The Making Of John Kerry

If you were looking to capture the essence of John Kerry’s relationship with his father, it’s hard to beat the story of how he learned to sail. Forget about going out on the waters off Cape Cod and having fun and bonding. This was a test of courage and character, in which Richard Kerry would blindfold his 12-year-old son John and leave it to him to find the way home through fog and turbulent seas.

At least, that’s how the legend goes, being such a handy window on the life of the boy who was left to sink or swim as he was tossed between boarding schools and across time zones by his hard-driven diplomat father. Perfect story, admits Kerry, except that it’s not exactly true. “There is so much mythology out there,” Kerry says, with evident frustration. “Let’s clear this one up.” Yes, his father was an austere man, hard to please and even harder to know. But sailing was one of the things John and his father could share, like skiing, fishing, piloting a plane. Richard was all about mastery. It was not enough to guide the boat by sight around the rocks and into the harbor; the goal was to be able to navigate entirely by the charts and compass. It was not young John who was “blindfolded” that day in the boat, but Richard; he sat covered by a tarp reading his maps and instruments by flashlight and calling out a course for John, at the helm, to follow. Every now and then he offered to switch places, and John guided the vessel by what sailors call dead reckoning.

It is tempting to mine the political metaphor here, since Kerry, the serious, cerebral Senator, is trying to steer a course to victory in a race against a President who is so often guided by his instincts. But that’s not why Kerry seems so intent in an interview with TIME on setting the record straight about the whole blindfolded-sailing anecdote. Talk to Kerry about his childhood and he quickly goes on defense, making a point of describing his family as very normal and fun loving. When informed how consistently his friends and siblings described him as a serious kid (“not just serious; very serious,” says brother Cameron), Kerry’s features head in two directions: his lips smile but his brow knits, and he immediately pushes back. Rather than spin the quality into a virtue for anyone running for President, particularly in these serious times, Kerry makes himself out to be Huck Finn, recounts his childhood larks and prep school shenanigans and love of “vegging out” during college.

Maybe that’s because some of the most memorable story lines emerging from profiles and biographies and especially G.O.P. ads–the tales of his attending a Swiss boarding school, teaching his parakeet to speak French, allegedly flaunting his initials, J.F.K., as a politically precocious and impossibly earnest high school student–do not serve him well, especially in a race against a candidate like George W. Bush. Voters know where Bush comes from, in a way few generations have known about their Presidents. They knew the brand before they knew the man himself, got to watch his family in the White House for 12 years and on the public stage for many more. They are reminded where W. is from every time he opens his mouth. And in any case, Bush’s biography is not likely to matter as much this time around; it’s his presidency on which he will be judged. But the public is still getting to know John Kerry and may be surprised by his story.

*BORN TO RULE?

Kerry offers his bio as the story of a devoted family in which the children, by virtue of their father’s foreign-service career, got to explore other cultures and acquire early on a commitment to serious public service. His detractors tell the story of an effete snob who “looks French” and can’t possibly understand the concerns of average Americans. An ad by the conservative group Citizens United mocked Kerry for his $75 haircuts and million-dollar yacht and closed on this note: “Another rich, liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he’s a ‘man of the people’ … Priceless.”

There is some irony in Republicans using Kerry’s story against him, since in some ways it so closely matches Bush’s. Both Bush and Kerry were the first sons of blue-blooded families: Bush is a 13th cousin, once removed, of the Queen of England; Kerry descends from John Winthrop, the founder of Massachusetts. Both attended elite Eastern boarding schools like their fathers, moved on to Yale two years apart and as juniors were tapped for its most exclusive secret society, Skull and Bones.

But the image of Kerry as a Boston Brahmin misses one point; he managed to have a privileged upbringing without the wealth that usually goes with it. From the outside he was an American prince, but within his rarefied world, he was actually one of the poor kids. “John was never a part of the Eastern elite, if you will, whatever that means,” says David Thorne, a close friend going back to Yale days. “He was not in demeanor or otherwise the product of a rich family.” Thorne, the product of a very rich family, knows the difference.

“Most people have not gotten it right yet,” Kerry told TIME when asked about his formative years. “They seem overly focused on [my] being dropped off at boarding school. I keep reading ‘rootless.’ I could not disagree more. I have spectacular roots, a spectacular sense of family and place.” It’s true that many stories about Kerry’s early years focus on their nomadic quality, maybe because he had gone to seven schools on two continents by the time he was in ninth grade. And as for an acute sense of family, Kerry did not know the whole story of his father’s family until he learned it in early 2003 from the Boston Globe, whose staff has been the most avid archaeologists of Kerry’s past.

Kerry’s mother Rosemary Forbes was descended on her mother’s side from Governor Winthrop. On her father’s side, the Forbes shipping clan’s fortune allowed the family to collect mansions all over the world. But Rosemary was one of 11 kids, which meant the money didn’t stretch too far across her generation. John Kerry got to spend time at the family estate in France, but the reason he and his siblings could attend the fancy schools they did was that his great-aunt Clara had no children of her own and paid their way.

His father’s was a more typical American tale. Fritz Kohn, a Jewish manager of a shoe factory in Austria, changed his name to Frederick Kerry, converted to Catholicism and crossed the ocean in 1905 with his Hungarian wife Ida, also originally a Jew. They ultimately settled in Brookline, Mass., where Frederick started a successful shoe business. By the time their son Richard was born in 1915, Frederick had done well enough to buy a car and a nice house and take his family on vacation to Europe. But over the next few years, the business may have faltered, and the debts mounted. On Nov. 23, 1921, Frederick wrote his wife a note, went to Boston’s Copley Plaza Hotel, ducked into the men’s room and shot himself in the head.

Richard Kerry, John’s father, was 6 years old at the time of his father’s suicide. He would also lose a sister, to cancer, and that crush of grief seems to have hardened his personality enough that his children would have a hard time penetrating it years later. “He didn’t share emotions easily,” Kerry says. The Kerry kids never knew the full story of their grandfather until the Boston Globe published its account last year. “I knew he committed suicide, but I never knew the how or why. I never really asked. I sort of figured overdose.” Neither did Kerry know that his grandfather was a Jewish convert to Catholicism. “I was not aware of the name change. And obviously, I wish my mother and father were alive to ask them.” Only in his father’s last years did Kerry talk to him a bit about the past. “I think my dad was really upset about the loss of not only his father, but ultimately his sister, and I think it had a lot of impact on him. Just a sadness. I sensed there was a big hole.”

Richard Kerry nonetheless did well by any standard, attending Andover and Yale and then Harvard Law School. He met Rosemary in the summer of 1938, when he was in Europe taking a sculpture class. She was planning to become a nurse; he was heading into the Army Air Corps to become a test pilot. John Kerry likes to tell the story of his brave mother, trapped in France as the Nazis overran the country. “She was working in Paris as a nurse taking care of refugees, wounded, right up until the last day when the Germans came in,” he told TIME. “She escaped on a bicycle with her sister and foraged and fled her way to Portugal and got on a ship to come over here.” She and Richard were married in 1941, and they had a daughter Margaret (Peggy). Richard’s test-pilot career soon ended when he came down with tuberculosis. He was sent to Colorado in hopes that the air there would speed his recovery, and that is how John Forbes Kerry came to be born in Denver in December 1943.

The truth about Kerry’s roots–that they are as much new striving immigrant as Old Yankee aristocracy–may help explain why he didn’t grow up steering by the same stars as many sons of privilege. As a kid, he wore his ambitions on his sleeve, reflecting the instincts of his refugee grandparents but violating the code of languid grace sanctified by Eastern aristocracy.

*ROOTS AND WINGS

Kerry has a colorful personal story, but Bush possesses a clear one, and he never misses a chance to turn it to advantage. Being a Texan is a big part of being George W. Bush. His father could extol pork rinds and have a Houston mailbox, but few people really thought of him as anything but a Connecticut Yankee. Though W. was born in Connecticut while his father was at Yale, he grew up in Midland, Texas, a dusty town of new wealth and old values, lots of bikes and baseball and frog hunting and friends for life. As a result he has much more twang and sand and sky in him. For years, people could ask him the difference between himself and his father, and he offered just a one-word answer: “Midland.”

Kerry cannot be so easily situated in the public mind. He may be the Senator from Massachusetts, but he is not from Massachusetts. He is not really from anywhere; his father’s legal and diplomatic career meant that the family moved every few years. Now he talks about deep roots nourished through summers on Cape Cod with all the various cousins, and says people have made too much of the moving around–even though he famously had to shop for a congressional district the first time he ran for public office, in 1972, because he didn’t really have a hometown.

If any place comes close, it is a rural town outside Boston called Millis, where the Kerrys settled after the war. They bought a big, pretty house with six bedrooms, multiple fireplaces and a pond where John and his sister Peggy played. “He was a very adventurous, outdoorsy person,” says Peggy, who is two years older. “There was a farm next door, and John used to like to play there and in the woods.” Sister Diana was born in 1947, then brother Cam in 1950. That year the rural idyll was interrupted, when John was 7 and the family moved to Washington so that Richard could work in the office of the general counsel of the Navy. “We went to a school where quite a few kids were sons and daughters of Congressmen,” says Peggy. “We became aware of the political environment early.” Peggy and John went door to door in 1952, selling ADLAI STEVENSON FOR PRESIDENT buttons. And they got their first taste of dinner-table conversation that revolved around policy, diplomacy and the cares of the world, a language in which John would become fluent, if for no other reason than it was one he and his father could speak to each other.

In 1954 the family moved again, to Berlin, where as the legal adviser to the U.S. mission, Richard got a longed-for chance to be part of history being made. And John got his first taste of another world. Traveling through communist East Germany, “I actually noticed a very perceptible difference–the darkness, the lack of automobiles, the dark clothes. It just seemed bleak. And I sensed the foreboding unwelcomeness to it.” One day he went so far as to ride his bike through Checkpoint Charlie and into East Berlin to look around and visit Hitler’s bunker. When Richard realized where his son had gone, John recalls, “My dad was not thrilled. He explained to me that I could have [caused] an international incident. I think he took my passport. I think I got grounded–passport grounded.”

And soon he got sent away. Feeling that English boarding schools were too stuffy, Rosemary and Richard sent John to the Institut Montana Zugerberg near Zurich, a strict place with only a handful of English-speaking boys. “At first I was homesick as hell,” Kerry says. Raised a Catholic, Kerry says he found comfort and company in church, becoming quite religious and serving as an altar boy. “I remember him writing me to remember to say my prayers,” Peggy recalls. Cam, on the other hand, recalls how John learned to swear in Italian. “That part I do remember. Him coming back from vacation and spouting ‘Spaccare la faccia, porco!'” Cam says with a laugh. The phrase roughly translates as “Shove it in your face, pig” and was “probably one of the milder things he learned,” says Cam. “I had to learn Italian to get food at the table,” John recalls. “I could make a sailor blush in Italian, no question about it.”

Having a mother who grew up in Europe and a father who worked to reshape it, going to school abroad and learning French, Italian and German meant that Kerry developed a comfort with other cultures and other points of view that abides to this day. He’s an affirmed multilateralist and proud regular at the yearly World Economic Forum in Davos, and he is married to a woman–Teresa–who speaks even more languages than he does. When he and his brother are on a conference call and want to talk privately, they have been known to break into French. But when he tried to flaunt his credentials as a favorite of foreign leaders and a better bet to navigate the now hostile waters of world opinion, the Republicans pounced, suggesting that he is some kind of Eurosnob–forcing Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, to remind people that he had fought for his country and has served it as a public official for most of his adult life.

So at times Kerry and his defenders find themselves reduced to insisting that he had an all-American childhood. “Two years when you’re 11 or 12 does not a Swiss education make,” says sister Diana tartly. Kerry carefully walks a line between praising his parents for the breadth of his upbringing and acknowledging the price he paid for it. Yes, he admits, 12 years old is young for a child to be sent to boarding school in a foreign country. “I would not do that–I did not do that to my children,” he says. “But it taught you a lot of independence. It taught you how to get through, I guess is the word.”

That lesson left Kerry with an aura of self-sufficiency–critics would say self-centeredness–that was apparent by the time he was back in the U.S. for prep school and that would shape his choices for years to come: to be an aggressive overachiever in a high school where most kids worked hard at appearing not to work hard, to enlist in a war his father thought was misguided, to protest it when he returned and to build a political career much more as a soloist investigating wrongdoing than as a legislator who knew how to play nice with other Senators and get his bills passed in the process. Even as a campaigner, Kerry sometimes seems all alone, towering above the crowd, speaking in a deadly Washington dialect. That was one reason the arrival of his old Vietnam brothers on the stage helped turn around his fortunes on the way to the Democratic nomination. His Vietnam comrades, like the tight circle of friends he was finally able to form at prep school and college, ultimately gave Kerry a sense of belonging in ways that his earliest years had not.

*MAKING FRIENDS …

One day in 1959, Danny Barbiero, a student at the exclusive St. Paul’s School (S.P.S.) in Concord, N.H., dropped by the apartment of his housemaster, the Rev. John Walker. Walker was known among the students for being sensitive and interested in everything, and Barbiero liked to swing by to talk about music. That day, another student was visiting as well. “This is Johnny Kerry,” Walker said as he introduced Barbiero. “He’s worried because he thinks people don’t like him.”

Barbiero, an Italian-American kid from Long Island, N.Y., could tell that Kerry was cut from a different cloth than most of their Waspy classmates–which is why they became fast friends. “I liked his serious nature. I liked that he could have his feelings hurt,” Barbiero says. “People were hard at St. Paul’s. The whole thing was to be casual and sarcastic and nonchalant. Johnny wasn’t like that at all. He wasn’t sarcastic or mean. He had no use for cliques. He had a very high sense of social fairness.”

Bush and Kerry had very different experiences in their respective prep schools. Each arrived as an outsider–Bush as a cocky Texan with an attitude, Kerry as a Catholic in a proudly Episcopal redoubt, a passionate Kennedy Democrat among generally apathetic Republicans. Whereas Kerry (like Bush’s father) was a star athlete, playing ice hockey and soccer, Bush founded the stickball league at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the one sport designed to be played purely for the fun of it and even by the uncoordinated kids. Kerry established a political debating society; Bush founded a mock political party called the Non-Competitors. Where Kerry is universally described as ultraserious, Bush was a clown, able to do the hard work of lifting spirits, rallying a crowd as an Andover cheerleader, displaying a wicked gift for telling stories and dispensing nicknames. Kerry ultimately found happiness at St. Paul’s by gathering a small group of close and like-minded friends. By the time he was a senior, Bush came in second in the vote for big man on campus, and it wasn’t by being a genius or a jock; it was by force of personality and his gift for making friends.

Kerry’s friends from St. Paul’s note many ways in which he was a conspicuous outsider. He was disgusted by the classmate who, tired of one not very wealthy kid’s enormous pride in his record collection, went into town and bought out the local record store. “A lot of guys thought it was funny,” Barbiero says, “but John was really upset that somebody would do that.” While his pedigree was plenty aristocratic, Kerry didn’t have the money to go with it. He didn’t jet to Gstaad for Christmas or fly the private jet to Paris for a long weekend. In fact, he worked summers loading trucks as a Teamster at First National Stores, then one of the Northeast’s leading grocery chains. “You have to understand that atmosphere,” Barbiero says. “These were kids who were raised to believe that they came from the ruling class. But John was Catholic. He was also not from wealth. He never had money in his pocket. I joke that he still owes me money. He never had cash, and that was a very unusual thing for a student at S.P.S. He also had a European kind of flair. He dressed a little differently, liked to wear French cuffs. He was a very hard worker at everything. He played sports hard. He was very competitive, and it wasn’t a cool thing to be competitive at S.P.S. You didn’t have to be competitive–you had a birthright.”

Kerry compensated by almost forcing his way into prominence at the school. Having shot up in size after arriving at St. Paul’s–growing “something like six inches in six months,” brother Cam remembers–Kerry used his height to his advantage in sports, especially hockey. He acted in plays, played bass in a band and joined as many other clubs and organizations as he could. By his senior year, Kerry was much more comfortable than in his first couple of years. “Like at any school, you find your friends, and I did,” he says. “And it was a different kind of group. It was more of a group who was interested in ideas. We talked more seriously about what was going on.”

“We used to spend long times after the younger boys had gone to bed talking about the state of the world,” recalls his English teacher Herb Church. “I was always impressed with his maturity.” But people who remember what he was like back then suggest that there was already a difference between the public Kerry, who was intent on making an impression, winning the debate, and the private one, who was much more raw and passionate and genuine. “I tease him that he always had a senatorial tone,” Barbiero says. “He’s not that way, really. He’s funny and a great guy to be with. He just comes across that way sometimes.”

Two pieces of writing from that time reveal the divide. One was an essay Kerry wrote for the school magazine, Horae Scholasticae, titled, “In Support of Federal Aid to Education.” The 800 words read like glue, right up to the conclusion: “The problem stretches far and wide and wherever it goes it draws in trying circumstances and more problems.” The other piece was a poem Kerry wrote for the same magazine in May 1962 about, of all things, France’s President Charles de Gaulle, and the decline of the French empire. “A poem? I wrote a poem?” he asked TIME, upon being reminded of that effort, at once pretentious and subtle.

The fifth Republic stands weak and dismayed By her failure; she lives devoid of love Except by the men whose debt has been paid …”

The poem ends:

Beyond all terror, destiny in hand, Over rack and ruin, over black peaks Of rebellion, blood and communist brand, Rules a man whom no Algerian dares Blaspheme or murder–except in his prayers.

It is hard to imagine one boy writing both pieces: the education essay is pinched, passive and overloaded with empty phrases meant to lend it gravitas. The poem, while overwrought, is vivid and compelling, much like Kerry’s letters and journals from Vietnam. It’s as if there is a person inside Kerry with real, not calculated passion who has been buried by his cautious, public self.

*POLITICS ALL THE TIME

It’s 1962, and Kerry is finally in his element. “He loved Yale from the first day we were there,” says Barbiero, who also enrolled at Yale. Barbiero recalls walking around campus the first week and listening to Kerry identify the buildings and statues, the lore, the campus legends. “He knew the history of the place already. He just seemed to know where he was, where he was in history, and he wanted to be a part of it.” Most important, says Barbiero, Yale was liberating for Kerry. “He became more comfortable with who he was,” says his friend.

And he was fresh off a once-in-a-lifetime kind of summer. He had been volunteering on Edward Kennedy’s Senate campaign and dating a girl named Janet Auchincloss, who happened to be the half sister of First Lady Jackie Kennedy. It was on a visit to see Auchincloss at Hammersmith Farm in Newport, R.I., that Kerry got to meet President Kennedy, his idol, first at a house party, and later out sailing together to watch the America’s Cup.

When Kennedy came to the Yale campus that spring to give a speech, Kerry urged his buddies to go. “That was my first experience with how important all this stuff was to John,” says David Thorne, who would become Kerry’s close friend, his soccer teammate and eventually his brother-in-law. “He said, ‘We have to go. We have to go cheer the President.'” People from that era at Yale say that even before Kerry became president of the political union and a champion college debater, they knew he would run for President one day. A classmate who would not count himself a fan goes so far as to say he remembers attending a party Kerry threw in his freshman dorm and seeing a sign on the door: JFK IN 64; JFK IN 96.

“Impossible,” Kerry says flatly, when asked if he remembered any such thing. “I think that’s mythology. I mean, it’s just one of those things that I keep hearing about or reading about later that is just, you know, mischievous to say the least.” Barbiero acknowledges that other kids viewed Kerry’s ambition with some disdain. The “problem,” says Barbiero, is that Kerry “is so passionate about the issues he believes in. He has a larger share [of passion] than most, and he acts on it. That can turn some people off. People think, ‘Who is this guy? Who does he think he is?'” Kerry’s admiring biographer, Douglas Brinkley, attributes the likability gap to a “cult of envy” that has persisted throughout Kerry’s career.

There is some dispute about whether and where Bush and Kerry crossed paths during the years they overlapped at Yale. They certainly ran in different circles. Among the more vivid contrasts between Bush and Kerry is the fact that Bush, the true political heir, showed so little interest in the substance of politics while Kerry, whose father was a public servant, though not a very happy one, fell deeper and deeper in love with public life. Where Bush ended up president of the fraternity and knew the name of every pledge from the day he walked in the door, Kerry could become president of the Yale Political Union but still have classmates recall his never getting their names right in four years on campus.

Though they graduated only two years apart–Kerry in 1966, Bush in ’68–in between their world turned on its axis. Bush called his the “last short-haired class,” but they were rebels compared with Kerry’s. Of the 15 Skull and Bones members in the graduating class that included Kerry, four enlisted after graduation; two years later, none did. Speaking of John’s decision to join the Navy, Richard Kerry told the Boston Globe in 1996, “I thought [the war] a serious policy mistake. His attitude was gung-ho: he had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction.”

*LIVING UP TO DAD

George W. Bush may have been shoved at birth into an impossible competition with a man he could never hope to surpass. He may have suffered in his father’s shadow, protested that sharing his name was as much a curse as a blessing as he tried to make his way in the world. But people who grew up watching the Bush family recall a powerful bond among them. “His father was an inspiration,” says childhood friend Randall Roden. “He played with us. He joked with us. The family had an impact on me. They were very lively, and they were interested in you. They asked questions and made you feel welcomed and important.”

When you ask Kerry about his father–who developed views of the U.S.’s role in the world so strong he felt a need, almost 30 years after he retired from the foreign service, to write a book about it–he often changes the subject. John talks instead about his mother, who died of respiratory complications in 2002–how influential she was and how warm, or he skips ahead to Vietnam and how that experience shaped his world view. Richard moves in and out of the picture like a shadow, looming large especially in childhood as John fought to win his approval, but ultimately shrinking as John found his place under the hot lights. By the time the son had won his seat in the Senate in 1984, the father was the one looking for affirmation, firing off faxes to John, suggesting positions and finally, in the months before he died of prostate cancer in 2000, talking about the things that mattered but had never really been discussed.

“There isn’t a son in the world who hasn’t had an issue with his father,” John says. Barbiero observes, “John’s dad was someone he was always trying to prove himself to.” While John’s mother struck Barbiero as a “terrific, warm person,” he is blunt about Richard Kerry. “I didn’t like his father,” Barbiero says. “He was dismissive of John. We’d go out to dinner, and John would be saying something, and his father would cut him off. I didn’t feel he gave John much respect.” Richard Kerry was suave but not warm, articulate but not expressive.

Richard Kerry retired from the foreign service in 1962, frustrated by the inertia he encountered there and resentful at not being listened to and appreciated to the degree he thought he deserved. “He obviously enjoyed the work at some level, being involved in policy and the travel and so on,” Cam says of his father. “But I think ultimately he was frustrated by the bureaucracy and by the policies.” He had parted ways with President Eisenhower and his men, who he thought saw things in black and white–the godless communists against everyone else. Richard rejected the notion that the rest of the world either ought to be like us or wanted to be. Some soil may not be hospitable to “American values,” he said. Richard was too much of a maverick to ever make ambassador, and so he ultimately returned to private law practice and spent decades stewing on the ideas that turned into his 1990 book, The Star Spangled Mirror.

There is a heroic version of the elder Kerry’s story: “John’s father was somebody who took a particularly independent line,” says Jonathan Winer, who worked as legal counsel for John Kerry from 1984 to 1995, became a close friend, and remains an adviser. Winer got to know Richard Kerry and saw how father and son related. “[Richard] was a dissident, a genuine dissident within the Department of State. He was not of the manor or the manner born. But he had the style and the capacity to become a foreign service officer anyway. He left because he was an insufficiently doctrinaire anticommunist.” In Winer’s rendering of Richard Kerry’s career, the lessons for his son are clear and noble: “‘Don’t be afraid to take a dissident position. Realize that people can rebuild after disaster–that’s what they saw in Europe after World War II. And respect what other people want.’ It was an internationalist, multilateralist point of view.”

Returning home from Vietnam with the rank of captain and five medals, including three purple hearts, John Kerry became a leading protester against the war. He used his newfound prominence to launch a bid for Congress, but failed. After a stint as a high-profile prosecutor in Massachusetts’ Middlesex County and then a term as Lieutenant Governor, he finally gained national office when he was elected to the Senate in 1984. Yale, Vietnam and the Senate are the biographical highlights that the Kerry campaign is using to introduce the candidate to voters. But it was his earliest years that formed the parts of Kerry that remain to this day: an incongruous coupling of curiosity about the world and a loneliness in it as well. –With reporting by John F. Dickerson/Washington