Kerry family background?

[ramapo]

I keep hearing that Kerry grew up wealthy. His website has no info beyond his dad being in the military.

So where did the money come from?

[MaineDem]

1. His father was foreign service I thought

I'm pretty sure the family money is from his mother's side.

[hedda_foil]

2. John Forbes Kerry

The money is on his mother's side and it's very very big and very very old money. The Forbes family (as in Steven Forbes first cousin) and most of the very old Massachusetts families. He spent most of his time in the states as a kid living in his Aunt Winthrop's mansion. (Winthrop as in Winthrop Rockefeller's first name.) His father was a diplomat. Served in West Berlin during the height of the cold war (mid-late '50's, which means he was probably CIA, since West Berlin was the key listening post to the Soviet bloc.

[Raya]

3. Kerry Did NOT Grow up wealthy. It is one of the old RW tactics

He grew up middle class. His father was a pilot and later in the
foreign service. Kerry had a difficult childhood because he was often
in boarding school because his family was moving around.

The wealth of his mother's parents meant he had security and connections when he grew up. But he did not grow up wealthy.

[Mobius]

9. "Kerry Did NOT Grow up wealthy"???????

"This, however, was only a temporary residence for young Kerry, who was destined for an unusually privileged upbringing. Kerry's father, a diplomat in the Foreign Service, and his mother, Rosemary, was a member of the Boston Brahmin Forbes family, whose wealth is drawn primarily from its land holdings on Cape Cod, ........etc....."
:shrug:

[RichM]

4. Here is a link to his bio. (He grew up wealthy, is the short answer.)

http://www.bop2004.org/bop2004/candidate.aspx?cid=4

[bushwakker]

5. Dean wasn't exactly raised in a shotgun shack

enuf of this crap.

[Raya]

8. What is the point of an inaccurate statement? He was born to a working Dad

in a military hospital.

"John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943 at a military hospital in Denver, Colo., while his father Richard Kerry, a pilot in the Army Air Corps, was being treated for tuberculosis."

His mother's family was rich. His dad's was not. His grandfather
committed suicide because of financial stress.

Bios love to ignore the actual nitty-gritty of how a person
grows up and play to the "story" of wealth.

I am personally very familiar with the kid of struggling professional in the foreign service going to boarding school story, and it is
not the typical "happy and wealthy" life in America. It can be quite tough. Though you can get a hell of an education and a world perspective which changes you for the rest of your life.

[NashVegas]

14. Not to Slag Kerry (Not on This), But

When it comes to aristocracy, your paternal connections don't count for squat compared to the matrilineal line. GHWB's paternal line isn't terribly impressive, but the women ...

And Kerry appears to have that going for him, in spades.

[Feanorcurufinwe]

6. John Kerry's childhood

Check out the Boston Globe: A privileged youth, a taste for risk

[Hoppin_Mad]

7. Here's a picture of a young John Kerry yachting with JFK and Jackie

I assume lots o poor folk got invited to sail with JFK ;-)

Here's an indepth profile of this aristocratic blue blood family.

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061503.shtml

[DrFunkenstein]

10. Connections, Schooling, and Travel, But No Big Money

Kerry is a man without geographic roots; his youth stretched through a dozen towns across two continents. He enjoyed the cachet of illustrious family names but not always the bonds of a household. By the time he was 10 years old, he was shipped off for an eight-year odyssey at boarding schools in Switzerland and New England, where ``home'' was a dormitory or an aunt's estate.

More than any one place, his ties were to a social milieu -- that rarefied world of wealth and privilege where the French is fluent and the manners impeccable. As a young man, Bill Clinton got a chance to shake JFK's hand on a Boys Nation outing; young John Kerry dated Jacqueline Kennedy's half-sister and once sailed Narragansett Bay with JFK at the helm.

But Kerry did not fully belong to this elite world, either. His father's government salary, combined with his own struggles with money, left him planted further on the outskirts of New England's ruling class than many realized. The boy who was educated at patrician prep schools grew into a gentleman without significant means, part of a landless aristocracy that one might find in a Jane Austen novel.

---

Among the array of relatives who looked after John, none was more important to his education than great-aunt Clara Winthrop, who had no children of her own. She owned an estate in Manchester-by-the-Sea, complete with a bowling alley inside a red barn. Winthrop offered to pay for much of John's prep school education, an expensive proposition far beyond the means of Kerry's parents. ``It was a great and sweet and nice thing from an aunt who had no place to put (her money),'' Kerry said. Such a gift today might be worth about $30,000 per year, given the school's typical annual cost before subsidies.

``We weren't rich,'' explained Kerry's sister, Diana. ``We certainly had some members of the family we thought of as rich. We were the (beneficiaries) of a great-aunt who had no children. My father was on salary from the State Department, and my mother had some family money but not major.''

http://www.boston.com/globe/nation/packages/kerry/061503.shtml

[WiseMen]

11. Great Article, confirms what I had heard.

[AP]

12. John Kerry's mother inherited islands off the coast of Rhode Island.

Although Kerry's father's income was never super high (if memory serves), his mother (nee Forbes) always stood to inherit those islands and it has given them a lot of options other people don't have.

I don't know who owns those islands now (a family trust? Kerry and his sibs?).

I've heard that the islands are worth 10-100 million bucks. Does anyone know the number?

Kerry's already loaded because of his wife (500 mil). (He's the wealthiest man ever to run for president?)) But those islands alone probably would make Kerrry pretty rich. I think Bush was only worth 5-10 million when he ran (with a potential inheritance in the range of 20-50 mil, if I had to guess).

[Cheswick2.0]

13. did you ever hear if the Forbes family?

Try google

[eissa]

15. I think it's safe to say

that anyone running for president is not exactly looking for his/her next meal. I don't really care if a person is from old money or new money -- what I do care about are real issues, and in this election year, even that doesn't count for much; I just want * out NOW!

[AP]

16. I actually care that the candidates understand what life is REALLY like.

I think their sources of wealth suggest a great deal about whether they understand.

I'm not saying it's impossible to understand if you grew up with lots of options, and if you stood to make the bulk of your wealth from sources other than earned income/working for a living (eg, marriage, inheritance, gifts, trusts, unearned income, etc).

But I'm saying that someone who didn't might understand a little more about it than someone who did.

I think Dean's education plan (more student loans, interest payments to Wall St companies underwriting the loans which are subsidized by taxpayers, and especially middle-class taxpayers bearing a disporportionate burden of taxes) is something that someone who had to go into debt to pay for college would NEVER propose.

I think if Dean or Dean's parents had had to take out a loan to pay for Yale, he'd never had proposed that plan.