Waltzing Matilda: The Life and Times of Nebraska Senator Robert Kerrey - Tapa dura

The life of Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey is at first glance a classic American tale. Raised on the Great Plains in a large family, the handsome young Bob Kerrey planned to be a pharmacist. But in 1969, with the call of the Vietnam War, he left the sheltered environment of Lincoln, Nebraska, and joined the elite Navy SEALS, never to return the same.
On an early-morning raid in 1969, a grenade blast shattered Kerrey's right leg. Recounting that raid, he remarked, "In one explosive moment the physical strength of my youth was blown away." For his valor, Kerrey was given the nation's highest military award, the Medal of Honor, but the experience left him profoundly changed. His staunch support of the war yielded to acrid criticism, his patriotic cockiness replaced by awareness of the "tears of things." Today Kerrey compares the difficulty of his return to the Australian soldier and amputee in the song "And the Band Played 'Waltzing Matilda.'"
After a long stay at the Philadelphia Naval Hospital, Kerrey returned to his beloved Cornhusker State, to a land where the calm and expansive prairies stand in direct contrast to the jungles of Vietnam. The transition would not be easy. With determination, however, Kerrey learned to walk and, eventually, to run with his prosthesis. He started a restaurant and became a wealthy man, but he remained restless, a higher purpose in life still eluding him.
In 1982, Kerrey won the Nebraska governorship in a surprising upset and turned a state deficit of $24 million into a budget surplus in his first year. It was during this term that Kerrey met actress Debra Winger while she was shooting Terms of Endearment, and a seemingly storybook romance resulted. With reelection guaranteed, the popular Governor declined another term, but ran for the Senate in 1988 and won easily.
In this eloquent biography, Washington writer Ivy Harper provides the first complete portrait of the man whose vision and candor brought him national attention as a Democratic Presidential candidate in 1991 and 1992. Like the unpredictable land he hails from, Kerrey's unorthodox politics resist categorization, yet ironically endow him with the very qualities that continue to stir legends of greatness.