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.

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.