"Master Kerry is not at home."
In one particularly revealing anecdote, Camil told the Globe that a VVAW member "had tried to reach Kerry by telephone and was told by someone, presumably a maid, that 'Master Kerry is not at home.' At the next meeting, someone hung a sign on Kerry's chair that said: 'Free the Kerry Maid.'"
www.boston.com/globe/nation/ packages/kerry/061703.shtml
Kerry's Forbes aunt could afford the tuition. And the estate on the French coast where Kerry spent his summers. Kerry was the (relatively) poor relation of a family with great wealth. He grew up with the trappings of great wealth (estates, elite schools, family servants), but the actual wealth itself was just outside his hands. Does this have something to do with his marrying TWO women with multi-million dollar fortunes. Well, obviously. If you've grown up to be accustomed to life with the elite but don't have the wealth yourself to stay in that lifestyle, well, you can marry into it. And if one elite marriage doesn't work out, find another even richer. If not for those rich wives, what would he do?
By the time he was 10 years old, he was shipped off for an eight-year odyssey at boarding schools in Switzerland and New England, where ``home'' was a dormitory or an aunt's estate.
More than any one place, his ties were to a social milieu -- that rarefied world of wealth and privilege where the French is fluent and the manners impeccable. As a young man, Bill Clinton got a chance to shake JFK's hand on a Boys Nation outing; young John Kerry dated Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister and once sailed Narragansett Bay with JFK at the helm.
But Kerry did not fully belong to this elite world, either. His father's government salary, combined with his own struggles with money, left him planted further on the outskirts of New England's ruling class than many realized. The boy who was educated at patrician prep schools grew into a gentleman without significant means, part of a landless aristocracy that one might find in a Jane Austen novel. He married wealthy wives whose net worth dwarfed his own.
.....
Among the array of relatives who looked after John, none was more important to his education than great-aunt Clara Winthrop, who had no children of her own. She owned an estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea, complete with a bowling alley inside a red barn. Winthrop offered to pay for much of John's prep school education, an expensive proposition far beyond the means of Kerry's parents. ``It was a great and sweet and nice thing from an aunt who had no place to put [her money],'' Kerry said. Such a gift today might be worth about $30,000 per year, given the school's typical annual cost before subsidies.
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