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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.