Kerry’s team is now trying to position him as the Comeback Kid, pointing out that he’s recently cut Dean’s lead in some New Hampshire and Iowa polls. “Kerry’s much tighter now as a candidate,” media consultant Jim Margolis insists. “The TV ads are on; it feels like a campaign now.” Spinmaster Shrum adds, “I’ve been in politics a long time, and I’ve seen people get excited by candidates and take a second look. If we tell this guy’s very powerful story—and I’m not talking about autobiography, I’m talking about a long record of taking on special interests and what he wants to do as president—I think this will be powerfully appealing to voters.” That said, the Kerry image gurus will have to work hard to change the late-night-punch-line perceptions of the senator’s candidacy. When Kerry appeared on the Jay Leno show last week, he was preceded by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog puppet, who declared, “The poop I made in the dressing room has more heat than John Kerry.”

Not that Kerry was fazed. “I loved Triumph,” he said the next day. “I think Triumph is going to endorse me.”

At campaign events, Kerry can seem stiff because he is put off by the call to join in stagey theatrics he feels are phony. Midway through the recent Arizona debate, the men all doffed their jackets and then began, on camera, a sleeve roll-a-thon for that working-man look. By the end, Howard Dean had his sleeves above the elbows, and even Joe Lieberman and the crisply military Clark unbuttoned their cuffs, but only Kerry and Al Sharpton conspicuously maintained formality.

Asked by debate moderator Gwen Ifill about his seeming inability to connect, he quipped, “Wait until you see my video, ‘Kerry Gone Wild.’ ” He told me, “If we ever go out for a few drinks, I’ll give you Samurai Senator,” a reference to the old Saturday Night Live skit. When I inquired what other journalists have missed in profiling him, he shot back, “How much fun I am.”

“If Kerry were losing ground to someone like Lieberman or Gephardt whom he respected, it would be one thing, but to be losing to Howard Dean is infuriating to him. Does he rant? No, but it gets to him.”

It’s been hard for Kerry to play the happy warrior during a year in which he has suffered a series of personal blows. His mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, a descendent of the aristocratic Boston Forbes family, died a year ago in November after a lingering illness. His father, Richard, the American-born son of Austrian immigrants, was a foreign-service officer who was stationed during Kerry’s childhood in Oslo and Berlin. John, the second of four children, grew up in a family with a distinguished pedigree, a dwindling fortune, and a wealth of overseas experience. When Kerry refers to his childhood in speeches, he often says, “I rode my bike as a 12-year-old around East Berlin,” past Hitler’s bombed-out headquarters—a stark contrast to John Edwards’s small-town-son-of-a-mill-worker life story.

From boarding school in Switzerland to St. Paul’s prep school in New Hampshire—Kerry points out the van window at the school’s boathouse as we drive by—to Yale to military service in Vietnam, Kerry has followed what has seemed a predestined path toward the White House. His daughter Vanessa, 26, a Harvard-med-school student, recalls a poignant family scene from last fall as her grandmother was ailing: “When my father told her, ‘Mom, I think I’m going to run for president,’ she smiled and said, ‘It’s about time.’ ”

Just weeks after his mother’s funeral last fall, Kerry was, as he puts it, “whacked again,” this time with the news that he had prostate cancer, the disease that killed his father in 2000. Right before undergoing surgery in mid-February, Kerry gave a press conference, joking that the doctors had promised to remove his “aloof gland,” too. But he now admits he was in a much darker mood when he first got the news. “I was pissed off. I thought, ‘Fuck this, why now?’ ” Kerry says, adding, “I thought of it as more of a real drag on what I was trying to do, not God, I’m going to kick the bucket.”

For the macho Kerry, who windsurfs and kite-boards and plays ice hockey with a daredevil’s abandon, to be physically sidelined this year was an insult to his hyperenergetic image. And he still wonders how much the timing of the diagnosis and surgery hurt his candidacy. “I think some of the dynamics of this thing would have been different otherwise,” he says. “It took me off the trail at a critical moment, created uncertainty. I was out for two weeks, but I should have been out for six weeks.”

On the campaign trail, Kerry always makes a special point of trying to connect with fellow veterans, and in Iowa he often introduces his local “brother,” Gene Thorson; the two men served together on a gunboat in Vietnam. Thorson, now a cement mason, says, “We made fun of him; he was this East Coast college guy. But you knew you could count on him.” Thorson adds, with a laugh, “Before we’d go on missions, he’d play his rock and roll loud, and then turn it off and say, ‘Okay, tigers, it’s time to go.’ ”

Kerry received the Purple Heart three times and a Bronze Star and a Silver Star for heroism during his four years (1966–1970) of active duty in the Navy. In one exploit, he jumped off his boat to chase down and kill a Vietcong who had fired at his crew with a rocket-propelled grenade launcher. When campaigning, Kerry relishes pointing out that he “knows more about aircraft carriers” than Bush, but doesn’t mention his medals. Instead, he emphasizes his transformation from Vietnam vet to a national leader of the antiwar movement, bragging proudly that “I was named to Richard Nixon’s enemies list at the age of 29.”

Vietnam always seems to be with him. Over a late-night dinner in Des Moines, I asked whether he still had bad dreams about Vietnam. “I haven’t had a nightmare in quite a while,” he said, then mused: “Sometimes, if you’ve been going 90 miles an hour all day and you try to go to sleep, your subconscious mind doesn’t shut down. It fools you into thinking that you’re in danger when you’re not, that something’s gone wrong. That you’re seeing things out of the corner of your eye that are moving.” Earlier this year, the Boston Globe hired a genealogist who discovered that his grandfather, Frederick Kerry, had been born Fritz Kohn to Jewish parents in what is now the Czech Republic before converting to Catholicism and changing his name. (Kerry had long known that his paternal grandmother was a Jew turned devout Catholic.) But the more stunning news to Kerry was learning from the Globe this February that his grandfather had committed suicide in 1921 at the Copley Plaza Hotel, shooting himself in the head in the men’s room; Kerry’s dad was 4. The cause of death had never been discussed in the family. “It was a shock to be confronted with the circumstances,” says Cameron Kerry. “And it happened in a place where we’ve been frequently. John has had fund-raisers there.”

This is the kind of information that makes one rethink family history, perhaps explaining Kerry’s father’s gruff-love nature. “My father never knew his father,” says Kerry. “I learned sixteen years ago that my grandmother was a Jew who converted to Catholicism . . . Why did my grandfather kill himself? Obviously, I have asked myself what on earth went on in his head.”

Turning to Kerry’s immigrant Jewish roots, I mention that my grandfather’s name was changed at Ellis Island, and that we could be Gorodnichey interviewing Kohn. “Could have been, should have been, I can’t worry about this stuff at this stage of my life,” he snapped. Then his voice softened, “I wish I had answers to a lot of questions. It’s ironic that my father died three years ago. I’m an orphan. there’s no one to talk to.”

As he got up to leave the restaurant a few minutes later, Kerry was stopped repeatedly by well-wishers. The introspective mood lifted and he smiled, delighted by the adulation. Shaking hands with an elderly white-haired woman at the door, he asked her to vote for him in the Iowa caucus. “I’m a Republican,” she replied. Undeterred, Kerry said, “My wife is a Republican, and she’s become a Democrat and she’s voting for me.” The woman said, “She has to, she’s your wife.” Kerry burst out laughing, saying, “You don’t know my wife.”