Senator John F. Kerry
John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943 at a military hospital in Denver, Colo., while his father Richard Kerry, a pilot in the Army Air Corps, was being treated for tuberculosis. Soon after his birth, the Kerry family returned to Massachusetts. This, however, was only a temporary residence for young Kerry, who was destined for an unusually privileged upbringing. Kerry's father, a diplomat in the Foreign Service, and his mother, Rosemary, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family, whose wealth is drawn primarily from its land holdings on Cape Cod, made certain that Kerry received the best education that their positions could afford him. Kerry was educated at Swiss boarding schools and attended an elite private school in New Hampshire, before enrolling in Yale University.
At Yale Kerry was actively involved in sports and the student social life. He was a member of the exclusive club Skull and Bones, to which George W. Bush, two years younger than Kerry, also belonged. After graduating in 1966, Kerry heeded the call of what his brother, Cameron Kerry, would later call duty, and volunteered to fight in the rapidly escalating Vietnam conflict.
Kerry served as an officer on a "swift boat" in the Mekong Delta. On February 28, 1969, his swift boat came under a rocket attack. A subsequent military report about the engagement, quoted by a 1996 article in the New Yorker, stated: "Kerry's craft received a B-40 rocket close aboard. Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry ordered his units to charge the enemy positions . . . (his craft) then beached in the center of the enemy positions and an enemy soldier sprang up from his position not ten feet from (Kerry's craft) and fled. Without hesitation Lieutenant (j.g.) Kerry leaped ashore, pursued the man behind a hootch and killed him, capturing a B-40 rocket launcher with a round in the chamber." About the incident Kerry recalled, "It was either going to be him or me. It was that simple."
For his actions that day, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. Some controversy would arise with concern to the incident years later though when during a close election with William Weld in 1996, the Boston Globe's David Warsh questioned the circumstances of Kerry's heroism that day. Evidence emerged that the Viet Cong who had fired the rocket was alone and had already been wounded by the gunner on the ship.
After completing his tour returning home in 1969, Kerry made an about face in his position on Vietnam. Disillusioned, angered, and feeling an onerous sense of betrayal by Washington's handling of the conflict, he became a prominent anti-war protestor. Referring to the involvement in Vietnam as the "biggest nothing in history," Kerry became a co-founder of the Vietnam Veterans of America and the spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War.
It was in this capacity Kerry achieved national renown and laid the nascent groundwork for a career in politics. In April 1971 while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Vietnam, he asked a question that echoed throughout the country: "How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?" A day after delivering this simple question, he led a group of veterans that hurled their war medals onto the Capitol steps to protest the war. Though it later became clear that Kerry had only thrown his ribbons on the steps (to this day his medals are proudly displayed in his office), the events cemented Kerry's position as a leading critic of the Vietnam War. Morley Safer praised him as "a veteran whose call to reason . . . seemed to bridge Abbie Hoffman's of the world and [then-Vice President Spiro] Agnew's so called "silent-majority.'"
Kerry entered law school, graduating from the Boston College Law School in 1976. In the following years he served in Middlesex County and earned a reputation as a "top prosecutor" for leading the prosecution against a prominent New England organized crime boss and for modernizing the district attorney's office.
In 1982, Kerry was elected lieutenant governor of Massachusetts (he served under then-Gov. Michael Dukakis) and in 1984 he ran for Paul Tsongas's vacant Senate seat. He was supported by the nuclear freeze movement and feminists, and won election while refusing to accept contributions from political action committees. During his first term, he became a critic of government waste.
Today Kerry is serving his third consecutive term on Capitol Hill. Throughout he has broached contentious issues that many others, even from his own party, avoided.
He was an integral player in the Oliver North Hearings, having launched an investigation in 1987, know as the "Kerry Committee," that exposed the diversion of drug money from counternarcotic operations to the U.S.-backed Nicaraguan Contras. In 1992, Kerry coauthored a report for the Committee on Foreign Relations on the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), "an elaborate corporate spider-web" that defrauded depositors of billions of dollars, engaged in money laundering, arms trafficking, and allegedly facilitated the development of Pakistan's nuclear arms program. Kerry pursued the charges against the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals International," as it became known, despite the involvement of the late Clark Clifford, an advisor to four Democratic presidents. Clifford was the president of First American Bank, a Washington, D.C.-based, federally regulated bank that was secretly and illegally bought by BCCI with Clifford's aid in the mid-1980s.
In 1991 the Senate created the Select Senate Committee on POW/MIA Affairs to investigate the possibility that U.S. prisoners of war and soldiers designated missing in action were still alive in Vietnam. Acting as chairman, Kerry helped persuade the group to vote unanimously that no American servicemen still remained in Vietnam. In doing so, he helped begin the process of normalizing U.S.-Vietnamese relations.
But Kerry's participation in the Committee became controversial in December 1992 when Hanoi announced that it had awarded Colliers International, a Boston-based real estate company, an exclusive deal to develop its commercial real estate potentially worth billions. Stuart Forbes, the CEO of Colliers, is Kerry's cousin.
Kerry was a delegate to the Earth Summit in 1992 (where he met his future wife, Teresa Heinz, the widow of Pennsylvania Senator John Heinz), the Kyoto climate talks in 1997 and the Hague Conference of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change in 2000.
Kerry has continuously criticized the Bush administration for its abandonment of the Kyoto protocol and encouraged the United States to promote what he views as sound and sustainable environmental policies. In an August 2002 Time article Kerry asserted, "American's deserve better choices than this Administration is offering. The United States must stop being an environmental isolationist and once again work with our global allies…First and foremost, we must lead at home, where American's unrivaled ability to drive economic growth through innovation can protect the environment and create jobs."
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