One has to wonder if Richard Kerry's anti-American leanings weren't based on his father's suicide. Perhaps he blamed American capitalism for the elder Kerry's depression and eventual demise. How does a boy, who's family came to this country as immigrants, get to be so anti-America? Grandpa Kerry threw off his Jewish heritage, chose an Irish last name and an Irish town to live and run a businesss in. Something is not right with this whole picture.
It is strange why the grandfather chose an Irish name and moved to Boston with its large Irish population. Brookline, though, was a WASP stronghold when he lived there, and became quite Jewish in subsequent years.
I don't know why he converted, but many Jews of his generation felt alienated from Orthodoxy and saw conversion as a step towards assimilation. Some felt as though they were already virtually in the gentile world, and conversion would simply be an acknowledgement of this. Many did so for purely practical and opportunistic reasons, but Frederick Kerry does seem to have taken it seriously. He may not have been the only Austrian to take the name Kerry, either. Manfred Kerry, a politician in Vienna, claims to be a distant cousin.
You may have a point about Richard Kerry. I don't know if he blamed America for his father's suicide, but he was probably looking for something to attach himself to in order to make sense of the world and have a place in it, and found it in the Old World. Perhaps he was returning to such roots as he did have. Perhaps Harvard opened the European option for him and made it hard for him to find a place in ordinary, everyday America without opening the world of Brahmin Boston to him.
John Kerry inherited his father's marginal position: not quite being a Brahmin, but not quite being anything else. So perhaps he clings to his father's book and ideas as one legacy or root that he clearly does have. Father and son shared the arrogance of the person who always claims to know better than others, and the frustration that this isn't recognized by people. Apparently, European opinion and One World sentiment became the rock they built their would view upon.
This is truly strange, though:
If Richard and John Kerry were not in perfect political sync, it was because the father, in an inversion of the usual dynamic, was more radical than the son. John Kerry, for instance, had grown enthusiastic about John F. Kennedy and his robust, anti-communist foreign policy. Indeed, it was his fervor for Kennedy's "bear any burden" call to service that largely inspired Kerry to join the Navy. Richard Kerry, by contrast, was more skeptical about New Frontier idealism. In a 1996 interview with The Boston Globe, he groused, "[John's] attitude was gung ho: had to show the flag. He was quite immature in that direction." When John Kerry came back from Vietnam, his father pushed him to be more outspoken in his opposition to the war. "When Kerry refused to speak out against the government [while in uniform], suddenly his father felt like he was being a wimp," says Brinkley. "[So he] encouraged his son to take off the uniform and to become a critic."
What's also curious about the article is that it doesn't let on how Richard Kerry supported himself after leaving the government.