John Kerry

John Kerry
U.S. Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA)

John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is a United States senator from Massachusetts, and, due to victories in the U.S. presidential primary elections, is the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee for President in 2004.

This article deals with Kerry's biography, background and experience.
For the presidential campaign, see John Kerry presidential campaign, 2004.

Early life

Kerry was born at the Fitzsimmons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver, where his father, Richard Kerry, a test pilot for the Army Air Corps who had been serving stateside in Alabama during WWII, was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. His family returned to their native state of Massachusetts shortly after John's birth. He was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Family background

His father, Richard, was a lawyer who later joined the United States Foreign Service and worked for the United States Department of State, Bureau of United Nations Affairs. His mother, Rosemary Forbes Kerry, who was born in Paris, France, was apparently a homemaker. The daughter of an international businessman, Rosemary grew up mostly in France, where the Forbes family still has a home on a bluff in Brittany. Rosemary and Richard met while he was visiting the French coastal town of Saint-Brieuc in 1937.

Kerry's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in Horni Benesov in what is now the Czech Republic, grew up in Mödling (a small town near Vienna, Austria) and migrated to the United States. He arrived 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. 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. 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 Kerry's birth.

John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was an international lawyer and banker who was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade. (Kerry's great-great-grandfather John Murray Forbes, who was similarly involved in the China trade, was a noted philanthropist; Kerry is related to Ralph Waldo Emerson by a Forbes collateral marriage.)

James Forbes's wife, Kerry's maternal grandmother, was Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, whose ancestry extends far into Massachusetts history, and whose grandfather was Robert Charles Winthrop, the conservative Whig Speaker of the House and Senator. Through Margaret, his grandmother, Kerry can trace descent from James Bowdoin, former Governor of Maine, and John Winthrop, the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. This branch of Kerry's family tree also shows a common ancestry with Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Calvin Coolidge, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.

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.com 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.

Yale University

In 1962 Kerry entered Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut (his father graduated from Yale in 1937), and there majored in political science, graduating with a B.A. in 1966. To earn money during the summers, he loaded trucks in a grocery warehouse and sold encyclopedias door to door.

As a student, he lived in a three-room dormitory suite with Daniel Barbiero, who was a friend from St. Paul's School, and Harvey H. Bundy III. The first time he met Harvey Bundy, they almost came to blows. Bundy was heckling President Kennedy about his sex life during a speech he was giving on the New Haven Green on October 17, 1962, and Kerry approached him to get him to stop. Harvey, who would become a principal at the investment banking firm of William Blair & Company in Chicago, disliked Kennedy even though he had two uncles—McGeorge Bundy and William P. Bundy—who served senior posts in his administration. Indeed, it was a visit to Yale by William Bundy, who reportedly told Kerry, "We need people like you to lead over there [in Vietnam]," which influenced Kerry's decision to serve in the war.

Kerry and Harvey Bundy became close friends despite their tense introduction, and even spent the summer in Europe together in the summer of 1963, after their freshman year. During the trip, they drove from Paris to Austria, where they visited an old ski instructor of Kerry's. They drove through Switzerland on the way but didn't visit anyone there. Then, when they arrived at the Austrian Alps, Kerry insisted on climbing a mountain even though it was only 5 a.m., and then raced his friend down the peak. When they visited London that summer, Kerry delivered an impromptu speech from the famed Speakers' Corner in Hyde Park.

Kerry, who had always been athletic, played soccer, hockey and lacrosse at Yale. He was also on the Fence Club and took flying lessons. Barbiero later recalled, "In prep school, he had a pretty small group of friends—guys who were interested in philosophy and political science...In college, he got to know everybody."

In his sophomore year Kerry became president of the Yale Political Union. His involvement with the Political Union gave him an opportunity to be involved with important issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and President Kennedy's New Frontier program. Under the guidance of the speaking coach and history professor Rollin Osterweis, Kerry won dozens of debate contests against other college students from across the nation. In March 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated, he won the Ten Eyck prize as the best orator in the junior class for a speech that was critical of U.S. foreign policy. In the speech he said, "It is the specter of Western imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism, and thus it is self-defeating." Because of his public speaking skills, he was chosen to give the class oration at graduation. The speech was hastily rewritten at the last moment, and was a broad criticism of American foreign policy, including the war.

In April 1965 his friend John Shattuck (who would later become CEO of the John F. Kennedy Library Foundation) inducted him to Yale's Skull and Bones secret society, three years before George W. Bush joined the same group. He was joined by friends such as Frederick W. Smith, who would later found Federal Express, his debate partner William Stanberry, Jr., David Thorne, twin brother of Kerry's future wife Julia Thorne, (also dated Janet Auchincloss) and Richard Pershing a peer from St. Paul's. Pershing would become Kerry's closest friend as a young man, and would precede him in going to Vietnam. A few years later, Kerry thought fondly of this time, recalling that he and Pershing shared "irreplaceable, incomparable moments of love, concerns, anger and compassion... in Bones." Another member of Skull and Bones that year was David Rumsey, who would go on to found the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.

A few weeks before graduating, Kerry and all of the Skull and Bones seniors went on a trip together to the fishing camp owned by the organization on the secluded 50-acre Deer Island, located on the St. Lawrence River, just north of Alexandria Bay, New York. They spent the days idly, playing cards and drinking beer. But in an article by Joe Klein for The New Yorker in 2002, David Thorne remembered there was a serious ongoing discussion about Vietnam. He said, "There were four of us [Kerry, Smith, Pershing and Thorne] going to war in a matter of months. That tends to concentrate the mind. This may have been the first time we really seriously began to question Vietnam. It was: 'Hey, what the hell is going on over there? What the hell are we in for'?" Although ambivalent, Kerry would still go to serve in Vietnam, on the ship he received the news that his best friend Richard Pershing was killed in action.

Military service

Kerry medals

Medals awarded to Lt. Kerry include the Silver Star,

Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.

First tour of duty

On February 18, 1966 Kerry enlisted in the United States Navy. He was ordered into active duty on October 19, and received his Navy commission on December 16. After completing a year of training, in December of 1967 he began his first tour of duty, serving as a lieutenant in the electrical department on the guided-missile frigate USS Gridley (DLG-21). In February 1968, the Gridley sailed into war to support aircraft carriers in the Tonkin Gulf, but was far removed from combat. Kerry had no contact with the enemy during that time. According to Kerry's profile in the Boston Globe Kerry recalled: "I didn't have any real feel for what the heck was going on [in the war]," His ship returned to port in Long Beach, California, on June 6, 1968.

Second tour of duty

Initially, according to the Boston Globe profile, Kerry had hoped to keep a relatively safe distance from most of the fighting by obtaining assignment as commander of a Swift Boat:

"I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a little-noticed contribution to a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing."

But two weeks after he arrived in Vietnam, the swift boat mission changed -- and Kerry went from having one of the safest assignments in the escalating conflict to one of the most dangerous. Under the newly launched Operation SEALORD, swift boats were charged with patrolling the narrow waterways of the Mekong Delta to draw fire and smoke out the enemy. Cruising inlets and coves and canals, swift boats were especially vulnerable targets. [1]

He commanded his Swift Boat Patrol Craft Fast-94 during several operations, including Operation Sea Lords (raids on the Viet Cong-controlled Cua Long River in the Mekong Delta near the Cà Mau province), and proved an aggressive commander: "To his crew, Kerry was one of the most daring skippers in the US Navy, relentlessly and courageously engaging the enemy" [ibid.]

In reference to an incident in which Kerry's boat hit a mine, the Globe reported that "Kerry often would go beyond his Navy orders and beach his boat, in one case chasing and killing a teenage Viet Cong enemy who wore only a loin cloth and carried a rocket launcher. Kerry's aggressiveness in combat caused a commanding officer to wonder whether he should be given a medal or court-martialed" [ibid.]

Yet despite his aggressiveness, "Kerry would watch in despair as a crewmate killed a boy who may or may not have been an innocent civilian. He would angrily challenge a military policy that risked the death of noncombatants" [ibid.]

Kerry lost five friends in war, including his Yale classmate Richard Pershing who was killed in action on February 17, 1968. The death had a devastating impact on Kerry, who expressed his grief in a wrenching letter to his parents, writing: "If I do nothing more, and if I convince the others to do nothing more, it will be to give every effort we can to somehow make this a better world to live in and to end once and for all this willingness to expend ourselves in this stupid, endless self-distruction [sic]." [2]

Combat wounds

Kerry's arm was wounded during his first combat experience (on December 2, 1968) and he was awarded a Purple Heart. On February 20, 1969, he earned a second Purple Heart when his left thigh was hit with shrapnel. Eight days later, on February 28, 1969, Kerry's boat, in enemy territory, was hit by a B-40 rocket. After beaching his boat, Kerry chased down and killed a wounded Viet Cong, who had been shot in the leg by a crew-mate and was fleeing with another B-40 rocket. Kerry came back to the boat with the rocket and launcher. He was awarded the Silver Star medal for his actions. On March 13, 1969, Kerry's boat detonated a mine (as his position took heavy fire) and his arm was wounded. For his injury and rescuing U.S. Army Green Beret James Rassmann on the same occasion, Kerry was awarded a third Purple Heart and the Bronze Star with Combat V.

Return from Vietnam

On March 17, 1969, Commodore Charles Horne, an administrative official and commander of the coastal squadron in which Kerry served, filled out a document that said Kerry "has been thrice wounded in action while on duty incountry Vietnam. Reassignment is requested as a personal aide in Boston, New York, or Washington, D.C. area." There has been some debate about whether Kerry asked Horne to write the letter, or if Horne did so on his own. Transfer was subject to approval by the Bureau of Naval Personnel, which granted the request under then-existing naval instructions which said those who are wounded "three times, regardless of the nature of the wound or treatment required ... will not be ordered to serve in Vietnam and contiguous waters or to duty with ships or units which have been alerted for movement to that area."

Kerry ended his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1969 after 11 months in-country.[3], but he remained on active duty for two more years with the Military Sea Transportation Service, Atlantic based in Brooklyn, New York. All told, he was on active duty from four years, from 1968 until 1972. He then joined the United States Naval Reserve where he served from 1972 to 1978, for a total of 10 years of military service.

Anti-war activism

File:Kerryrally.jpg
John Kerry speaking at an
anti-war rally.

Kerry returned to America in 1969. On May 7, 1970, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show for the first time, to speak about his opposition to US involvement in the Vietnam. Just a few weeks later, May 23, 1970, he married Julia Stimson Thorne, his girlfriend of six years, at a lavish ceremony attended by approximately 250 guests in Bay Shore, New York. The bride wore a cream-colored wedding gown which was first worn two centuries earlier in the wedding of her ancestors, Catherine Peartree-Smith and Elias Boudinot 4th (at that wedding, guests included Alexander Hamilton and George Washington). After honeymooning in Jamaica, Kerry stepped up his antiwar activities, becoming a media celebrity for his outspoken opposition to the war, behavior which, according to some reports, served as a great annoyance to the Nixon administration.

Joining the Vietnam Veterans against the War

In June, he joined the newly formed organization Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), where he became a prominent spokesman, leading numerous protests, marches and rallies. On September 7, Kerry spoke at an event that the group organized called "Operation RAW", or Rapid American Withdrawal, in which Vietnam veterans marched 86 miles from two Revolutionary War sites, Morristown, New Jersey and Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

Protest in Washington, D.C.

As part of the VVAW, Kerry organized a non-violent protest of the war entitled "Operation Dewey Canyon III", which occurred from April 18 to April 23. The organizers called the protest "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," and named it "Dewey Canyon III" because it followed Dewey Canyon I and Dewey Canyon II, code names for American and then ARVN invasions of Laos in February and March of 1971.

On April 19, a procession of about 1,100 veterans moved across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to Arlington Cemetery, led by mothers who lost their sons in Vietnam, the "Gold Star Mothers". There, a brief ceremony for the war dead was conducted by Reverend Jackson Day on the small plot of grass outside the cemetery beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the grave of John F. Kennedy. In the following days, the protestors, who camped out on a grassy quadrangle between Third and Fourth Streets, took part in "guerilla theatre", marches, and listened to speeches. Senator Edward Kennedy made a midnight visit to the group on the evening of April 21.

Testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee

Kerry talked about the VVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation, an event which took place from January 31 to February 2, 1971 in Detroit, Michigan, at which over 150 honorably discharged veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia during the war.

Speaking under oath, Kerry said the following:

"I would like to talk on behalf of all those veterans and say that several months ago in Detroit we had an investigation at which over 150 honorably discharged, and many very highly decorated, veterans testified to war crimes committed in Southeast Asia. These were not isolated incidents but crimes committed on a day-to-day basis with the full awareness of officers at all levels of command. It is impossible to describe to you exactly what did happen in Detroit - the emotions in the room and the feelings of the men who were reliving their experiences in Vietnam. They relived the absolute horror of what this country, in a sense, made them do. They told stories that at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Ghengis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

He also criticized William Bundy, the man who had influenced his decision to go to Vietnam, stating "Where are they now that we, the men they sent off to war, have returned? These are the commanders who have deserted their troops. And there is no more serious crime in the laws of war. The Army says they never leave their wounded. The marines say they never even leave their dead. These men have left all the casualties and retreated behind a pious shield of public rectitude. They've left the real stuff of their reputations bleaching behind them in the sun in this country." The full context of these quotes is available online. [4]

In a February 2004 interview with CNN's Judy Woodruff, the now frontrunner denied that he had ever accused U.S. soldiers of committing war crimes in Vietnam. Woodruff remarked, "They are saying, in effect, you were accusing American troops of war crimes." Kerry replied, "No, I was accusing American leaders of abandoning the troops. And if you read what I said, it is very clearly an indictment of leadership. ... It's the leaders who are responsible, not the soldiers. ... The fact is if we want to redebate the war on Vietnam in 2004, I'm ready for that. It was a mistake, and I'm proud of having stood up and shared with America my perceptions of what was happening." [5]

The medal-tossing incident

The following day, Kerry and other veterans threw medals and ribbons over a fence at the United States Capitol building to protest the war. This became a controversy when it was discovered that he has his service medals on display, suggesting that what he threw were not his own medals. CNN reported on January 22, 2004 (Wolf Blitzer Reports): "In one well-documented episode, Kerry joined with other veterans, tossing their war medals onto the lawn of the Capitol. Kerry freely admitted the medals he threw were not his..." Kerry:"I threw some medals back that belonged to some folks who asked me to throw them back for them," Kerry said in April, 2001."[6]

The Boston Globe, in a part of a profile on Kerry titled "With anti-war role, high visibility," detailed the incident: "Some press reports say that Kerry 'threw his medals.' But Kerry has long maintained he threw not his own ribbons but someone else's medals. ... In an interview, he said that he had previously met two veterans, one from the Vietnam War and another from World War II, who had asked Kerry to return their medals to the military. Kerry said he stuffed them into his jacket. ... He said that when he prepared to throw his ribbons over the fence, he reached into his jacket and pulled out the medals from those two veterans. He said his own medals remained in safekeeping."[7]

Each service member receives both a ribbon and medal for each honor earned. The ribbon is worn on the Class A uniform (suit uniform) and the full medal stored or worn only on special occasions. Kerry is said to have thrown the former. On April 24, the day after this VVAW protest, over 500,000 demonstrators arrived in Washington to lobby Congress and to "stop the government" if President Nixon did not stop the war.

President Nixon comments on Kerry

In a secretly recorded White House conversation of April 28, President Nixon discussed Kerry with his counsel, Charles Colson. Nixon said, "Well, he is sort of a phony, isn't he?" Colson agreed, and mentioned that during the antiwar demonstrations that had just taken place, Kerry stayed at the home of a Georgetown socialite while the other protesters slept on The Mall. Colson opined, "He's politically ambitious and just looking for an issue. Yeah. He came back [from Vietnam] a hawk and became a dove when he saw the political opportunities." "Sure," said Nixon. "Well, anyway, keep the faith." In 1993, Colson sent a letter of apology to Kerry for his behavior at this time. He told a reporter for the Boston Globe, "I apologized for having tried to undermine him when he was head of the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. I think there were some stories that Nixon and I were trying to find ways to discredit him, and I am sorry for past feelings resulting from anything I have done."

Media attention

All of the events of 1971 thrust him into the national spotlight. On May 25, 1971 he appeared in a segment of 60 Minutes entitled "The First Hurrah," produced by Morley Safer. At one point Safer asked, "Do you want to be president of the United States?", to which Kerry responded, "Of the United States? No...That's such a crazy question when there are so many things to be done and I don't know whether I could do them." On June 20, 1971, Kerry appeared on The Dick Cavett Show to debate the White House-selected Navy veteran John O'Neill, who represented a group called Veterans For A Just Peace. And he was also parodied in the comic strip Doonesbury(created by fellow Yale alumnus Garry Trudeau). [8] In 1978 he cofounded Vietnam Veterans of America. He maintains a lifetime membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) organization.

War photos

Among the related attacks, one photo has been widely circulated to attempt to associate Kerry with Jane Fonda, the well-known actress and daughter of widely-loved actor Henry Fonda. Among many in the US, Fonda is "Hanoi Jane," a symbol of betrayal and a target of blame for the harsh treatment brought on US soldiers upon returning to the US. Her public anti-War activism, vocal and financial support helped bring the Anti-war movement to the forefront, and a quicker end to the Vietnam War on Communist terms. Her efforts were praised by the Communist Vietnamese government as recently as 2003 [9]. Despite repeated attempts by critics to link Kerry with Fonda's controversial positions, Kerry was never a close associate of hers.

Claimed by Kerry's political foes as "evidence" of Kerry's ties to Fonda, the photo is from the rally in Valley Forge and shows Kerry sitting in the audience several rows behind well-known actress Jane Fonda, who spoke at the event along with actor Donald Sutherland, and others. [10]. Fonda would embark on her highly controversial visit to North Vietnam two years later —an action that Kerry did not publicly support.

In 2004, a new photograph emerged, that showed Fonda standing by Kerry's side at an antiwar demonstration. It made the rounds on the internet, and was quickly found to be a hoax. [11] The event, known as the "Register for Peace Rally", took place on June 13, 1971 in Mineola on Long Island New York, with thousands in attendence, including former members of Congress such as Bella Abzug, Allard Lowenstein and Lester Wolff. Folk singer Peter Yarrow entertained the crowd. Kerry spoke at the rally, but Jane Fonda was not in fact present.

Law, politics and public service

File:Kerrypodium.jpg
Senator Kerry speaks at
Walden Woods in 1998.

He entered Boston College Law School in Newton, Massachusetts in September 1973, within days of the birth of his first daughter, Alexandra. He graduated in May of 1976, the same year his second daughter, Vanessa, was born.

Law practice and first election

He was the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, Massachusetts from 1977 to 1979.

In 1979 he opened a private law practice, and in the fall of 1981 began planning to run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts. During the campaign, he separated from his wife Julia, but it had no effect on the election; he won in November 1982, and served under Michael Dukakis until 1984. In January of that year, he announced his decision to run for the United States Senate as a Democrat, replacing Paul Tsongas. In his campaign he promised to mix liberal compassion with tight budget controls, and in the November election he won the seat, despite a nationwide landslide for the re-election of President Reagan. In his acceptance speech, Kerry asserted that his win meant that the people of Massachusetts "emphatically reject the politics of selfishness and the notion that women must be treated as second-class citizens."

Iran-Contra hearings

In April 1986, Kerry and Senator Christopher Dodd proposed that hearings be conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding charges of contra involvement in cocaine trafficking. Senator Richard Lugar, the Republican chairman of the committee, agreed to conduct the hearings. Meanwhile, Kerry's staff began their own investigations, and on October 14, 1986, issued a report which charged that Lieut. Col. Oliver North set up a private network involving the National Security Council and the CIA to deliver military equipment to the Nicaraguan rebels. Furthermore, the network was thought to be involved with shipping cocaine and marijuana to the United States, with profits from their selling to go pay for more arms for the insurgents. The investigation, they said, raised "serious questions about whether the United States has abided by the law in its handling of the contras over the past three years." The Kerry report generated a firestorm of controversy and lead to years of investigations, hearings, and widely-seen television proceedings, known collectively as the Iran-Contra affair.

Kerry's inquiry eventually widened to look not just at the contras, but at events in Cuba, Haiti, the Bahamas, Panama and Honduras. In 1989 he released a report that slammed the Reagan Administration for neglecting and undermining anti-drug efforts while pursing other objectives in foreign policy. The report noted that the government "turned a blind eye" in the '80s to the corruption and drug dealings of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega, who had assisted the contras. The report concluded that the CIA and the State Deparment knew that "individuals who provided support for the contras were involved in drug trafficking...and elements of the contras themselves knowingly received financial and material assistance from drug traffickers." While some critics attacked him as being a conspiracy theorist, a decade later the CIA inspector general released a pair of reports that affirmed Kerry's findings.

During the investigation of Noriega, Kerry's staff discovered that the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) had facilitated Noriega's drug trafficking and money laundering. This led to a separate inquiry into BCCI, and as a result, banking regulators finally shut down BCCI in 1991. In December 1992 Kerry and Senator Hank Brown (R-Colorado), released "The BCCI Affair," a report on the BCCI scandal. The report showed that the bank was crooked and was working with terrorists, including Abu Nidal. It blasted the Justice Department, the Treasury, US Customs, the Federal Reserve, high-level lobbyists, and the CIA. One of the Bush Administration figures criticized for his handling of BCCI was Robert Mueller who, as deputy attorney general, dragged his heels on the investigation because suspects were said to be friends and associates of the Bush family.

Intelligence committee and funding controversy

On February 3, 1994, a year after the 1993 terrorist bombing of the World Trade Center, Kerry proposed a deficit reduction bill that cut a wide range of programs, including many opposed by Democratic senators (S. 1826). One provision of this bill rescinded $1 billion from intelligence and froze spending budgets for two major intelligence programs, the National Foreign Intelligence Program and Tactical Intelligence. The bill did not make it to a vote, but the language was later submitted as S. Amdt. 1452 to H.R. 3759. (Text of S. 1826 (PDF file))

On September 29, 1995, Kerry proposed another deficit reduction bill (S. 1290), one provision of which would have cut military intelligence funding by $1.5 billion over five years. The bill could not gather any co-sponsors, which in itself is not unusual. The cuts were $300 million in each of the five years, or approximately 1% of the total military intelligence budget per year.(Text of S. 1290 (PDF file))

The Bush campaign has publicized the bills that Kerry sponsored (S. 1826 and S. 1290), claiming they are evidence Kerry does not have a solid record of support for intelligence agencies. These bills were both deficit reduction bills, though of course, like often happens in politics, primarily cutting programs that were not favored by Democrats. The bills were presented at a time when fiscal responsibility had a more prominent position on the agenda of the nation's leaders. Late in 1995, a budget crisis, preciptated by an ideological showdown between the Republican House of Representatives and the Democratic Clinton Administration, forced a government shutdown. Further, there had been reports of mismanagement and waste in intelligence programs, so it is not unusual that they became targets for reducing the federal budget deficit. Both bills also came in the aftermath of the fall of the Soviet Union, and there was widespread agreement that focus of intelligence spending needed to be shifted away from obsolete Cold War projects.

Kerry did co-sponsor two amendments (S.AMDT.2881 and 2882 to S.922) [12] [13] with Republican Arlen Specter, that tightened intelligence management and passed on a bipartisan voice vote (a process typical for uncontroversial measures). Both amendments addressed financial mismanagement at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), a military intelligence program. The program had accumulated more than $1.5 billion in unspent appropriations (which is, not coincidentally, the amount Kerry proposed cutting in S. 1290). In amendment 2881 appropriations for the NRO in "fiscal year 1996 are reduced to reflect the availability of funds appropriated prior to fiscal year 1996 that have accumulated in the carry forward accounts for that Office." (Senator Specter in Congressional Record discussion of 2881). Amendment 2882 did not cut intelligence spending per se but limited the amount of unspent money in that could be carried forward into fiscal year 1997.

Committee assignments

In the Senate, Kerry serves on the Committee on Foreign Relations, Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation and Committee on Finance. He was the chairman of the Committee on Small Business and Entrepreneurship from 2001 to 2003 and remains the ranking Democrat.

Kerry is also the ranking member of the Subcommittee on Oceans, Fisheries and the Environment and the Subcommittee on East Asian and Pacific Affairs. He also serves on the Subcommittee on Communications, Subcommittee on Transportation (both part of Commerce, Science and Transportation); the Subcommittee on Health Care, Subcommittee on International Trade and the Subcommittee on Social Security and Family Policy (Finance subcommittees); and on the Subcommittee on European Affairs and Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Peace Corps & Narcotics Affairs (Foreign Relations subcommittees).

Political chairmanship and presidential nomination

Kerry was the chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee from 1987 to 1989, and was reelected to the Senate in 1990, 1996 (despite the candidacy of popular Republican ex-Governor William Weld), and 2002. His current term will end on January 3 2009.

In 2003 and 2004, the Presidential campaign of John Kerry defeated Democratic rivals John Edwards, Howard Dean and Wesley Clark, all but clinching the Democratic nomination for Kerry. Kerry is running for President of the United States against incumbent George W. Bush.

Personal life

Teresa and John Kerry
Teresa and John Kerry
on the campaign trail.

John Kerry is 6-feet 4-inches (1.94 meters) tall and has been called the "Lanky Yankee." His oldest friends and family call him Johnny. Kerry speaks fluent French, having spent time in Switzerland and France with his diplomat father in his youth. He enjoys surfing, hockey and hunting. Kerry plays the bass, having recorded an album in 1961, with a band called The Electras. Between his first and second marriages he dated actresses Morgan Fairchild and Catherine Oxenberg. He was diagnosed with and cured of prostate cancer in 2003.

Kerry's favorite films are Giant and Casablanca. His favorite books are James Bradley's Flags of Our Fathers and Stephen Ambrose's Undaunted Courage. While campaigning in 2003, he read Clyde Prestowitz's Rogue Nation, and Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed.

Family

Kerry was married to Julia Thorne in 1970, and they had two children together: Alexandra Kerry (b. 1973), currently a film-school student in the Los Angeles area, and Vanessa Kerry (b. 1976), currently a student at Harvard Medical School. Vanessa has been active in her father's Presidential campaign.

Kerry and Thorne were separated in 1982 and divorced July 25, 1988. "After 14 years as a political wife," she wrote in A Change of Heart, her book about depression, "I associated politics only with anger, fear and loneliness." The marriage was formally annulled by the Roman Catholic Church in 1997. Thorne later married an architect named Richard Charlesworth, and moved to Bozeman, Montana, where she became active in local environmental groups such as the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.

Kerry and Teresa Simões-Ferreira Heinz, the widow of Pennsylvania Senator H. John Heinz III and formerly a United Nations translator, met at the UN-sponsored Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. They married on May 26, 1995 in Nantucket, Massachusetts. Kerry has three stepsons with Teresa: John Heinz Jr., André Heinz and Christopher Heinz (b. ~1973).

Today, the combined net worth of the Kerry-Heinz fortune is reported to be between $199 million and $839 million, making Kerry the wealthiest U.S. senator.[14] Sen. Kerry is wealthy in his own name, and is the beneficiary of at least four trusts inherited from Forbes family members, including his mother, who died in 2002.[15] Kerry has an older brother, Cameron Kerry, who is a litigator in Boston, and two sisters, Diane and Peggy.

External links and references

Official