(4 of 10)
The truth about Kerry's roots--that they are as much new striving immigrant as Old Yankee aristocracy--may help explain why he didn't grow up steering by the same stars as many sons of privilege. As a kid, he wore his ambitions on his sleeve, reflecting the instincts of his refugee grandparents but violating the code of languid grace sanctified by Eastern aristocracy.
*ROOTS AND WINGS
Kerry has a colorful personal story, but Bush possesses a clear one, and he never misses a chance to turn it to advantage. Being a Texan is a big part of being George W. Bush. His father could extol pork rinds and have a Houston mailbox, but few people really thought of him as anything but a Connecticut Yankee. Though W. was born in Connecticut while his father was at Yale, he grew up in Midland, Texas, a dusty town of new wealth and old values, lots of bikes and baseball and frog hunting and friends for life. As a result he has much more twang and sand and sky in him. For years, people could ask him the difference between himself and his father, and he offered just a one-word answer: "Midland."
Kerry cannot be so easily situated in the public mind. He may be the Senator from Massachusetts, but he is not from Massachusetts. He is not really from anywhere; his father's legal and diplomatic career meant that the family moved every few years. Now he talks about deep roots nourished through summers on Cape Cod with all the various cousins, and says people have made too much of the moving around--even though he famously had to shop for a congressional district the first time he ran for public office, in 1972, because he didn't really have a hometown.
If any place comes close, it is a rural town outside Boston called Millis, where the Kerrys settled after the war. They bought a big, pretty house with six bedrooms, multiple fireplaces and a pond where John and his sister Peggy played. "He was a very adventurous, outdoorsy person," says Peggy, who is two years older. "There was a farm next door, and John used to like to play there and in the woods." Sister Diana was born in 1947, then brother Cam in 1950. That year the rural idyll was interrupted, when John was 7 and the family moved to Washington so that Richard could work in the office of the general counsel of the Navy. "We went to a school where quite a few kids were sons and daughters of Congressmen," says Peggy. "We became aware of the political environment early." Peggy and John went door to door in 1952, selling ADLAI STEVENSON FOR PRESIDENT buttons. And they got their first taste of dinner-table conversation that revolved around policy, diplomacy and the cares of the world, a language in which John would become fluent, if for no other reason than it was one he and his father could speak to each other.