John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in , when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of obscurity. His celebrity as the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was fading. The war was over, and his much heralded testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was five years in the past. He had entered law school after losing a congressional election in , a race he was widely expected to win.
Kerry practiced law for six years. During that period, he began inching back into public view in Massachusetts, rebuilding a reputation both for aggressive investigation and for showmanship which he still enjoys today. The issues that mattered to him then have dominated his subsequent legislative career, and it is his brief career as a lawyer, more than his record as a protester, that could suggest what kind of President he would make.
It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated. After graduation, Kerry was hired as an assistant district attorney under John J. Droney, who was the district attorney of Middlesex County, the largest county in the state, with more than a million residents and encompassing the cities of Cambridge and Lowell.
Droney was a major figure in Massachusetts legal and political circles. By , Droney was suffering from what was later revealed to be A. And John Kerry was a great face to put on the office. They were kids who worked their way through Suffolk law school or maybe night law school. Droney jumped John over virtually all of that, and, in the end, it made no difference. John built this thing from a sleepy backwater operation into a real powerhouse.
He transformed it, professionalized it into the premier shop in Massachusetts. When Kerry started at the Middlesex County D. Many prosecutors did not have their own telephones. He told me what he was going to do. Kerry reached all the way to Washington in order to overhaul the office and, most dramatically, its budget. Under President Carter, the Justice Department was making grants to local prosecutors, and Kerry proved adept at tapping into those funds.
