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 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.