John F. Kerry

I

Introduction

John F. Kerry, born in 1943, American politician and Democratic Party candidate for the United States presidency in 2004. Kerry, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts, lost to incumbent President George W. Bush in a hard-fought battle that divided the American public.

Kerry became the Democratic Party nominee after overcoming an early lead in the polls by former Vermont governor Howard Dean. Kerry won the Iowa presidential caucus and the New Hampshire primary, both in January 2004. He then swept all but two of the remaining primaries and caucuses and became the Democratic Party’s nominee at its July convention. Prior to the convention Kerry selected U.S. senator John Edwards of North Carolina as his vice-presidential running mate.

A graduate of Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, Kerry served as an officer in the Vietnam War (1957-1975), winning numerous commendations for bravery. He returned to the United States disillusioned about the war and rose to national prominence as he led a group of veterans who sought a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam. Kerry was first elected to the U.S. Senate in 1984 and was reelected in 1990, 1996, and 2002.

II

Early Life

John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943, at a military hospital in Denver, Colorado. He is a descendent of some of America’s oldest families. His mother, born Rosemary Forbes, was descended from the Forbes family, which helped develop trade between Boston, Massachusetts, and China in the early 1800s. She was also related to the Winthrop family, which traces its ancestry to John Winthrop, a Puritan from England who was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.

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Kerry’s grandparents on his father’s side of the family were Fritz and Ida Kohn, who lived in the Austrian Empire in the late 1800s. Facing anti-Semitism, Fritz changed his first name to Frederick and the family name to Kerry. The two converted to Catholicism and immigrated to the United States in 1905. Frederick Kerry faced financial problems and committed suicide in Boston in 1921, leaving behind a daughter and two sons, one of them Richard Kerry, the father of John Kerry.

Richard Kerry grew up in Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University in 1937 and Harvard University Law School in 1940. He met Rosemary Forbes while traveling during a summer vacation in France, where Rosemary lived on the Forbes estate. In January 1941, while stationed at an Army base in Alabama where he tested planes as an Army Air Corps pilot, he and Rosemary were married. He became seriously ill with tuberculosis and was hospitalized in Denver, Colorado, where Rosemary gave birth to their second child, John Kerry. A few months later, the family moved to Massachusetts, where John spent the next six years of his life.

In 1950 the Kerrys moved to Washington, D.C., where Richard began a career as a foreign service officer. The Kerry family was intrigued by another person from Massachusetts who also had arrived in Washington, D.C.: the young congressman John F. Kennedy, who later became a U.S. senator, U.S. president, and a role model for John Kerry.

III

Education

A

Prep Schools

By 1955 the Kerrys had moved to Berlin, West Germany, where Richard Kerry served as legal adviser to the U.S. High Commission for Germany. John Kerry learned about the U.S. Cold War against Communism in the city that marked the dividing line between East and West at the height of the Cold War. In 1956 Kerry was sent to prep school in Switzerland. This started a pattern in his life in which he would be sent to all-male boarding schools until he went to college.

Kerry returned to Massachusetts to attend prep school at age 13. For the next five years he was enrolled at the elite St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire, where he founded a debate club and became a sports standout in hockey and soccer. In 1960, at 16 years of age, Kerry gave a speech at the school favoring the election of John F. Kennedy as president. Two years later, Kerry was dating the half-sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy and went sailing twice with President Kennedy off the coast of Rhode Island.

B

Yale

In the fall of 1962, Kerry enrolled at Yale University, where he became a leader in the Yale Political Union and the debate club. Many of Kerry’s friends viewed him as a future political leader, which helped Kerry become a member of the exclusive Skull and Bones society in his senior year. Kerry performed well in college, earning a bachelor’s degree in political science, but he also learned outside the classroom, becoming a pilot at the Yale Flying Club and learning to perform aerobatics.

Kerry was given a high honor at Yale by being chosen to deliver the class oration to the graduating class of 1966. He delivered a speech that questioned whether the United States should be involved in the Vietnam War, saying: “The United States must, I think, bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world.”

While at Yale, Kerry met Julia Thorne, whom he married in 1970. They had two children, Alexandra, born in 1973, and Vanessa, born in 1976.

IV

The Vietnam War Period

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