Compare GW's early yrs to the following & tell me which one has had more average American upbringing in their formative yrs:
From the Boston Globe:
>>The rap on John Kerry is that he is an aloof politician who lacks a core. Part of his personal story feeds the image: Kerry is a man without geographic roots; his youth stretched through a dozen towns across two continents. He enjoyed the cachet of illustrious family names but not always the bonds of a household. 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.
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.
The family tree
Kerry's reputation as a Boston Brahmin has deep roots, but only on one side of the family. His maternal ancestors include the Forbes family, which started the Boston-China trade and which still owns estates around the world frequented by Kerry, and the Winthrops, who produced the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Kerry name on his father's side led some of his Irish-American constituents to assume he had Irish roots.
Here the story takes a turn. For the past 15 years or so, Kerry says, he knew his paternal grandmother was probably Jewish, and he also knew the Kerrys came from the former Austrian empire. But he said he did not know, until informed by the Globe earlier this year, that his grandfather was a Czech Jew named Fritz Kohn who changed his name to Frederick Kerry to escape a violent strain of anti-Semitism. According to a story passed down to at least one family member, Kohn and his siblings randomly dropped a pencil on a map of Europe, spotted Ireland's County Kerry, and adopted the name. Kohn and his wife, Ida Lowe, who was born Jewish in Budapest, changed their name to Kerry, were baptized as Catholics in 1902, and immigrated to the United States in 1905.
For several years the Kerrys prospered, with Frederick working as a business consultant in Chicago and then moving the family to Massachusetts. In 1915, Richard, the father of future Senator Kerry, was born. By 1921, the Kerrys were wealthy enough to park a Cadillac outside their home at 10 Downing Road in Brookline. At the time, Frederick Kerry was described in the Globe as ``a prominent man in the shoe business.''
But on Nov. 23, 1921, Frederick Kerry walked into the washroom of Boston's Copley Plaza Hotel, pulled out a handgun, and shot himself in the head. Just days earlier he had filed a will revealing that his debts nearly equaled his assets. Six-year-old Richard Kerry was left without a father, though enough family money was available to send Richard to Yale University and Harvard Law School.
Childhood years
His father worked for the State Department, and his mother was an active volunteer in community service. Kerry lived his first year in Groton and his next five in another Massachusetts town, Millis. But by the time he was 7, the family had moved to Washington.
When Kerry was 11, his father was appointed legal adviser to James B. Conant, head of the US High Commission for Germany, which later became the US mission to the country. Kerry was sent for the next two years to boarding schools in Switzerland, joining his family in West Berlin only on vacations. By the time Kerry turned 13, his parents decided that they would stay in Europe, and that -- in what Kerry calls a ``Victorian'' process -- their son would return to New England for his education. ``My parents were fabulous and loving and caring and supportive, but they weren't always around,'' Kerry recalled.
The constant shuffling between boarding schools, he noted, was ``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.''
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.
``We weren't rich,'' explained Kerry's sister, Diana. ``We certainly had some members of the family we thought of as rich. We were the [beneficiaries] of a great-aunt who had no children. My father was on salary from the State Department, and my mother had some family money but not major.''
In 1957, after his father had become the chief political officer at the US Embassy in Norway, the 13-year-old Kerry entered the Fessenden School in West Newton, Mass. There he began a pattern of filling his family void by forming close friendships with like-minded boys, including Richard Pershing, grandson of the famed US general John Joseph Pershing. Like Kerry, the young Pershing had been educated in Europe; the intertwining of their later lives would leave a deep imprint on Kerry.
After a year at Fessenden, Kerry entered the prestigious St. Paul's School, in Concord, N.H. To step inside the school's campus is to step inside a world that seems frozen in an age of privilege. Much of the 2,000-acre campus, nestled amid white pines along the shores of Turkey Pond, features a neo-Gothic architectural style that echoes Oxford or Cambridge. Meals are served in an Elizabethan-style dining hall with flying buttresses.
After five years at St. Paul's, Kerry was eager to move on to his father's alma mater, Yale University.<< |
