12/14/2015, “Negotiating the Whirlwind," The New Yorker, David Remnick
“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....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 Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer [2015], 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 things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and 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.’”…
Kerry has shown repeatedly that he will use any lever as a means of diplomatic persuasion—including his defeat in 2004.
In July, 2014...Abdullah Abdullah, a physician [in Afghanistan] and the former foreign minister, and Ashraf Ghani, the former chancellor of Kabul University—charged each other with trying to steal the election….
On September 17th, [2014] Kerry called Abdullah from his office at the State Department to persuade him to concede and accept the face-saving position of “chief executive officer” in Ghani’s government.
“He asked Abdullah to put his phone on speaker so that his aides could hear. After flattering Abdullah for his strength and importance in the country, Kerry said, “I will share with you a very personal experience: When I ran for President of the United States, in 2004, against George Bush, in the end, on Election Day, we had problems in the state of Ohio on how the votes were taking place. I even went to court in America to keep polling places open to make sure my people could vote. I knew that even in my country, the United States, where we had hundreds of years of practicing democracy, we still had problems carrying out that election.”…
Between Kerry’s trips to Europe and the Middle East, I had dinner with Kerry and Heinz at their house in Georgetown, a twenty-three-room mansion decorated with Early American portraits, Dutch still-lifes, and an amiable yellow Labrador retriever named Ben. (The Lab has the Twitter handle @DiploMutt.) I asked Kerry how long he carried around a sense of anger and resentment.
“I didn’t carry it,” he insisted. “I didn’t. I didn’t. My wife was mad at me that I didn’t carry it longer.”
From across the table, Teresa Heinz said, “I’m still carrying it.””…
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