John Kerry
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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 and Education
Kerry was born at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado, outside Denver, where his father, Richard Kerry, was undergoing treatment for tuberculosis. His father had been serving stateside in Alabama during World War II as a test pilot for the United States Army Air Corps. His family returned to their native state of Massachusetts shortly after John's birth. John was raised as a Roman Catholic, and as a child served as an altar boy.
Family background
Kerry's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in the town of Horni Benesov, Austria-Hungary (in what is now the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic), and grew up in Mödling (a small town near Vienna, Austria). He immigrated to the US arriving at Ellis Island with his wife Ida (née Loewe, who was born in Budapest, Hungary) and son Erich on May 18, 1905. In Illinois, Mildred was born (c. 1910) and in Massachusetts, Richard was born (c. 1916). The Kerry-Kohns were German-speaking Jews, but the family concealed its background upon migrating to the United States, and raised the Kerry children as Catholics. A Czech historian has shown that Ida is a descendant of Sinai Loew, one of three older brothers of Rabbi Judah Loew (1525-August 22, 1609), a famous Kabbalist, philosopher and talmudist known as the Maharal of Prague.
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. Frederick committed suicide on November 23, 1921, by gunshot to the head at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. His second son, Richard, was only six at the time.
Richard John Kerry, John's father, graduated from Yale University in 1937. He received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1940, and then joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. In his adult career, he worked for the Foreign Service and served as an attorney for the Bureau of United Nations Affairs in the U.S. Department of State. In 1937, he met Rosemary Forbes, a member of the wealthy Forbes family. One of eleven children, she studied to be a nurse, and served in the Red Cross in Paris, France during World War II. She would stand to inherit (in 2004 dollars) approximately $20 million to 40 million from her father and the Forbes family. The couple married in Montgomery, Ala., in January 1941.
John Kerry's maternal grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was born in Shanghai, China, where the Forbes family of China and Boston accumulated a fortune in the opium and China trade, and became an international businessman and attorney living in France and England.
John Kerry's maternal grandmother, Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, came from a family with deep roots in Massachusetts history, and was raised in Boston. Her grandfather was Robert Charles Winthrop, the conservative Whig Speaker of the House and a senator, and her ancestors include James Bowdoin, former governor of Maine, and John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Other notable figures in this branch of Kerry's family tree are Franklin Roosevelt, Jane Addams, Calvin Coolidge, and ironically, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush.
Childhood years
Kerry has said that his first memory is when, as a 3-year-old, he held his mother's hand while she cried as they walked through the broken glass and rubble of her childhood home in Saint-Briac, France. The memorable visit came just a short period after the United States had liberated Saint-Briac from the Germans (August 14, 1944). The family estate, known as Les Essarts, had been occupied as Nazi headquarters during the war, and when the Germans left Les Essarts, they bombed it and burnt it down.
The sprawling estate was rebuilt in 1954. Kerry and his parents would often spend the summer holidays there. Kerry occupied his time there racing his cousins on bicycles and challenging relatives to games of kick the can. During his summers there, he became good friends with his first cousin Brice Lalonde, a future Socialist and Green Party leader in France who ran for president of France in 1981.
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 attending the boarding school, Kerry saw the film Scaramouche, which became his favorite movie. He later would name his powerboat after its hero.
Boarding school
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. There he met and befriended Richard Pershing, grandson of the famed U.S. Gen. John Joseph Pershing.
The following year, he enrolled at St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, and graduated from there in 1962. His father's Foreign Service salary did not earn enough to pay the school's tuition. Kerry's childless great-aunt, Clara Winthrop, then very much advanced in age, voluntarily covered the costs. At St. Paul's, Kerry felt like an outsider because he was a Catholic and liberal while most of his fellow students were Republican Episcopalians.
Despite having difficulty fitting in, he made friends and developed his interests. He learned skills in public speaking and he became deeply interested in politics. In his free time, he enjoyed ice hockey and lacrosse, which he played on teams captained by classmate Robert S. Mueller III, the current director of the FBI. Kerry 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; the Society still exists there. In November of 1960, Kerry gave his first political speech, in favor of John F. Kennedy's election to the White House.
While living in the U.S., Kerry spent several summers at the Forbes family's estates on Naushon Island off Cape Cod.
Encounters with President Kennedy
In 1962, Kerry volunteered to work for Ted Kennedy's first senatorial campaign. Kerry was known to broadcast the words "Kennedy for Senate" from a loudspeaker in his Volkswagen Beetle, adding the words "And Kerry for dogcatcher!" That summer, 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, where he majored in political science, graduating with a bachelor's degree 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.
During the summer of 1963, Kerry and some classmates drove from Paris to Austria, where they visited an old ski instructor of Kerry's. 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 Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park.
During his time at Yale, Kerry played soccer, hockey and lacrosse. He was also on the fencing team and took flying lessons.
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.
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. According to 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'?"
Military Service
First tour of duty
After an application for a twelve month deferment to study in Paris was denied, Kerry joined the United States Navy on February 18, 1966. 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 1967 he began his first tour of duty, serving as a Lieutenant (Junior Grade) 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 Gulf of Tonkin, but was far removed from combat. Kerry had no contact with the enemy during that time. His ship returned to port in Long Beach, California on June 6, 1968.
Second tour of duty
Initially, Kerry had hoped to keep a relatively safe distance from most of the fighting by obtaining an assignment as commander of a Swift Boat. He commanded his Swift Boat Patrol Craft Fast-94 during several operations, including Operation Sea Lords (raids on the NLF-controlled Cua Long River in the Mekong Delta near the Cà Mau province), and proved an aggressive commander.
Kerry lost five friends in war, including Pershing, who was killed in action on February 17, 1968. The death had a devastating impact on Kerry, who expressed his grief in a letter to his parents.
Combat medals
Kerry was awarded his first Purple Heart for an injury incurred during his first combat experience (on December 2, 1968). He was treated for a small piece of shrapnel in his arm and he immediately returned to duty. On February 20, 1969, he earned a second Purple Heart when his left thigh was hit with shrapnel and, again, he was treated and returned to duty. Eight days later, on February 28, 1969, Kerry's boat was hit by a B-40 rocket. After beaching his boat, Kerry chased down and killed a wounded National Liberation Front guerilla, 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. Various informed persons have suggested that rather than be awared with a medal for this action, Kerry should have been reprimanded for endagering his crew for beaching his boat. 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. The last of his three injuries included a bruised arm and shrapnel in his posterior which, according to Kerry, cost him about two days of active service.
Due to questions regarding the nature of his wounds, the Kerry Campaign released his military records. These show second citations for a Silver Star and a Bronze Star were issued by John F. Lehman, who was Secretary of the Navy eleven years after Kerry's service.
However, it is a little know fact that John Kerry's former commander, Grant Hibbard (Kerry Purple Heart in Dispute) disputes Kerry's account of how he received his 1st Purple Heart. According to Hibbard, the evidence strongly suggest that Kerry exaggerated the source and extent of a so-called "injury". Whether Kerry did this in order to cheat on his military record, or simply because he was young and ignorant of the guidelines for genuinely earning a Purple Heart award, remains unclear.
Return from Vietnam
Within a week of his receiving his third purple heart, Kerry requested reassignment to the U.S. He was entitled to an early departure from Vietnam, subject to approval by the Bureau of Naval Personnel, according to then current regulations 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."
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." Kerry ended his tour of duty in Vietnam in 1969 after 11 months in-country. He remained on active duty for one more year with the Military Sea Transportation Service, Atlantic based in Brooklyn, N.Y. All told, he was on active duty for four years, from 1966 until 1970. He was transferred to the U.S. Naval Reserve in 1970. There is no documentation that he fulfilled his active Reserve obligations while engaged in his anti-war activities. Transferred to the Standby (inactive) Reserve in 1972, he then no longer was required to participate in Reserve activities. He received his honorable discharge in 1978.
Anti-war Activism
Kerry returned to America in 1969. In 1968, Kerry's first cousin, Lalonde, became president of the National Student's Union at the Sorbonne, and had actively participated in the May 1968 student uprisings in France, which showed all of Europe (and the U.S.) the power of student protest and confrontation. Peggy Kerry, his sister, was also active in anti-war activities then.
He was involved in anti-war activities while on active duty as an admiral's aide in Brooklyn. Arranged by his sister, in October 1969 he spent two days flying Ted Kennedy's advisor Adam Walinsky to present antiwar speeches. The Boston Globe says "the experience helped convince him that he wanted to become a public leader of the antiwar movement." In November he requested release from active duty so he could campaign for a Congressional seat in the House.
He was transferred from active duty to the Naval Reserve (inactive) on January 3, 1970, so he could fulfill his Ready Reserve obligations. Within three months he lost the caucus to Father Robert F. Drinan, and later became manager of his campaign.
On May 7, 1970, he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show for the first time, to speak about his opposition to the United States' involvement in the Vietnam. Just a few weeks later, May 23, 1970, he married Julia Thorne, his girlfriend of six years, at a lavish ceremony attended by approximately 250 guests in Bay Shore, New York. After honeymooning in Jamaica he met with Hanoi peace talk representatives in Paris. Kerry then 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 1970, Kerry joined the newly formed Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW), where he became a prominent spokesman and member of the Executive Committee, 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, 1971. The organizers called the protest "a limited incursion into the country of Congress."
On April 19, a procession of about 1,100 veterans moved across the Lincoln Memorial Bridge to Arlington Cemetery, led by the Gold Star Mothers who lost their sons in the war. There, on the small plot of grass outside the cemetery beneath the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the grave of President Kennedy, Reverend Jackson Day led a brief ceremony for the war dead. 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 speeches.
Testimony before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee
Kerry spoke before the U.S. Senate Armed Services Committee. He informed the committee about the VVAW's Winter Soldier Investigation, an event which took place from January 31 to February 2, 1971 in Detroit, Michigan. That event was presented as having over 150 honorably discharged veterans who testified to war crimes supposedly committed in Southeast Asia during the war. Questions had already been raised by the Detroit Star about the testimony, and an investigation found that claimed events could not be confirmed, some participants were not Vietnam veterans, some were not honorably discharged, some were impostors. Although Kerry interviewed the participants before the meetings, it is not known when he learned about the problems with the testimony.
The medal-tossing incident
The following day, April 23, Kerry and other veterans threw medals and ribbons over a fence at the U.S. 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. Kerry later said that he “threw some medals back that belonged to some folks who asked me to throw them back for them."
President Nixon comments on Kerry
In a secretly recorded White House conversation of April 28, 1971, 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 National 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 the following months, The FBI engaged in surveillance of Kerry and his activities with the VVAW. They followed him, recorded the content of his speeches, took photographs, and reported their findings to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and president Nixon. In May of 1972, the FBI stopped monitoring his activities, stating in a final memorandum that "It should be noted that a review of the subject's file reveals nothing whatsoever to link subject with any violent type activity... Thus, considering the subject's apparently legitimate involvement in politics, it is recommended that no further investigation be conducted regarding subject until such time as it is warranted."
In 1993, Colson sent a letter of apology to Kerry for his and Nixon's behavior against him in the 1970s.
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," with Morley Safer.
In the Washington Star on June 6, 1971, Kerry is quoted: "We established an American presence in most cases by showing the flag and firing at sampans and villages along the banks. Those were our instructions, but they seemed so out of line that we finally began to go ashore, against our orders, and investigate the villages that were supposed to be our targets. We discovered we were butchering a lot of innocent people, and morale became so low among the officers on those 'swift boats' that we were called back to Saigon for special instructions from Gen. Abrams. He told us we were doing the right thing. He said our efforts would help win the war in the long run. That's when I realized I could never remain silent about the realities of the war in Vietnam."
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. He was also parodied in the comic strip Doonesbury
In 1978 he co-founded Vietnam Veterans of America.
He maintains a lifetime membership in the Veterans of Foreign Wars (VFW) organization.
Vietnam War era photos
Among the related attacks, one photo WAS widely circulated to attempt to associate Kerry with Jane Fonda, a symbol to some of betrayal and a target of blame for the harsh treatment brought on U.S. soldiers upon returning stateside.
Claimed by Kerry's political foes as evidence of Kerry's ties to Fonda, the photo is from the rally in Valley Forge, although their sitting several rows apart belies the involvement in both with the VVAW event. Both were among eight speakers at a VVAW rally in Valley Forge, and Kerry was involved in organizing the rally. VVAW records show that four days later there were arrangements for her to tour and raise funds. This was before Fonda's famous visit to Vietnam, and after Kerry's first meeting with Hanoi representatives.
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. The event, known as the Register for Peace Rally, took place on June 13, 1971, in Mineola, New York, with thousands in attendance. Kerry spoke at the rally, but Jane Fonda was not in fact present.
In attempts to continue the association of Kerry with Fonda, Rep. Sam Johnson and other Republicans referred to Kerry as Hanoi John in the US House of Representatives, although chamber rules do not permit personal attacks on senators.
Resignation from VVAW
From November 12 to 15, 1971, a VVAW meeting was held in Kansas City, Missouri, in which a member proposed that they escalate their tactics and assassinate pro-war politicians. The statement was immediately shouted down by a disgusted majority. However, some groups use this story to paint VVAW as a violent group. VVAW did decide to meet with North Vietnamese leaders, an action Kerry thought was disastrous for the appearance of the group.
Over the years, Kerry said that he did not remember attending the meeting in Kansas City, stating that he retired from the organization at the St. Louis meeting in July 1971. However, there are conflicting accounts, including newspaper articles, FBI reports, and witnesses who have different recollections.
Law, Politics, Public Service
Walden Woods in 1998.
John Kerry entered Boston College Law School in Newton, Mass., in September 1973, within days of the birth of his first daughter, Alexandra. He graduated in May 1976, the same year his second daughter, Vanessa, was born. Also in 1976, he and friend K. Dun Gifford opened a cookie and muffin shop called Kilvert & Forbes in Boston’s Quincy Market area.
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 his campaign 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 1984, Kerry announced his decision to again run for Congress. This time he set his sights on the United States Senate, running as a Democrat to replace Paul Tsongas. In his campaign he promised to mix liberal compassion with tight budget controls. In the November election he won the seat, despite a nationwide landslide for the re-election of Republican president Ronald 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 (D-Conn.) proposed that hearings be conducted by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee regarding charges of Contra involvement in cocaine trafficking. Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.), the Republican chairman of the committee, agreed to conduct the hearings. Meanwhile, Kerry's staff began their own investigations, and on October 14 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 sales going to pay for more arms for the insurgents. The investigation, the report 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 1980s 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 had known 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 Pakistan-based 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 Sen. Hank Brown (R-Colo.), 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 U.S. Department of Justice, the U.S. Department of the Treasury, the U.S. Customs Service, the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States, high-level lobbyists, and the Central Intelligence Agency. One of the Bush administration figures criticized for his handling of BCCI was Robert Mueller who, as deputy attorney general, had dragged his heels on the investigation.
Gun Politics
As a senator, Kerry has supported various gun control regulatory measures including:
- The Brady Bill and mandatory background checks
- Legislation to close the so-called "gun show loophole"
- Ban on several types of semi-automatic rifles known as the Assault weapons ban
- Mandatory gun locks.
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-Gov. 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 Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), ex-Vermont Gov. Howard Dean and retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark, all but clinching the Democratic nomination for Kerry. Kerry is running for President of the United States against incumbent George W. Bush.
Home Life and Interests
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. He speaks fluent French, having spent time in Switzerland and France with his family as a young man. He enjoys surfing, hockey, hunting, and playing the bass.
Kerry's favorite films are Giant and Casablanca. His favorite books are said to be 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.
In 2003, he was diagnosed with and cured of prostate cancer.
Family
Kerry was married to Julia Thorne in 1970, and they had two children together: Alexandra Kerry (b. 1973), who graduated in June 2004 from a film-school in the Los Angeles area, and Vanessa Kerry (b. 1976), a graduate of Phillips Academy like her grandfather, Yale University, and 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, Mont., where she became active in local environmental groups such as the Greater Yellowstone Coalition.
Between his first and second marriages he dated actresses Morgan Fairchild and Catherine Oxenberg.
Kerry and Teresa Simões-Ferreira Heinz, the widow of Pennsylvania Sen. H. John Heinz III (R-Pa.) and formerly a United Nations translator, met at the U.N.-sponsored Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro in 1992. They married on May 26, 1995, in Nantucket, Mass. Teresa has three sons from her previous marriage: John Heinz Jr., André Heinz, and Christopher Heinz (b. ~1973).
Today, the combined net worth of the Kerry-Heinz fortune is estimated to be around $1 billion, making Kerry the wealthiest U.S. senator. 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.
Kerry has an older brother, Cameron Kerry, who is a litigator in Boston, and two sisters, Diane and Peggy.
External links and references
Official
Print media
- Klein, Joe, "The Long War of John Kerry: Can a Massachusetts Brahmin become President?," The New Yorker, December 2, 2002.
- Kranish, Michael, "John Kerry: Candidate in the making," Boston Globe, June 15, 2003.
- Gibbs, Nancy and Douglas Waller, "What Kind of President Would Kerry Be?," TIME Magazine, February 9, 2004.
Online media
- "Profile: John Kerry". BBC News. January 20, 2004.
- "Senator John Forbes Kerry". Project Vote Smart. 2002-2004.
- "Senate Elections, John Kerry (1997-2002)". OpenSecrets.org.
- John Kerry's "Winter Soldier" testimony to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations in 1971. (PDF file)
- The BCCI Affair, A Report to the Committee on Foreign Relations, United States Senate, by Senator John Kerry and Senator Hank Brown, December 1992
- Kaplan, Fred, "John Kerry's Defense Defense - Setting his voting record straight." Slate, MSN. February 25, 2004.
Information
- Reitwiesner, William Addams, "The Ancestors of Sen. John Forbes Kerry".
- wikisource: Statement on behalf of Vietnam Veterans Against the War - April 1971.
- wikisource: John Kerry's letter to his parents about Richard Pershing's death - 1968
- John Kerry Campaign Organization Wiki
- John Kerry FBI Files - CIA Files - Military Records
- Voting history for Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts in the 108th Congress
Further reading
- Kerry, John and Vietnam Veterans Against the War, The New Soldier, MacMillan Publishing Company, 1971. ASIN 002073610X
- Thorne, Julia and Larry Rothstein, You Are Not Alone: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey Through Depression, HarperCollins, 1993. ISBN 0060969776
- Kerry, John, The New War: The Web of Crime That Threatens America's Security, Simon & Schuster, 1997. ISBN 0684818159
- Smith, Gene, Until the Last Trumpet Sounds: The Life of General of the Armies John J. Pershing, John Wiley & Sons, 1999. ISBN 0471350648 (For information on Kerry's closest friends at Yale, class of 1966.)
- Kerry, John, A Call to Service: My Vision for a Better America, Viking Press, 2003. ISBN 0670032603
- Brinkley, Douglas, Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War, William Morrow & Company, 2004. ISBN 0060565233