UNLV students were moved by Kerry’s 1971 anti-war speech

Kirsten Searer

Wednesday, June 9, 2004 | 11:52 a.m.

In two trips to Nevada this year, presidential hopeful John Kerry joked about times he spent at Circus Circus as a young Navy man, but he barely mentioned an impassioned anti-war speech he gave here 30 years ago.

"My 10 years of political consciousness in America is very wrapped up in gravestones," Kerry told hundreds of students gathered at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas on Sept. 30, 1971.

"These are the gravestones of John and Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Medgar Evers, the Kent State students, the men of Attica, and the other 53,000 brothers in Vietnam."

Kerry fired up the crowd on that cold and windy day by saying that America had lost its "dream," and that he might support a minor-party presidential candidate in 1972.

It was one of his most compelling addresses at the height of his anti-war activism, said Gerald Nicosia, a Kerry watcher and supporter who recently wrote about the speech in the Los Angeles Times.

Nicosia reviewed copies of files the FBI kept on Kerry while the highly decorated veteran toured the country in 1971 to speak out against the war.

"I thought that was certainly one of the most revealing things I saw about him," Nicosia said of Kerry's Las Vegas speech. "Because certainly, he plays his cards close to his vest these days."

Kerry helped solidify the anti-war message with his passionate dissidence in 1971. Today, as troops fight in Iraq, Kerry is once again reaching out to war skeptics, but his words are much more tempered than they were at the UNLV student union in 1971, according to news accounts of the event.

"Somewhere, somehow, we lost track of where we are as a nation," he said at the time. "People must realize the disparity between the America of the speeches and the America of the streets."

Students at UNLV, then a school of about 5,200 mostly commuter students, were slow to protest the Vietnam War, historians said. But they responded to Kerry.

"He seemed emotional," said Jeff Margolin, a student body vice president at the time who now owns a business in Las Vegas. "He seemed like he really cared about what he was talking about and really believed it. It had big meaning to us at the time."

The Rebel Yell, then a weekly newspaper, put a hand-drawn picture of a grinning Kerry on its front cover. Inside, writer Jeanne M. Hall wrote that seeing Kerry, whom she had long admired, give the speech was "one of the best things in the world."

"It was electrifying to hear a speaker whose weapon was rationality," Hall wrote.

FBI informants also were on hand for the speech, according to documents obtained by Nicosia.

A Teletype dispatched from Las Vegas to New York warned a day before the speech that Kerry, then an executive board member with the Vietnam Veterans Against the War, was scheduled to speak at UNLV.

"LV will follow with established sources," the teletype read.

And a memo filed on Oct. 14, 1971, said that "a confidential source, who has furnished reliable information in the past," told the FBI that the Confederate Students of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, paid Kerry's expenses for the speech.

Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., was student body president at the time and said she introduced Kerry to the crowd.

Kerry was one of several liberal speakers to visit the university at the time, including consumer advocate and current presidential candidate Ralph Nader and the late singer, John Denver, Berkley said.

An article in the Las Vegas Review-Journal at the time quoted Kerry as saying that Vietnam veterans are protesting "not because we hate the country, but because we love it.

"We cannot be quiet until we make this country see what it is doing, not only in Vietnam, but in the smaller Vietnams here -- Montgomery, Watts, Selma -- and in places like Greece and the Dominican Republic.

"We still hope we can find that conscience that talks about the need for morality all over the world," he said. "But change must come without violence or bloodshed. We veterans have seen enough of that."

Some, like Nicosia, are hoping Kerry will rediscover the passion of his Las Vegas speech.

"I'm a little disappointed in him right now," Nicosia said. "Some people, we're sort of wondering how could you be so much against the Vietnam War and you're playing it so cagey with the Iraq war."

Kerry is walking a fine line to attract veterans, who mostly voted for George W. Bush in 2000, political pundits say.

Sen. Terry Care, D-Las Vegas, a Vietnam veteran who is one of the coordinators of the Kerry campaign in Nevada, pointed out at a veterans event on Friday that even he was concerned at first in 1971 about the strong words Kerry used to criticize the Vietnam War.

Care, however, said that Kerry's activism caught his attention at the time, and that Kerry won supporters then that he carries to this day.

"There are a lot of guys involved in this campaign for the same reason," he said.

Berkley, who said she thinks Kerry is just as energized in his speeches today as he was in 1971, said she was struck by how Kerry hasn't changed from the get-down-to-business demeanor he exhibited when she greeted him in 1971.

This February, when Kerry spoke at Valley High School, Berkley was once again charged with meeting him at the curb.

"I said to him, 'Do you need some quiet time? We have a little place for you to organize your thoughts,' " Berkley said. "He said, 'No, let's go do it,' and we trotted onto stage. None of the theatrics, none of the prima-donna behavior."

"I thought it was great, and that's exactly the impression I had of him 32 years earlier," she said.