From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Point-of-View Notice: The 2004 U.S. presidential
campaign is underway. The race will likely be heated
and partisan; the related Wikipedia articles may be
the focus of contention and debate-possibly
diminishing their neutrality.
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 focuses on Kerry's
biography, background and experience. For information
about Kerry's presidential campaign and his current
views on issues, please see the separate article,
Presidential campaign of John Kerry.
Table of contents [hide]
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.
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 after being deported there 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."
Please read the full article at
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DeanBusters/message/5235
Source:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kerry
Jewish World Review March 11, 2004 / 18 Adar, 5764
Keith Olbermann
`Bonesmen' for president
http://www.NewsAndOpinion.com | Pres. Bush and John Kerry were both
members of the secret organization `Skull and Bones.' `Temporary'
was Pres. Bush's nickname under the group, and if he winds up losing
the presidential election this fall, that name is going to haunt him
the rest of his life.
|
|
