The Making Of John Kerry

INSTITUT MONTANA / KEYSTONE (left); JAY L. CLENDENIN / POLARIS FOR TIME (right)
THEN, NOW: Kerry as a schoolboy in Switzerland in 1954 and campaigning in Florida last March

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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.