Young gun.

• Author: Shapiro, Walter

EVERYONE WHO HAS COVERED politics in the last decade has their Bob Kerrey story. For me, the emblematic Kerrey moment was sitting with the Nebraska senator in the bar of the Hotel Fort Des Moines after Al Gore had pummeled his primary candidate, Bill Bradley, in a debate before the 2000 Iowa caucuses. Kerrey kept talking analytically about all the ways in which Bradley should have been more aggressive in taking

on the vice president. The frustrated ambition beneath the surface was palpable. You could see Kerrey thinking, "I would have destroyed Gore. This could have been my year. But, dammit, I couldn't have raised $30 million like Bradley."

In truth, Kerrey could never have been elected president. Not in 1992 when he ran a diffident and unfocused primary campaign against Bill Clinton, not in 2000 when he yielded to the realities of political fund-raising, and not in 2004 had he stayed in the Senate. For Kerrey, who had lost part of a leg and gained a Congressional Medal of Honor in Vietnam, was haunted by a secret that would likely have destroyed his political career. Writing in The New lark Times Magazine in April of last year, Gregory Vistica accused Kerrey and his Navy Seal team of participating in a 1969 massacre of women and children at Thanh Phong. At the time, Kerrey, while acknowledging that horrible night, denied any recollection of the specific charges of deliberate slaughter leveled by one of the Seals under his command.

Advance knowledge of that back story is a precondition for reading When I Was a Young Man. For the uninitiated, Kerrey's uninflected memoir of his life until 1970 makes for a curious book. With its large type and generous margins, this chronicle seems to be mostly prelude with little payoff. Do we really need an entire chapter on Kerrey's struggles to make the first-string high school football squad? Yes, there are the occasional nice bits such as his description of the football field as "a place where a man can recall an afternoon or evening of his youth with absolute clarity." But we must also endure, with our fingers pinching our nostrils, Kerrey likening "the acrid smell of the locker room" to "my uncle Ronnie's turkey coops on my mother's family farm near Ripley, Iowa." The uplifting moral that Kerrey derives from this gridiron experience should be familiar to readers of standard artless political autobiographies: A small nose-guard scar would permanently remind him "how close I had once come to quitting...