Jeffrey Toobin of the New Yorker has written this interesting story on John Kerry’s background as a lawyer before his career as a politician. There is nothing earth shattering in the article, but it is nevertheless provides interesting insight into Kerry. As Toobin notes:

John Kerry graduated from Boston College Law School in 1976, when he was thirty-two years old and on the brink of obscurity. His celebrity as the former leader of Vietnam Veterans Against the War was fading. The war was over, and his much heralded testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was five years in the past. He had entered law school after losing a congressional election in 1972, a race he was widely expected to win. A story about him in the Boston Globe during this time ran under the headline ?once a hot political property.?
Kerry practiced law for six years. During that period, he began inching back into public view in Massachusetts, rebuilding a reputation both for aggressive investigation and for showmanship which he still enjoys today. The issues that mattered to him then have dominated his subsequent legislative career, and it is his brief career as a lawyer, more than his record as a protester, that could suggest what kind of President he would make.

And somewhat surprisingly, Kerry was not a bleeding heart criminal defense lawyer:

Given his background in the antiwar movement and progressive politics, Kerry might have seemed like a natural for a public defender?s office. ?That?s a stereotype of the worst order and a total knee-jerk reaction,? Kerry told me during a recent conversation about his legal career. ?I always had a prosecutor?s mind and a prosecutor?s bent. It was always what I wanted to do, even in law school. There was a rule in Massachusetts that allowed law students to prosecute misdemeanor trials in front of six-person juries, and I got an unbelievable amount of experience before I even graduated.? For a politically ambitious young lawyer like Kerry, especially one who was known only as a protester, it also made sense to earn a law-enforcement credential.

Hat tip to Ernie the Attorney for the link to this piece.