Washington ? Vietnam, anti-war protests and politics were still years in the future.

In 1963, John Kerry was a college kid looking for adventure on a summer abroad. Traveling on better wheels than most, there were Kerry and a buddy exploring Europe in a low-slung Austin Healey, racing against an Alfa Romeo on the twisting road to Nice, chasing a Porsche across Italy.

The gendarmes caught him in Monte Carlo: Kerry, so intent on retracing the course of the Grand Prix that he headed the wrong direction on a one-way street.

“John had to do those types of things,” says his travel companion and longtime friend, Harvey Bundy.

Even the youthful hijinks of John Kerry had an extra element of intensity about them.

Now, at age 60, Kerry is pursuing the American presidency with the same doggedness and focus that are lifelong traits for a son of privilege who nonetheless had to fight for much of what he got. The impatient young man whose first two tries for Congress fizzled, who waited another 15 years for the right entree to Congress and two more decades for a good shot at the White House, is right where his stars seemed fixed from the beginning.

“He’s always been the kind of guy who knew his place in history,” says Daniel Barbiero, college roommate and friend since before that.

Kerry winces at any such hint of destiny.

Life, he says in an interview in his stocking feet aboard his campaign plane, too often offers a “twist of fate” to think in such terms.

“When you lose Robert Kennedy, you lose John Kennedy, you lose Martin Luther King, you lose your very closest friends, you lose both your parents … you just know every day is every day. You take ’em as they come. And it’s up to others later on to make judgments about how it all fits.”

‘Leader of the pack’

As a child, Kerry was always “the most politically attuned,” says his younger brother, Cameron. “He was always the leader of the pack in the neighborhood among the cousins, the quarterback at touch football.”

His drive and competitiveness, says Cameron, are “just hard-wired.”

They are still there in adulthood, as Kerry windsurfs Naushon Island in a full-on Northeastern gale or silences a campaign heckler by declaring: “I never run away from anything, especially George Bush.”

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., takes part in a fund-raiser in Washington earlier this month.

William Stanberry, Kerry’s debate-team partner at Yale, says Kerry’s interest in the presidency was clear even in college.

“I couldn’t help admire the gall, in a way, of someone who had such a clearly stated long-term objective,” he recalls. “To some extent it was impressive, and to some extent almost ridiculous.”

Blakely Fetridge Bundy, the girlfriend and later wife of Harvey Bundy, one of Kerry’s college roommates, remembers his pals presenting Kerry with a telegram and a red, white and blue cake that said “Yippee!” in May 1964 when he was elected president of the Yale Political Union, a college debating society.

She wrote in her journal at the time: “We decided that for all further successes — especially when he’s elected president of the U.S. — that we’ll send him a Yippee! cake.”

Always a leader, always an achiever, Kerry, a four-term Massachusetts senator, nonetheless sketches a less scripted life plan for himself, one driven by a desire to serve more than an ambition to climb.

Early on, he says, thoughts of the presidency were only “a hazy possibility.”

“I don’t think you think of it in real terms,” he says.

He decided to run, he says, because the Democrats “had no voice.” The Republicans, he felt, were reducing national security issues to political slogans.

He wanted to offer people a “360-degree view of where America is today,” as he wrote in his campaign book.

Seeing both sides

That panoramic perspective is trademark Kerry.

Where supporters see a refreshing openness and an ability to think through complex issues almost three-dimensionally, his critics find waffling and ambivalence.

“He has this good and bad characteristic to describe at length the things that he sees,” says former Sen. Bob Kerrey, a Democrat who served with Kerry in Congress. “Sometimes he can give you the impression that he’s on two sides of an issue. He’s not.”

Ever was it so.

As a 27-year-old war protester who captured the attention of a nation, Kerry told a “60 Minutes” interviewer in 1971 that when he went to Vietnam, “I was gung-ho in a certain sense but had doubts in another sense.”

He came home from war, he said, with “a tremendous amount of hope” but also “a certain depression.”

Watching Kerry debate an issue can be “a little bit like at a tennis match, watching the ball going back and forth,” says David Leiter, his former chief of staff. “He is curious. … He’s engaged and thoughtful. He always struggles to get it right.”

The nuance that typifies Kerry’s public statements is there as well in his life portrait, which is painted with blended colors and dappled brushstrokes rather than sharp lines.

He is the promising young man of high society bloodlines who managed to attend an elite prep school only through the largesse of a generous aunt. He is the decorated war hero who evolved into a shaggy-haired protester. He is the politician who speaks of core principles yet is known for his cautious pragmatism. He is the candidate who can’t seem to warm up to people yet whose friends speak of his uncanny ability to connect. He is the fabulously wealthy success story who wolfs down peanut butter-and-jelly sandwiches.

Deceiving appearances

The first thing that people must come to grips with when they consider John Kerry, even before they begin to parse his words, is his appearance. He is so long, so thin, he looks deceptively fragile. One’s head must scan up, then down to take in his full 6-foot-4 frame. His wingspan, when he gestures with his arms, seems to stretch to the walls.

His face, too, is long and thin. Comic Billy Crystal jokes that someone needs to let Kerry’s face know that he’s having a good time.

His lanky body only serves to accentuate the thick mass of silvery hair atop his head. “In the event of an emergency, my hair can be used as a flotation device,” Kerry once joked on his campaign plane.

That funny, self-deprecating side of Kerry, and his warm, generous side — friends say his true persona — doesn’t always come across in public. Voters have sometimes seen him as standoffish.

“Have you had a beer with me yet?” Kerry protested when a local reporter once asked about his reputation for aloofness.

What would someone learn about him if they did go out for that beer, he is asked later.

“You just have to do it,” he insists. “You just have to have fun, let your hair down, relax, laugh, kick some jokes around, have a good time — talk about something other than this.”

Kerry’s daughter Alex, 30, says her father sometimes can get so focused that it “precludes having a lackadaisical moment.” But she says he can be witty and silly, even goofy, in more relaxed settings.

His younger daughter, Vanessa, 27, offers four words to sum up her father: dedicated, curious, intelligent, playful.

“I like ‘playful’ above all,” Kerry says, when offered his daughter’s list.

Then, somewhat reluctantly, he comes up with his own quartet: romantic, passionate, idealistic, engaged.

Friends speak of small, frequent acts of generosity, and loyalty built up over decades.

Tracy Droz Tragos, whose father served with Kerry in Vietnam and was killed there, remembers how Kerry took time to make rubbings of her father’s name from the Vietnam War Memorial to send to her grandparents in small-town Missouri.

“That relationship meant the world to my grandmother,” says Tragos.

Vietnam service

Kerry, whose service as captain of a Swift boat in Vietnam brought him three Purple Hearts and a Silver Star for heroism, still has a piece of shrapnel embedded in his leg. There is a scar, he says, but the wound doesn’t bother him.

“It’s just there,” he says, “part of my internal machinery.”

Kerry’s service became a major campaign issue this year as several veterans who served on other boats appeared in biting TV ads questioning his record and criticizing his later anti-war comments. Veterans who served on Kerry’s boat defended him and sometimes campaigned alongside him.

Vanessa Kerry says she remembers poking around her father’s desk as a child and coming across a rocket that had been aimed at Kerry’s boat when he jumped ashore to chase down and kill a young Viet Cong fighter.

“Those are the stories I grew up with,” she says. “I think it has made my dad value every day. He’s the first to say every day is extra.”

Kerry went to war with doubts about Vietnam and came home with certainty that the war was wrong; he received early release from the Navy to run for Congress as an anti-war candidate. His candidacy fizzled because a more prominent anti-war figure was already in the race. But as a decorated veteran, Kerry quickly emerged as a spokesman against the war.

Bob Muller, president of the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation and a friend who has known Kerry since their war-protester days, says Kerry was the one who “put a good face on us,” who tamped down the movement’s extremes and offered a more moderate face of dissent.

“John has always been able to do an override on the emotions,” Muller said, “to be pragmatic and to be effective.”