With Vietnam war hero John Kerry having turned back the challenge from antiwar candidate Howard Dean, and George Bush scrambling to account for all his time in the National Guard, the Democrats seem well positioned to neutralize the traditional Republican advantage on foreign policy. But George McGovern also could boast that he was "a decorated combat pilot in World War II," while his opponent "was stationed far from battle," and McGovern nonetheless lost 49 states, largely because the voters thought him weak on national security. Kerry may not project a similar image of weakness, but the record he has compiled in the three decades since he left Vietnam is more dovish than that of any Democratic nominee since McGovern.

As leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, Kerry accused American soldiers of "war crimes . . . committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command." This hyperbolic rhetoric may be written off against the fevers of the times and his own profoundly painful experience in the war; in subsequent years and on other issues, his tone became appreciably cooler. But the tilt of his positions remained constant.

When he won election to the Senate in 1984, Kerry said that the "issue of war and peace" remained his "passion." As a first major foreign policy cause, he championed the "nuclear freeze." Later Kerry battled Sen. Sam Nunn, a hawkish Democrat who chaired the Armed Services Committee, over the funding of research into missile defense, which Kerry wanted to slash.

The litany of weapons systems that Kerry opposed included conventional as well as nuclear equipment: the B-1 bomber, the B-2, the F-15, the F-14A, the F-14D, the AH-64 Apache helicopter, the AV-8B Harrier jet, the Patriot missile, the Aegis air-defense cruiser and the Trident missile. And he sought to reduce procurement of the M1 Abrams tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, the Tomahawk cruise missile and the F-16 jet. Time and again, Kerry fought against what he called "the military-industrial corporate welfare complex that has relentlessly chewed up taxpayers' dollars."

Kerry was one of the Senate's strongest critics of President Ronald Reagan's policies of military resistance to Communist inroads in this hemisphere. When U.S. troops intervened in Grenada, Kerry denounced the action as "a bully's show of force." Kerry lent his name to Medical Aid for El Salvador, a political group that brought humanitarian aid to regions of that country held by Communist guerrillas. And he made himself one of the Senate's most vigorous opponents of aiding the anti-Communist contras as a means of pressuring Nicaragua's Sandinista regime. "I see an enormous haughtiness in the United States trying to tell them what to do," said Kerry. He and Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) traveled to Managua to try to work their own peace deal with strongman Daniel Ortega and thus undercut U.S. policy. Kerry justified this by saying Reagan had failed "to create a climate of trust" with the Sandinistas.

Nor did Kerry's dovishness end with the Cold War. When Saddam Hussein swallowed up Kuwait in 1990, Kerry voted against authorizing the use of force. "He stressed," reported the Boston Globe, "that he thinks [economic] sanctions can work if given time."

The next major international crisis came in Bosnia. By 1995, with the death toll there estimated to have reached a quarter-million, Congress voted to end the arms embargo hamstringing the beleaguered Bosnians. Kerry was one of 29 senators who opposed this resolution. Before the vote, Kerry argued that lifting the embargo would not necessarily provide arms, but Sen. Joseph Lieberman called his bluff, saying, "I will be glad to join him, as soon as this measure passes, in introducing a package authorizing aid to . . . the Bosnians." Kerry brushed aside the offer.

Last year, in contrast to 1990, Kerry voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. And he has reversed himself on other issues as well. He now says that some of his stands against weapons systems were "stupid." And those medals he tossed away in protest, he explains, actually belonged to someone else; his own hang proudly on his office wall.

Candidate Kerry, in short, sounds different from Senator Kerry. But this can cut two ways. In October, having lost the favor of Democratic activists to Dean, Kerry cast one of only 12 Senate votes against the administration's request for $87 billion for the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once he has the nomination in hand, Kerry is likely to resume his tack toward the center (as candidates from all sides are wont to do). He cannot, however, renounce an entire record that bespeaks the deeply dovish beliefs he brought home from Vietnam. Perhaps his heroism in the war will make voters comfortable with that outlook. But with fears of terrorism and nuclear proliferation, that may not be enough.

Joshua Muravchik is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.