John Kerry's America

Stretching around the northeastern boundary of Boston Harbor sits a small, picturesque town with seven miles of beach, shady fruit trees, and quaint cottages. The town is part of a peninsula that, in 1632, the founding governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, John Winthrop, annexed from local tribes. Since 1846, it has continuously borne the family name--Winthrop, Massachusetts.

The town is but one of many signs of the storied role the Winthrops have played in New England and American history. Seven generations after Governor Winthrop formed his Puritan colony, Robert Charles Winthrop became Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, before moving on to the Senate in 1850. One hundred thirty-five years later, another direct descendant of John Winthrop would serve the Commonwealth of Massachusetts for 19 years as a U.S. Senator before going on to seek the U.S. Presidency.

His name is John Kerry. John Forbes Kerry, actually. In addition to the Winthrop connection, the Massachusetts senator also descends from the Bay State Forbes clan, which launched the Boston-China trade and amassed a fortune in the American mercantile class. To this day, the family maintains several estates throughout the world, homes in which Kerry vacationed as a boy, between semesters at boarding schools and before marrying into a $300 million real-estate portfolio of his own. This is the same John Forbes Kerry who now campaigns on a populist promise to bridge the "two Americas" divided by wealth and privilege.

The theme isn't original, of course. It's recycled from the primary campaign of Kerry's running mate, North Carolina's Senator John Edwards. And at least symbolically, this political ticket represents the uniting of the classes that the candidates promise. Although shaking down doctors and insurance companies has launched Edwards into Kerry's rarefied tax bracket, his pedigree couldn't be more different--the son of mill workers, the product of public education and state universities, a lifelong resident of North Carolina.

It's often noted that the purpose of the modern Vice Presidential nominee is to bring to the ticket what the Presidential candidate cannot: Walter Mondale provided Jimmy Carter with Beltway street cred, as did the elder George Bush for Ronald Reagan. Dan Quayle was, in theory anyway, going to make Bush attractive to Baby Boomers. Dick Cheney gave the younger Bush "gravitas," while Joe Lieberman was supposed to make Al Gore seem strong of character. Kerry's selection of Edwards follows the same model, injecting a dose of Horatio Alger into Kerry's silver-spoon persona. But more important, Edwards brings some Deep South to a campaign that reeks of New England, in this case, Northeastern elitism and unapologetically liberal politics.

In many ways, John Kerry represents both the personification and the pinnacle of the region that spawned him, a region increasingly detached from much of the rest of America in terms of culture and values. Although his background has helped bring him to his current position of wealth and prominence, it could ultimately thwart his lifelong pursuit of the Presidency. Between now and November, Kerry will labor mightily to convince working-class, swing-state Americans that he is, at least in spirit, one of them. The question is: Can he pull it off?

To better understand the cultural and political ethos of New England today, we must go back to Governor Winthrop and the society he intended to found. It wasn't Winthrop's goal to create a new country, but to reform the old one by setting an example of religious and social virtue.

Winthrop and the one thousand hearty souls who came with him from England were Europeans at heart--as evidenced by their zeal to name New World cities and towns after Old World counterparts. Even a century and a half later, many colonists still thought of themselves as Englishmen first. During Revolutionary times, they were divided among the Patriots and the Tories--those who pledged their loyalty to America and its emerging national character, and those whose loyalty remained with the British crown and its attendant aristocracy. (One noteworthy loyalist was the Reverend John Forbes, Kerry's great-great-great-great grandfather, who served the British Empire at a key post in East Florida until 1783, when he fled to England, leaving two sons behind.)

As the country expanded westward, it was largely members of the lower classes--those with little to lose and much to gain--who ventured into the wilderness. Those staying behind were disproportionately those who, like the Winthrops and the Forbeses, enjoyed positions of privilege and distinction. The result is that, while class mobility and meritocracy were early phenomena elsewhere in America, New England retained a more rigid social and economic caste system not unlike the one that millions of immigrants would flee Europe to escape. With the hoi polloi seeking opportunity on the frontier while the elites remained in the east, a natural sense of superiority arose throughout New England--a sense that very much carries on to this day.

In the eyes of many New Englanders, the region is culturally more like Europe than the rest of America. It has cobblestone streets, centuries-old buildings, established families who dominate the local history books, each with its own seal and tartan. Those who grow up in the region feel a righteous sense of pride that their home is the birthplace of American liberty, of Plymouth Rock, the Minutemen, the shot heard 'round the world. Anyone who can boast a lineage that traces in whole or part "back to the May-flower" is something of an honorary royal, a living connection to a storied past. The floods of tourists who come in each year to marvel at sights they'd previously only read about in history books--sights that, for the locals, are simply part of the everyday landscape--reinforce the notion that this is a place that's in some intrinsic way better than any of the newer, less interesting, less gentrified parts of the country.

Imbued with an innate sense of egalitarianism, no New Englander worth his salt will own up to being a snob, but New England snobbery is undeniable. It's there in the jokes, in the vocabulary, in the knowing references to the benighted souls back in the red states. In New England parlance, "West Virginia" is a synonym for uncouth, "Mississippi" for unread, "Iowa" means boring, and "Texas" boorish. A Southern accent is widely recognized as a sign of intellectual inferiority, and anyone who owns a gun is, by definition, a bloodthirsty, paranoid redneck.

True to the region's Europhilic origins, New Englanders, as a whole, care deeply about what France and Germany think about America, Americans, and U.S. foreign policy. When Kerry wrings his hands about the need to "rebuild our alliances," he's not just giving voice to his own concerns; he's playing to his base, a constituency that can't bear the thought of losing international popularity contests. Commensurate with the Northeastern affinity for international sensibilities is a disdain for the notion of American exceptionalism, the idea that the U.S. has a unique role in the world, or at least a responsibility to exert its power for its own protection. All of which translates into a deep disgust for the man Kerry hopes to replace in November, President George W. Bush.

With New Hampshire as the glaring exception that proves the rule, the five other New England states--Maine, Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut--all lean politically to the left. You can drive for days in certain communities and not spot a single Bush-Cheney bumper sticker. While some of these states have elected Republican governors in recent years, such occurrences shouldn't be read as anything other than political anomalies owing themselves to the particulars of specific elections. No one doubts seriously that the five New England states that went for Gore in 2000 will back Kerry every bit as strongly this time, which only stands to reason. He is, in many ways, very much one of their own.

Lost on Northeastern liberals is that they live among--and their political leaders tend to come from--the very pockets of privilege they should, by virtue of their ideology, despise. Most notable are the elite prep schools which have, from the time of their founding until very recently, served as playgrounds for the pampered and feeders for top colleges. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was an alumnus of the Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts. John F. Kennedy and brother Bobby both attended Choate-Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, Connecticut. Self-styled populist Howard Dean went to St. George's in Newport, Rhode Island, and as a middle-schooler, Kerry attended the tony Fessenden School in Newton, Massachusetts, before heading off to St. Paul's in Concord, New Hampshire. Not coincidentally, these same prominent Democrats all went on to attend Ivy League colleges--FDR and the Kennedys at Harvard, Dean and Kerry at Yale.

The prep schools and the Ivies are a key part of the Northeast's identity, its sense of academic excellence and its aristocratic subculture. Yet in gauging their significance not only in the life of John Kerry but also to New England and American history, it's important to remember that only 40 years ago they occupied a very different place in society than they do today.

In recent decades, the elite colleges and prep schools have made a conscious effort to open their ranks beyond the children of alumni, who once enjoyed virtually guaranteed admission, qualified or not. Pedigree--or lack thereof--is no longer an automatic cause for acceptance or rejection. Blacks, Jews, and Catholics are now welcome, as are women. Financial aid is now available to those who need it, and as far as the admissions offices are concerned, new money is every bit as good as old. The direct link between the prep schools and the Ivies has been severed, and the Ivies themselves no longer occupy the same lofty position in American higher education, competing with the likes of Stanford, Duke, and the Universities of Michigan and Chicago for the best and brightest American youth.

But back when Kerry and the other current leaders of American business and politics--including George W. Bush--were attending the prep schools and Ivies, these institutions were still largely the domain of select WASP families, and mere attendance all but assured a prestigious and lucrative professional career.

While very few New Englanders ever attend Harvard or Yale, the mere concentration of elite colleges in the region supports the notion that New England is America's intellectual capital and the drawing ground of its public and private leadership. And for every big-name university in the region, there are countless smaller ones, more than 250, sprinkled throughout the six states in cities large and small. Massachusetts has more colleges and universities than either Florida, Michigan, or Virginia. Vermont boasts the highest number of campuses per capita in the nation. Even tiny Rhode Island can claim 11 institutions of higher learning. Boston itself is so college-heavy that, during the academic year, it's estimated that 25 percent of its population consists of students.

Colleges, of course, create their own communities, with a concentration of academics and artists, and those who like being around them. The result is that sizable portions of New England have become, to varying degrees, college towns. That means an abundance of intellectual life and cultural venues--theaters, used-book stores, coffee houses, a symphony orchestra on many campuses. It also means vast populations of people whose existence is largely sheltered from the workaday pressures of the real world, including professional academics who haven't left a campus since their undergraduate days. Then there are many more residents in the surrounding communities who take their moral and political cues from the colleges, operating under the false belief that education and smarts are one and the same.

So while the actual size of New England's elite class is relatively small, the sense of elitism extends far beyond those who attend the likes of St. Paul's or Yale. It extends over the descendants of Irish immigrants who, just generations earlier, suffered under the naked bigotry of the WASP establishment. It extends through boarded-up old mill towns, depressed Boston ghettoes, and haughty suburbs alike. Just as poor antebellum Southerners used to find some comfort in their social superiority to slaves, so can poor New Englanders find solace in the belief that, even if the preppies look down on them, they can still look down on just about everyone else. Being a New Englander comes with its own sense of privilege. Those with the real privileges--the fancy schools and the prestigious family names--are merely enjoying a slightly better view atop the societal order.

When Kerry's grandfather, John Forbes, married his grandmother, Margaret Winthrop, the event was widely considered the merger of two of Boston's most celebrated and influential families. It only stood to follow that a descendant of this elite coupling might one day ascend to the highest office in the country. A New Englander might say it was a matter of destiny.

Although Kerry's father, Richard Kerry, the son of Austrian and Hungarian immigrants, worked in the foreign service and never earned a fortune of his own, there was enough wealth on the Winthrop-Forbes side of the family to assure young John the proper Brahmin upbringing. As a boy, Kerry spent summers at the Forbes family compound in Saint Briac, France, on the Brittany Coast. In 1954, at 10 years old, after his father was stationed in Berlin, Kerry was shipped off to the Institut Montana Zugerberg overlooking Lake Zug, just outside Zurich, Switzerland--a boarding school popular among European royals. From there it was on to Fessenden, St. Paul's, and Yale.

At Yale, Kerry was selected in his junior year as one of 15 annual inductees to Skull and Bones, the super-secretive fraternal organization whose most famous members include both Presidents Bush. These are the most privileged of an already privileged group of students, and members tell each other over and over that they are destined to become America's top leaders.

If meeting John F. Kennedy was the thrill of Bill Clinton's youth, for John F. Kerry, it was merely one more instance of rubbing elbows with the rich and powerful. In the summer before his first year at Yale, Kerry briefly dated Janet Auchincloss, the half-sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, a relationship that once resulted in a cruise with the President aboard a Coast Guard yawl in Narraganset Bay.

Just in case the advantages of his own upbringing weren't enough to secure him a comfortable life, Kerry married into considerable wealth--twice. His first wife, Julia Thorne, twin sister of fellow Bonesman David Thorne, was the affluent descendant of William Bradford, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Second wife Teresa Heinz Kerry is the heiress of the vast Heinz ketchup fortune.

Owing in small part to the wealth he's inherited, but mostly to the wealth of his wives, Kerry has attained a net worth and lifestyle that would seem to belie his populist campaign rhetoric. The Heinz-Kerry family's five homes neatly illustrate the point: On Louisberg Square in Boston's Beacon Hill, near Boston Common and the State House, is Kerry's $12.8 million brownstone, the only property that's owned in his name. For summer getaways, the family has its $10 million beach house on Brant Point on Nantucket. For winters and snowboarding, there's the 7,000 square-foot, $5 million Sun Valley, Idaho ski lodge--a 500-year-old English barn carefully dismantled, moved, and then reassembled stateside. When in Washington, the Kerrys stay in their $4.7 million Georgetown pad. And finally, in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, just outside Pittsburgh, is the nine-acre Heinz family farm, estimated at a relatively paltry $3.7 million.

If Kerry's birthright moved him directly from the batter's box to first base in the baseball game of life, his marriages have propelled him to second and third. All that's left now is the short trot to home plate--and that ultimate piece of real estate--1600 Pennsylvania Ave.

Should it matter --the wealth, the status, the lineage? Kerry is hardly the first Brahmin to seek the White House, and it could be argued that his privilege pales in comparison to that of George W. Bush. Bush, after all, is also the scion of two New England aristocracies, the Walkers and the Prescotts, with a prep-school diploma and two Ivy League degrees to show for it. Moreover, he is the son of a former U.S. President. A key difference, however, is that Republicans mostly eschew the politics of class warfare and the demonizing of wealth. Whereas the Democratic Party's brand of egalitarianism holds that all men should end up more or less equal, Republicans emphasize the classical liberal notion that all men should be equally free to attain whatever status or rewards they can.

Democrats are the party of unions, the party that owns the vote of inner-city blacks, that throws around terms like "CEO" as an epithet. Sixteen years ago, the woman George W. Bush would eventually replace as governor of Texas, Ann Richards, stood before the Democratic National Convention and mocked his father as having been "born with a silver foot in his mouth"--to the howls and delight of the thousands in attendance. Now the party that made privilege a dirty word finds itself carrying the banner of an Ivy League patrician with an heiress wife. The ideological contortion is, if nothing else, amusing.

But ever since the ascendance of another Democrat, Andrew Jackson, to the White House in 1829, it has been crucial for candidates, especially wealthy ones, to evoke some sort of populist appeal. Jackson, a westerner, was the first President not to emerge from the New England or Virginia aristocracies, and though monied, he cleverly played up what would today be called his "outsider" image to win the election. Infamously, he opened his White House inaugural celebration to the public, resulting in a veritable mob scene that ultimately ended with the new President forced to escape through a back door. Nonetheless, the gesture solidified Jackson's reputation as a man of the people, a role that every subsequent Presidential candidate has tried to replicate.

Thus it was no less a Brahmin than FDR who would one day serve hot dogs to the visiting queen and king of England. And when the elder Bush campaigned in New Hampshire in 1988, he ditched the traditional coat and tie in favor of a bright blue ski jacket. Later, Bush tried to muster some populist appeal by declaring pork rinds his favorite snack food. Even though George H. W. Bush could never fully shake the snooty image, in his case, it didn't really matter--Ronald Reagan's coattails were more than enough to take him into the White House. But four years later, his not knowing the price of a gallon of milk, and his unfamiliarity with supermarket check-out scanners, would prove devastating. Democrats successfully cited these as evidence that Bush was indifferent to middle-class plight in the midst of the early-1990s recession. In a race against a charming, self-made governor of Arkansas, the elitist Bush was toast.

Populism isn't a problem for Bush the younger, whose public image is far more Crawford than Kennebunkport. He wears cowboy boots and Stetsons, and speaks with a drawl that has its roots in Texas, not Connecticut. Even his religion marks a sharp deviation from the family tradition, abandoning Episcopalianism--the denomination of the American ruling class--in favor of an evangelical Christianity picked up at a men's Bible study in Midland, Texas. Democrats like to sneer at Bush's Texan persona as some sort of well-calculated act--"all hat, no cattle," they snicker--but if Texans accept him as the genuine article, it's hard to see why anyone else should quibble.

Kerry, on the other hand, has very little in the way of populist credentials. For much of his political career he pretended--or at least made little effort to correct the misperception--that he was Irish, which is a political advantage in much of Massachusetts, especially in many blue-collar areas where Kerry's Brahmin background might otherwise be a political liability. For example, there's the following Senate floor statement, attributed to Kerry in 1986: "For those of us who are fortunate to share an Irish ancestry, we take great pride in the contributions [of] Irish-Americans." Kerry now claims that staff entered the remark for him--he neither recited nor read it--but the comment marks just one of several examples in which Kerry, his aides, or his campaigns tried to benefit from a bogus claim to Irish ancestry.

Although the name Kerry comes from that of an Irish county, the senator came to it by way of his grandfather, Fritz Kohn, an Austrian Jew (and the lone non-blue blood in the senator's family tree) who changed his name to Frederick Kerry, converted to Catholicism, and immigrated to America in 1905. It was because of his grandfather's conversion that Kerry was raised a Catholic, which today inoculates him from the WASP label and keeps him from fitting the stereotype of a New England aristocrat perfectly. Yet as a political strength, Kerry's Catholicism is undermined by heterodox social views and some highly-publicized rebukes from various Catholic bishops. Besides, the Kennedys proved long ago that New England elitism is no longer the exclusive province of old-money Protestants.

For Kerry, the best way to shed the image of New England elitism is, conveniently enough, the same device he uses to demonstrate his "strength" on matters of national security--his service in Vietnam. The constant references to Kerry's four-month tour of duty are an unsubtle reminder that he's not just some rich kid who, say, served in a National Guard unit while the progeny of poorer folk died overseas. But while admirable, even his Vietnam experience points to his privileged past. In Skull and Bones, members are drilled on the notion of service. They dwell on morbid images of mortality as a way to appreciate that even their fortunate lot has but a short time on this mortal coil, and a profound responsibility to do good with the advantages they've been given. It was at Yale that an alum and fellow Bonesman, William Bundy--then an Assistant Secretary of State in the Johnson administration--strongly urged Kerry and some of his classmates to serve the nation in Vietnam. Kerry didn't enlist because his number was pulled in the draft (although he expected that it would be), or because a military career attracted him, but because he was moved by a noble and heartfelt--and unmistakably Brahmin--sense of obligation.

And, some suggest, political calculation. A longtime admirer of John F. Kennedy, Kerry saw the dividends that a distinguished military career could pay in a future political life. (These were the days when military service was still widely considered a prerequisite for the Presidency.) Thus, it was by no accident that Kerry went to Vietnam with the Navy, opting for the Kennedy-esque assignment of a patrol boat. Even then, the political aspirations were widely apparent. As swift boat sailor Jerry Leads, who went on joint patrol missions with Kerry, told the Boston Globe, "We all knew he would run for President one day. You figure you got the initials, JFK, you are from Massachusetts, and you are on a gunboat. It wasn't hard to figure out."

So while Kerry's distinguished service no doubt wins him tremendous respect, it doesn't do much to shake the sense of New England elitism that he invariably radiates. Nor do his politics--the social liberalism, his preoccupation with gaining the approval of foreign leaders, his heavy reliance on Ted Kennedy to get him through the Democratic primaries. In a nation that doesn't mind leaders who walk with kings, as long as they don't lose the common touch, Kerry simply can't seem to put any separation between his upbringing and his personality because the former seems to so thoroughly infuse the latter.

That, more than even the prep-school past or the bevy of mansions, is what might seal in the public's mind the image of Kerry as the aloof Northeasterner, the grown-up rich kid who simply can't relate to the experiences or values of most anyone else. It's not an elite, New England background that alienates voters outside the region, but elitist New England sensibilities, which are often conveyed in the Europhilic, libertine, and paternalistic politics of blue-state liberals.

The public cares less about privilege than about attitude, and George W. Bush is the ultimate example of that. Bush has plainly rejected many of his family's patrician ways (though not its wealth) in favor of a middle-American demeanor that seems to suit him better. Kerry, on the other hand, is more like Bush's father--the politician who, late in life, sees the need to feign a middle-class awareness, but can't do it convincingly.

For Kerry, the problem isn't where he comes from, but the way it's shaped the person he's become.

Chris Weinkopf, a native New Englander and prep-school alum, is editorial page editor of the Los Angeles Daily News.

Published in The Year the Democratic Party Sailed to New England October/November 2004

There was no William Bradford among the Signers of the Declaration of Independence. There is a famous William Bradford who was a leader of Plymouth colony in its early years and the author of a historical account of the early years of the colony...maybe he was Kerry's ancestor.

Kerry will never understand the tsunami that's about to engulf his entire campaign. He's speaking today here in Toledo, Ohio at a community center in the old Polish village. These are predominantly blue-collar workers, middle to lower-middle class incomes, but mostly Democrats. So, his topic he's speaking on today will be health care for the middle class.

When the local news channels interviewed several people who were planning on attending, their comments displayed no, zero, zip, nada understanding of what the President of the United States is supposed to do. Comments like this:

Well, if he's coming here, then maybe he can see what some of our problems are and find ways to fix them.

I think it's good that he's going to fix the health care mess. Everybody knows it's all screwed up.

This entire facade is Kerry's attempt to try to relate to the "little people" and pose as a man of the people. It is so transparent.

Yesterday, the local news reporter said that if you want to get tickets to the event you had to call the phone number on the bottom of the screen to be asked a series of questions. He advised callers that it would be best to say that you are either "Undecided" or "Independent" if you want to get a ticket to the event.

He's talking now....

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