In 1964, at a party hosted by a mutual friend, photographer and filmmaker George Butler met a political science student from Yale named John Kerry. Bonding over their similar backgrounds, they became close friends, though their lives would soon radically diverge. Kerry enlisted and went to Vietnam, serving as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy until 1970, at which time he returned home and became active in the antiwar movement. Butler applied for a military deferment, joined VISTA, and found himself working in inner-city Detroit. It was here, in 1971, that Butler accompanied Kerry, now a leading figure of Vietnam Veterans Against the War, to the famous Winter Soldier Investigation, a series of public forums for the discussion of crimes and atrocities committed by U.S. forces during the war. Butler's photographs of the event were published later that year in The New Soldier (a book for which Kerry wrote the introduction) and are among the various archival materials edited into his feature-length documentary Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry (2004).

NL

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Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, 2004. 35mm film, black-and-white and color, sound; 89 min.