Early life and education

Kerry was born at the Fitzsimons Army Hospital in Aurora, Colorado outside Denver. His father, Richard Kerry, a World War II Army Air Corps test pilot, had been undergoing treatment there for tuberculosis.

Kerry's family returned to their home state of Massachusetts shortly after his birth. His family was Roman Catholic, and as a child John served as an altar boy.

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Family background
Kerry was the second child of Richard John Kerry and Rosemary Forbes Kerry. He has three siblings: Margery (1941), Diana (1947) and Cameron (1950).

A misconception some Americans have is that John Forbes Kerry is related to billionaire publisher Malcolm Forbes and his son Steve Forbes, the latter of whom twice sought the Republican presidential nomination. In fact, the two Forbes clans are not related. Another misconception regarding Kerry's upbringing is that his immediate family was wealthy. In truth, the Forbes family enjoyed a great fortune, but Kerry's parents themselves were upper-middle class. Although Kerry attended elite schools in Europe and New England, the tuition was paid by a wealthy great-aunt, as Richard Kerry's salary could not accommodate the schools attended by the Kerry children. However, Kerry did mix and mingle with the upper class. Summers were spent at the Forbes family estate in France, and Kerry enjoyed much greater extravagance there than he had come to know in Massachusetts.

Kerry is a distant cousin of U.S. President George W. Bush, though there appears to be some dispute regarding exactly how related they are [1] [2] [3] [4].

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Paternal family background
Kerry's paternal grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born on May 10, 1873 in the town of Horní Benešov, Austria-Hungary (in what is now the Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic), and grew up in Mödling, Austria (a small town near Vienna). His wife Ida (née Loewe) was born in Budapest, Hungary. They were both German-speaking Ashkenazi Jews. But in 1901, Fritz Kohn converted from Judaism to Catholicism and changed his name to Frederick Kerry. His wife Ida also converted at the same time. They then immigrated to the United States, arriving at Ellis Island in 1905. They raised their three children, including John's father, as Catholics. A Czech historian believes that Ida was 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 Kohn's siblings, Otto Loewe and Jenni Loewe, died in the Nazi extermination camps (Theresienstadt and Treblinka, respectively), after being deported from Vienna in 1942. Frederick Kerry himself committed suicide in the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston on November 23, 1921.

Kerry's father, Richard John Kerry, was born on July 28, 1915 in Massachusetts. After a stint in the U.S. Army Air Corps, 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, Richard Kerry met Rosemary Forbes, a member of the wealthy Forbes family. One of 11 children, she studied to be a nurse, and served in the Red Cross in Paris during World War II (she also was a Girl Scout leader for 50 years). The couple married in Montgomery, Alabama in January 1941.

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Maternal family background
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. Forbes married Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, who came from a family with deep roots in New England history. Through her, John Kerry is related to four Presidents, including, ironically, George W. Bush (ninth cousin, twice removed), and to many of the royal houses of Europe. [5] [6] [7]

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Childhood years
Kerry has said that his first memory is from when he was three years old, of holding his crying mother's hand while they walked through the broken glass and rubble of her childhood home in Saint-Briac, France. This visit came shortly after the United States had liberated Saint-Briac from the Nazis on August 14, 1944. The family estate, known as Les Essarts, had been occupied and used as a Nazi headquarters during the war. When the Germans fled, they bombed Les Essarts 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 these summers, 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 often, 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." At an early age he attended St. Albans School in Washington D.C. He then went to a Swiss boarding school at age 11 while his family lived in Berlin. When he visited home, he biked around the city, exploring the ruins of the former Nazi capital, and even sneaking into the Soviet Sector, until his father found out and grounded him. As a boy, Kerry often spent time alone. He biked through France, took a ferry from Norway to England, and one time camped alone in Sherwood Forest. While attending the boarding school, Kerry saw the film Scaramouche, which became his favorite movie. He later named his powerboat after the title character.

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