In 2004, when Kerry lost the Presidential race to George W. Bush, who is widely considered the worst President of the modern era, he refused to challenge the results, despite his suspicion that in certain states, particularly Ohio, where the Electoral College count hinged, proxies for Bush had rigged many voting machines. But he could not suffer the defeat in complete silence. He was outraged that Bush, who had won a stateside berth in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War, used campaign surrogates, the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, to slime his military record. He was furious, too, at Robert Shrum, his chief strategist, and other campaign advisers who had restrained him from hitting back.
For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio, Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerrys and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. We were sitting in the bow, Barnicle recalled, and we were talking about a bunch of different thingsabout Iran, about what the President of Iran was likeand I said, Other than not being President, this is pretty good. There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.
