Partisans are cultists who cannot even distinguish between strength of character & qualifications of each candidate; hence they need political party hacks to dictate their choice of nominee. That's how you ended up with the truly "international man of mystery"--give me a Texas cowboy anyday, rather than the following mumbo jumbo stew:
>>Family background
Kerry's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in Horni Benesov in what is now the Czech Republic, and grew up in Mödling (a small town near Vienna, Austria). They immigrated to the U.S. arriving at Ellis Island with his wife Ida née Loewe (who was born in Budapest, Hungary) and son Erich on May 18, 1905. The Kerry-Kohns were Jewish, but the family concealed its background upon migrating to the United States, and raised the Kerry children as Catholics. Two of Ida's siblings, Otto Loewe and Jenni Loewe, died in the Nazi concentration camps (Theresienstadt and Treblinka, respectively), after being deported from Vienna in 1942, about a year before John Kerry's birth. Frederick committed suicide on November 23, 1921 by gunshot to the head at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston, Massachusetts. His second son, Richard was only six at the time.
Richard Kerry, John's father, attended the Phillips Academy as a youth, and then graduated from Yale University in 1937. He received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1940, and then joined the United States Army Air Corps. In his adult career, he worked for the United States Foreign Service and for the United States Department of State, Bureau of United Nations Affairs, serving as an attorney. It was in 1937 while visiting the French coastal town of Saint-Brieuc that he met Rosemary Forbes, a Forbes family heiress born in Paris, France. Rosemary grew up mostly in France, where the Forbes family still has a home on a bluff in Brittany. They married in January, 1941.
John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade, and became an international businessman and attorney living in France.
James Forbes's wife, Kerry's maternal grandmother, was Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, with deep ancestral roots in Massachusetts history. Margaret's grandfather was Robert Charles Winthrop, the conservative Whig Speaker of the House and Senator, and her ancestors included James Bowdoin, former Governor of Maine and John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
Childhood years
Throughout his youth, Kerry and his parents would often spend the summer holidays at James' and Margaret's grand house at Saint-Brieuc, where Kerry would race his cousins on bicycles and challenge relatives to games of "kick the can." One of his cousins, an East Anglia geography teacher named Kevin Armstrong, later recalled, "I remember him on his bike. He always looked like he was in a race. He was never just pedaling along, he would be going like crazy. We always knew he wouldn't win, but were we ever wrong!" Armstrong, describing the Kerry household, said that they never talked of presidential ambitions, but "there would always be political discussions. Johnny's dad, Uncle Dick, was very serious about politics. There were high-level arguments going on. You had the feeling you were expected to know a lot."
Because Kerry's family moved around a lot, he attended several schools as a child. Many years later, he said that "to my chagrin, and everlasting damnation, I was always moving on and saying goodbye. It kind of had an effect on you. It steeled you. There wasn't a lot of permanence and roots. For kids, [that's] not the greatest thing." He went to a Swiss boarding school at age 11 while his family lived in Berlin. When he visited home, he biked around and saw the rubble of Hitler's bunker, and also sneaked into East Berlin, until his father found out and grounded him. The boy often spent time alone. He biked through France, took a ferry from Norway to England, and even camped alone in Sherwood Forest. While at his Swiss boarding school, Kerry saw Scaramouche, his favorite movie and movie hero, for whom he later would name his powerboat.
Boarding school and brief singing career
While his father was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway, Kerry was sent to Massachusetts to attend boarding school. In 1957 he attended the Fessenden School in West Newton, a village in Newton, Massachusetts, where he met his friend Richard Pershing, grandson of the famed U.S. general John Joseph Pershing. The following year, he enrolled at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire in 1958, graduating in 1962. There he practiced his skills in public speaking, and developed an interest in politics. In his free time, he enjoyed hockey and lacrosse, which he played on teams captained by a classmate named Robert S. Mueller III, who went on to become director of the FBI. He also played electric bass for the prep school's band The Electras, which produced an album in 1961. Only 500 copies were made, and in 2004 one of the copies was auctioned at eBay for $2,551.
In 1959 Kerry founded the John Winant Society at St. Paul's to debate the issues of the day, a group that still exists. It is said he began to emulate President John F. Kennedy while a student, even signing his papers, "J.F.K." Indeed, it was in November of 1960 while at school that Kerry gave his first political speech, in favor of Kennedy's election to the White House.
Encounters with President Kennedy
In 1962, Kerry volunteered on Ted Kennedy's first senatorial campaign. He was known to broadcast "Kennedy for Senate," from a loudspeaker in his Volkswagen Beetle, adding the words "And Kerry for dogcatcher!" In the summer of that year, he began dating Janet Jennings Auchincloss, Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister. Auchincloss invited Kerry to visit her family's estate, Hammersmith Farm in Rhode Island (home to Janet and Jackie's mother Janet Lee Bouvier Auchincloss and her husband Hugh D. Auchincloss, Jr.), on Sunday, August 26. It was then that Kerry met President Kennedy for the first time.
When Kerry told Kennedy that he was about to enter Yale University, Kennedy grimaced because he had gone to rival-school Harvard University. Kerry later recalled, "He smiled at me, laughed and said, 'Oh, don't worry about it. You know I'm a Yale man too now.'" According to Kerry, "[The President] uttered that famous comment about how he had the best of two worlds now: a Harvard education and Yale degree," in reference to the fact he had received an honorary degree from Yale a few months prior (June 11, 1962). Later that day, a White House photographer snapped a photo of Kerry sailing with Kennedy and his family in Narragansett Bay. They met again a few weeks later while at the September 1962 America's Cup race off the coast of Rhode Island.<< |
