In Haiti's case, he contended that if he had been in Mr. Bush's shoes, 'I would not have allowed it to arrive at where it was,' with mobs roaming the streets of Haiti's cities.

Mr. Bush's aides, led by Mr. Powell, said last week that such critiques distort of the administration's efforts. The crisis grew from Mr. Aristide's own actions and his sponsorship of the marauding gangs, Mr. Powell said last week, and the United States decided not to prop him up after he had lost his legitimacy.

Mr. Kerry charges that a similar lack of constant attention led the administration to avoid dealing with the North Korean crisis for the first 18 months of Mr. Bush's presidency and that even now, Mr. Bush is unwilling to engage in serious negotiations. It was an example, he said, of the president's dealing first with the less threatening problem, Iraq, because it was the easier to solve.

'There's a reason the Bush administration walked that backwards and chose Iraq,' he said. 'And the reason is in the first eight hours of a conflict with North Korea, you'd have over a million casualties, and they knew that in Iraq you wouldn't.'

He not only reads poetry -- 'I love Keats, Yeats, Shelley and Kipling' -- he writes it. 'I remember flying once; I was looking out at the desert and I wrote a poem about the barren desolation of the desert,' he said. 'I wrote a poem once about a great encounter I had with a deer early in the morning that was very moving.'