberal senator is adopting the conservatives' favorite cause of drug abuse. He can point to the administration's indictment to back up all his charges. And his colleagues in the Senate, some of whom quite recently ignored or scorned him, are paying their respects and thanking him for contributions to their campaigns.
*********************
Looky Looky who funded Weld in 1996
WELD RANKS 2D ONLY TO GINGRICH IN HELP FROM GOPAC
Boston Globe, Third, Sec. Metro, p B1 08-23-1996
By Globe Staff Frank Phillips
Almost from the day he launched his Senate campaign, Gov. William F. Weld has deftly distanced himself from House Speaker Newt Gingrich and the Republican right. But that hasn't dampened Gingrich's key financial backers in their enthusiasm to get Weld into the US Senate.
Weld is among the top recipients of money from wealthy donors across the country who make up the financial backbone of GOPAC, the political action committee that, until recently, Gingrich led. According to campaign finance records, Weld has received $48,000 in the seven months from December to June 30 from 41 contributors who show up as major donors to GOPAC.
Weld appears to rank second only to Gingrich among congressional candidates receiving money from GOPAC donors. The speaker has received $81,000 from GOPAC donors since January 1995, records show.
Weld was listed in May among the favored candidates on the World Wide Web site on the Internet that GOPAC uses to alert donors to whom they should throw their support.
The governor has also fared well among those on Gingrich's own donor list, Federal Election Commission records show. About 61 donors listed in the ``Friends of Newt Gingrich'' committee have given a total of $88,000 in contributions to Weld's Senate campaign.
Among Weld's GOPAC donors are some of the most conservative GOP money men, among them millionaire Richard Mellon Scaife of Pittsburgh and Robert H. Krieble of Hartford, who bankrolls conservative movements.
Krieble, who gave Weld $1,000 in May, has donated more than $200,000 to GOPAC over the years, while Scaife has given the Gingrich-controlled PAC $75,000. Scaife has donated $2,000 to Weld's Senate effort.
The husband of GOPAC chairman Gay Gaines gave Weld $1,000. He and his wife have donated $146,000 to GOPAC in recent years.
Of the GOPAC donors who contributed to Weld, 31 are what the group calls charter members, who gave $10,000 or more to GOPAC. The 41 GOPAC donors who gave to Weld have donated $1.2 million to GOPAC over the years.
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See what I mean. People have been after Kerry for decades.
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