Senator Kerry had to choke back tears as he announced, on the floor of the Senate, the end of his long quest for the presidency, but our own eyes are dry. His career, by our lights, has been one of the most disgraceful of his generation. It was begun, in 1971, with his testimony before the Senate, besmirching the honor of the GIs along with whom he’d had the honor to serve in Vietnam and whom he left on the battlefield to meet in Paris with envoys of our enemies. He sought, in his vainglory, to advance the notion that he was a “winter soldier” who was not abandoning the fight but carrying it on in a different way. Well, one of the great things about a democracy is its long memory, and Mr. Kerry was exposed, in 2004, in a way that couldn’t have been more dramatic — by a grassroots campaign of the swift boat veterans he’d betrayed.

It is typical of Mr. Kerry that he tried to wrap his decision yesterday in all sorts of high minded motives. He had become damaged goods in his own party because during the 2006 campaign, he insulted our GIs by suggesting they were stuck in Iraq because they were uneducated losers. It was quickly recognized as a profound error, one that, the more Americans thought about it, echoed in subtle ways his derision of American GIs in the earlier war. Mr. Kerry spent a good bit of time yesterday in a reprise of his own return from Vietnam and relating those times to Iraq, saying he wanted now to do “all I can to end the war.” Quoth he: “I don’t want the next president to find that they have inherited a nation still divided and a policy destined to end as Vietnam did, in a bitter and sad legacy.”

If there has ever been a more hypocritical sentence uttered on the floor of the Senate, we are unaware of it. It comes from a senator and a party doing all they can to bring this war to exactly the kind of end to which the same party brought Vietnam in 1975. There are those scurrying now to put the gloss on what happened back then. The latest example was from the Slate Web site, which published a history that tried to blame everyone but the Democrats who actually forced the abandonment of Vietnam. It tried to tarnish President Ford, Secretary Kissinger, and the Republican leadership on the Hill, who sought to re-supply free Vietnam as the communists mounted their eventually successful drive for conquest.

Mr. Kerry’s announcement yesterday was made in the course of encouraging the Senate to force just such an end to the current war. The thing for the new generation entering politics to remember as they watch this spectacle is the point about democracy’s long memory. What the politicians do today is going to enter the historical record. People are going to talk about it and tell their children. Those who stay with the fight are going to be remembered for decades to come, and their glory will be untarnished, even if we lose. Those who betray them, or force them to stand down, will be remembered as well. Who knows which of them may some day, a generation or two from now, seek the presidency in the kind of campaign that Mr. Kerry attempted in 2004. Let them learn what happened in 1971 and 1975, and study the tears that Mr. Kerry just shed.