Family History: The First Mrs. John Kerry
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She was John Kerry's first love, but politics did not agree with her. So she fled the limelight. It's catching up to her
By Susannah Meadows
Newsweek
May 3 issue
msnbc.msn.com
Julia Thorne has been trying to escape politics ever since rocks crashed through her window, barely missing her baby's crib, after her husband John Kerry ran for Congress in 1972. They'd met years before, while Kerry was still at Yale, after he'd already heard all about her from his buddy David Thorne, Julia's twin. She was wearing a bikini, riding around on the back of a car, when John Kerry saw the dashing 19-year-old for the first time, according to historian Doug Brinkley. They'd been married a few years when Kerry ran for office, and Thorne threw herself into getting him elected. "She was a real live wire, a very funny person, outrageous sometimes. She was a very positive force in the campaign," says Dan Payne, a former Kerry aide. But Kerry took a lot of heat for being antiwar, and lost. The nastiness of the race soured Thorne. As she would write in "A Change of Heart," her 1996 book about divorce, politics robbed her of the right to privacy and an autonomous life. "I was alone and overwhelmed, abandoned with a new baby in a town that held political disdain for us."
When Thorne finally separated from Kerry in 1982, she was determined to find the privacy she'd craved for 12 years as a political wife, asking friends never to talk to the press about her. Thorne, who'd suffered from depression, worked through it and eventually fled Boston for Wyoming and then Montana, remarried and kept her past with the senator from Massachusetts to herself. "She kept saying, 'Don't tell them what town I live in. Just say Montana or in the West'," says Brinkley.
But it hasn't been easy closing the door. An article in The New Yorker in 2002 portrayed her as being too depressed to take care of her own children. (The magazine subsequently published a letter from Kerry stating that Thorne was a wonderful mother.) Enraged by what she'd read, Thorne agreed to talk to Brinkley for his biography of Kerry, "Tour of Duty." "Her view was, 'I'm not going to be whitewashed out of history'," says Brinkley. So Thorne hauled out her old cardboard boxes and shared photos of the young couple posing in front of the big neon signs of old '60s California motels, and love letters from Kerry calling her "Darling" and "Bambi" and telling her she was all that mattered. (Kerry told Brinkley that a big reason he'd volunteered for Swift Boat duty in Vietnam—which is often cited as an example of his heroism—was so he could spend the summer with Thorne before training started. When asked if she'd ever heard that story before, their daughter Vanessa Kerry grew quiet and said, "No, but it wouldn't surprise me.")
Now that the first love of Thorne's life is the presumptive Democratic nominee, her dreams of escaping politics may be dashed for good. Her daughters, with whom she speaks every few days, call her from the campaign trail. Thorne laughs at their stories from the road, and she has told friends that she's proud her daughters are campaigning for their father. But Vanessa says her mother's reaction has been more mixed. "The risk of us becoming more public is concerning for her. It's been a funny balancing act, trying to not make [her] an enigma but also to let her have her own life."
Thorne remains a Kerry supporter, and sometimes called him after primary wins with her congratulations. Today she and her current husband, an architect, are active in local environmental issues and arts education, and she's working on a memoir about growing up in Italy. The local paper has discovered her, and slowly, townsfolk are waking up to the fact that they have the former wife of a presidential candidate in their midst. She's told friends that she's hopeful that Kerry will win. Just leave her out of it.
© 2004 Newsweek, Inc. |
