Richard Kerry

Richard John Kerry (28 July 1915 - 29 July 2000) was an American airman, attorney, diplomat, and author. He was the father of Senator and 2004 Presidential candidate John Kerry.

Life and career
Kerry was born in Boston, Massachusetts, raised as a Roman Catholic, attended the Phillips Academy as a youth, and then graduated from Yale University in 1937. He received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1940, and then volunteered as a test pilot for the U.S. Army Air Forces during World War II, flying DC-3's and B-29's stateside in Alabama. After a bout with tuberculosis, he was mustered out of the military.

Career
In his adult career, he was assistant district attorney for the southeastern district of Massachusetts. In 1949, Kerry moved to Washington, D.C., to work in the office of the General Counsel for the Navy Department. In 1951, Kerry joined the U.S. Department of State where he served in the Bureau of United Nations Affairs and the Office of Legal Advisor. He was a legal advisor to the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany, James B. Conant, as well as U.S. Attorney for Berlin.

In 1956, he joined the Foreign Service and was assigned as executive assistant to U.S. Senator Walter F. George, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He taught at the NATO Defense College in Paris in 1958 before being named Chief of the Political Section of the American Embassy in Oslo, Norway for four years.

Kerry was the author of Star Spangled Mirror, published in 1990. According to the book description at Amazon.com: the book "captures the dilemma of America's continuing reliance on an enduring fallacy of foreign policy-the assumption that other people ought to share our view of world order. Dr. Richard Kerry argues that from the time of Woodrow Wilson's aim to organize the world order in accordance with assumptions of democratic universalism, this vision of the world has remained central to U.S. foreign policy. "The Star-Spangled Mirror" will be considered an important addition to the history of American foreign policy and as required reading for current and future policy makers."

Family
Parentage
Kerry's father, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in the town of Horní Benešov, in what is now Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic, and grew up in Mödling (a small town near Vienna, Austria). He immigrated to the U.S. arriving at Ellis Island with his wife Ida (née Loewe, who was born in Budapest, Hungary) and son Erich on May 18, 1905. In Illinois, Mildred was born (c. 1910) and in Massachusetts, Richard was born (c. 1916). Frederick committed suicide on November 23, 1921, by gunshot to the head at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston. Richard, his second son, was only six at the time.

The Kerry-Kohns were Jewish, but the family concealed its background upon immigrating to the United States, and raised the Kerry children as Catholics. Two of Ida's siblings, Otto Loewe and Jenni Loewe, died in the Nazi concentration camps (Theresienstadt and Treblinka, respectively), after being deported from Vienna in 1942.

Marriage
Kerry met his wife, Rosemary Forbes, in 1937 while taking a course in sculpture in the French coastal town of Saint-Briac. The couple married in Montgomery, Alabama in January 1941. In 1976, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean together from Marblehead, Massachusetts, to Ireland aboard a 35 foot sloop named Warbonnet.

Children
Richard Kerry was the father of 4 children:

* Margery A. "Peggy" Kerry (Kaler), b. 11 November 1941
::Peggy has worked for the American Civil Liberties Union and was active in the peace movement during the Vietnam War, and introduced her brother to Vietnam Veterans Against the War. She now works for the State Department at the United States Mission to the United Nations as an NGO liaison.
* John Forbes Kerry, b. 11 December 1943
* Diana Kerry, b. 16 April 1947
::Diana is a drama teacher in Australia, and organized Americans Overseas for Kerry
* Cameron F. Kerry, b. 6 September 1950 (converted to Judaism)
::Cameron is a Boston lawyer.

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