John Kerry: 'People want a future. The orange menace is not providing that'

In 2004, the Democrats’ presidential candidate, John Kerry, was on the receiving end of one of the most egregious smear campaigns in modern history. At the height of the Iraq war, the Republicans came up with a strategy to combat the glaring military mismatch between Kerry, a decorated Vietnam vet, and the incumbent George W Bush, whose record consisted of a spell in the Texas Air National Guard. They concocted the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, a group of Vietnam vets who claimed that Kerry had lied about and exaggerated his record. The claims were later discredited, but the lies travelled around the world, and the damage was done.

“It was really the first of the fake news elections,” says Kerry, speaking via Zoom from his home in Massachusetts. “Where you can take a legitimate military record, which the US navy had certified, and you can lie about it. And that’s where we are today: massive lies. We’ve had tens of thousands of lies told by the president of the United States. We’re just completely divorced from the reality of what is happening to people’s lives.”

Does it still make him angry? “Yeah,” he says, “which is why I try not to think about it too much. I made the decision very shortly after that I did not want to get lost in anger.” Having seen what Al Gore went through in the 2000 election, which saw similarly questionable tactics, Kerry decided against a long court process, but now, with the 2020 election days away, he is reconsidering.

“The recent machinations about voter-suppression and interference in the election have prompted me to question not litigating. Because we’re seeing it still challenging our democracy in ways that are unacceptable. I wonder if that would have changed if we’d done it.”

Since he left office as President Barack Obama’s Secretary of State in January 2017, closing a five-decade political career, Kerry has kept a relatively low profile, but he has been transitioning from hard power towards soft. This is becoming a well-trodden route, with Gore making An Inconvenient Truth, and the Obamas signing a deal with Netflix in 2018. “After a long career in politics, if you’re doing it right, it’s about storytelling. It’s about having an impact on culture, and understanding what the culture is,” he says.

It is not just about politics, although it is difficult to avoid, and it’s certainly not about negative attack ads. “This plethora of new platforms, the democratisation through technology; there’s much greater ability. There ought to be more content telling stories in a more powerful and different way.”

Kerry is no newcomer to this landscape. In 1972, aged 28, he was the star of the landmark anti-Vietnam war documentary Winter Soldier. In recent years, he has appeared in numerous eco-docs such as the Leonardo DiCaprio-produced Before the Flood. He and DiCaprio are now friends, and are working together on a new documentary series about oceans.

Kerry’s latest initiative is his involvement with a new production company named Fingerprint Content, based in London. Its founders are three British women with backgrounds in media, production and campaigning: Melanie Dicks, Jess Hines and Lia Walton. Kerry came into contact with them via Walton’s association with his old film-maker friend George Butler. Best known for 1977’s Pumping Iron, which launched Arnold Schwarzenegger to fame, Butler also made a documentary about Kerry in 2004. Called Going Upriver, it attempted to set the record straight on his military record and undo the damage of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth.

Kerry’s role with Fingerprint is described as executive producer and senior adviser. “I’m certainly qualified as senior,” the 76-year-old jokes. “I’m a person who can open a few doors. I have many years of engagement on some of these issues, whether it’s racism, poverty, the pandemic or the climate crisis.”

It might sound like Kerry is “doing an Al Gore”, but his commitment to, say, environmental issues is well established. He helped organise the first Earth Day in Massachusetts in 1970, has been involved in senate-level climate discussions since the 1980s, and last year founded World War Zero, a zero-emissions initiative whose participants include a mixture of politicians and celebrities. Kerry also headed the US delegation for the 2016 Paris climate change agreement, from which Trump infamously withdrew the moment he entered office (technically, the US does not leave it until 4 November, the day after the election – Joe Biden has pledged to rejoin should he win).

“An Inconvenient Truth was one way to do it,” he says, “but there are ways to tell this differently.” Fiction can be as powerful as fact, he argues, perhaps more so, since it can reach the gut and the soul as much as the intellect. He talks of the effect The Deer Hunter had on him when he returned from Vietnam, and of 1983 nuclear holocaust TV drama The Day After, which prompted Ronald Reagan to negotiate with the Soviet Union to reduce nuclear stockpiles. “Historically, there are these moments where you tell a story the right way, it has enormous impact.”

Kerry’s own cultural interests range far and wide, from French cinema to Star Wars. The night before we speak, he was doing a Star Wars trivia quiz with Mark Hamill, AKA Luke Skywalker. “I loved the early ones but I confess I’ve not seen every one of the last ones, mostly because I was too busy as secretary.” During lockdown, he binge-watched Homeland, Succession and The Morning Show.

In terms of Fingerprint’s content, projects in the pipeline include a mobile-friendly short-format “eco detective series” starring the Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan; a “female-led, heightened genre film set in Corfu”; and a high-end “cli-fi [climate fiction] conspiracy thriller” series – all delivered with gender parity and minimal environmental impact. Programmes about such issues as climate don’t have to be deadly earnest, argues Dicks, they can also funny and inventive. “It feels a little bit like an oxymoron,” she says. “‘Entertaining climate show’ – but there is a way to do it.” They hope to put Kerry in front of the camera as well: “He’s a little bit reticent, but I’m very good at getting actors out of trailers.”

At the same time, factual and fictional narratives, and the distance between them, has become one of the key issues of the age. Few could argue against a powerful story about the climate crisis, but is America ready for this when it seems to be stuck in a place where the very existence of the crisis must still be argued. At her recent Supreme Court hearing, Amy Coney Barrett refused to say whether or not climate change was happening since it was a “very contentious matter of public debate”.

This is the reality of the post-truth landscape. Despite the sincerest and noblest intentions of such operators as Kerry and the Obamas, the narratives that have been moving the dial most successfully in recent years have been populist, rightwing and often dishonest: be it on climate, voter fraud, immigration, even the Covid pandemic, not to mention the vanishing sunlit uplands of Brexit. There is the feeling that our entire culture has been swiftboated.

“Trump is the great example of that,” says Kerry. “He’s a walking, living manifestation of a shift to lack of facts, to believing what you might want to believe, to being ‘entertained’ in the process.” Kerry has watched this transition take place in the US since the mid-1990s, from Newt Gingrich to the Tea Party to the Freedom Caucus. “And now you just have Trumpism, which has no relationship to any of the stuff preceding except the anger. It taps into the anger.” The upcoming election is a chance to “break the fever”, he feels. “People want to get on with their lives. People want to solve real problems. People want to see a future, and they’ve learned that the flim-flam, con-artist, orange menace is not providing that.

“My hope is that November the third is going to produce a resounding rejection of what has been going on, and a quick resurgence, even a release of energy of creativity, that’s going to be quite remarkable. And this is where the narrative is so important. People are now feeling the paucity of what has happened, the diminishment of the American Dream. It’s not gone, there are a lot of dreamers still, but it has been tarnished.”