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John Kerry
Also Known As John Forbes Kerry , Kerry
United States Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
John Forbes Kerry is an American attorney, politician and diplomat who currently serves as the first U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate. A member of the Forbes family and the Democratic Party, he previously served as the 68th United States secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 in the administration of Barack Obama and represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1985 to 2013. Kerry was the Democratic nominee for president of the United States in the 2004 election, losing to incumbent President George W. Bush.
Kerry grew up as a child of military personnel in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., before attending boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1966, after graduating from Yale University, he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve, ultimately attaining the rank of lieutenant. From 1968 to 1969, during the Vietnam War, Kerry served an abbreviated four-month tour of duty in South Vietnam. While commanding a Swift boat, he sustained three wounds in combat with the Viet Cong, for which he earned three Purple Heart Medals. Kerry was awarded the Silver Star Medal and the Bronze Star Medal for valorous conduct in separate military engagements. After completing his active military service, Kerry returned to the United States and became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He gained national recognition as an anti-war activist, serving as a spokesperson for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization. Kerry testified in the Fulbright Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where he described the United States government's policy in Vietnam as the cause of war crimes.
In 1972, Kerry entered electoral politics as a Democratic candidate for the United States House of Representatives in Massachusetts's 5th congressional district. Kerry won the Democratic nomination but was defeated in the general election by his Republican opponent. He subsequently worked as a radio talk show host in Lowell and as the executive director of an advocacy organization while attending the Boston College School of Law. After obtaining his juris doctor in 1976, Kerry served from 1977 to 1979 as the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, where he tried criminal cases and managed the district attorney's office. After a period in private legal practice, he was elected Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in 1982. In 1984, Kerry was elected to the United States Senate. As a member of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he led a series of hearings investigating narcotics trafficking in Latin America, which exposed aspects of the Iran–Contra affair. He was reelected to additional terms in 1990, 1996, 2002 and 2008.
Kerry won the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2004, alongside vice presidential nominee and North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Kerry campaigned as a critic of Republican President George W. Bush's prosecution of the Iraq War and advocated a liberal domestic policy. He lost the Electoral College and the popular vote by slim margins, winning 251 electors to Bush's 286 and 48.3% of the popular vote to Bush's 50.7%. Kerry remained in the Senate and chaired the Committee on Foreign Relations from 2009 to 2013.
In January 2013, Kerry was nominated by president Barack Obama to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and was confirmed by his Senate colleagues on a vote of 94 to 3. He was U.S. secretary of state throughout the second term of the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. During his tenure, he initiated the 2013–2014 Israeli–Palestinian peace talks and negotiated agreements restricting the nuclear program of Iran, including the 2013 Joint Plan of Action and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In 2015, Kerry signed the Paris Agreement on climate change on behalf of the United States.
At the end of the Obama administration in January 2017, Kerry remained active in public affairs from 2017 to 2021 as a vocal opponent of Obama's successor, President Donald Trump. Kerry returned to government in January 2021, becoming the first person to hold the new position of U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, under Joe Biden.
Early political career :
In 1970, Kerry had considered running for Congress in the Democratic primary against hawkish Democrat Philip J. Philbin of Massachusetts's 3rd congressional district, but deferred in favor of Robert Drinan, a Jesuit priest and anti-war activist, who went on to defeat Philbin. In February 1972, Kerry's wife bought a house in Worcester, with Kerry intending to run against the 4th district's aging thirteen-term incumbent Democrat, Harold Donohue. The couple never moved in. After Republican Congressman F. Bradford Morse of the neighboring 5th district announced his retirement and then resignation to become Under-Secretary-General for Political and General Assembly Affairs at the United Nations, the couple instead rented an apartment in Lowell, so that Kerry could run to succeed him.
Including Kerry, the Democratic primary race had 10 candidates, including attorney Paul J. Sheehy, State Representative Anthony R. DiFruscia, John J. Desmond and Robert B. Kennedy. Kerry ran a "very expensive, sophisticated campaign", financed by out-of-state backers and supported by many young volunteers. DiFruscia's campaign headquarters shared the same building as Kerry's. On the eve of the September 19 primary, police found Kerry's younger brother Cameron and campaign field director Thomas J. Vallely, breaking into where the building's telephone lines were located. They were arrested and charged with "breaking and entering with the intent to commit grand larceny", but the charges were dropped a year later. At the time of the incident, DiFruscia alleged that the two were trying to disrupt his get-out-the vote efforts. Vallely and Cameron Kerry maintained that they were only checking their own telephone lines because they had received an anonymous call warning that the Kerry lines would be cut.
Despite the arrests, Kerry won the primary with 20,771 votes (27.56%). Sheehy came second with 15,641 votes (20.75%), followed by DiFruscia with 12,222 votes (16.22%), Desmond with 10,213 votes (13.55%) and Kennedy with 5,632 votes (7.47%). The remaining 10,891 votes were split amongst the other five candidates, with 1970 nominee Richard Williams coming last with just 1,706 votes (2.26%).
In the general election, Kerry was initially favored to defeat the Republican candidate, former State Representative Paul W. Cronin, and conservative Democrat Roger P. Durkin, who ran as an Independent. A week after the primary, one poll put Kerry 26-points ahead of Cronin. His campaign called for a national health insurance system, discounted prescription drugs for the unemployed, a jobs program to clean up the Merrimack River and rent controls in Lowell and Lawrence. A major obstacle, however, was the district's leading newspaper, the conservative The Sun. The paper editorialized against him. It also ran critical news stories about his out-of-state contributions and his "carpetbagging", because he had only moved into the district in April. Subsequently, released "Watergate" Oval Office tape recordings of the Nixon White House showed that defeating Kerry's candidacy had attracted the personal attention of President Nixon. Kerry himself asserts that Nixon sent operatives to Lowell to help derail his campaign.
The race was the most expensive for Congress in the country that year and four days before the general election, Durkin withdrew and endorsed Cronin, hoping to see Kerry defeated. The week before, a poll had put Kerry 10 points ahead of Cronin, with Durkin at 13%. In the final days of the campaign, Kerry sensed that it was "slipping away" and Cronin emerged victorious by 110,970 votes (53.45%) to Kerry's 92,847 (44.72%). After his defeat, Kerry lamented in a letter to supporters that "for two solid weeks, [The Sun] called me un-American, New Left antiwar agitator, unpatriotic, and labeled me every other 'un-' and 'anti-' that they could find. It's hard to believe that one newspaper could be so powerful, but they were."He later felt that his failure to respond directly to The Sun's attacks cost him the race.
Secretary of State (2013–2017) :
On December 15, 2012, several news outlets reported that President Barack Obama would nominate Kerry to succeed Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, after Susan Rice, widely seen as Obama's preferred choice, withdrew her name from consideration citing a politicized confirmation process following criticism of her response to the 2012 Benghazi attack. On December 21, Obama proposed the nomination, which received positive commentary. His confirmation hearing took place on January 24, 2013, before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, the same panel where he first testified in 1971. The committee unanimously voted to approve him on January 29, 2013, and the same day the full Senate confirmed him on a vote of 94–3. In a letter to Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, Kerry announced his resignation from the Senate effective February 1.
Early Life
John Forbes Kerry was born on December 11, 1943, at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colorado. He is the second of four children born to Richard John Kerry, a U.S. diplomat and lawyer, and Rosemary Forbes, a nurse and social activist. His father was raised Catholic (John's paternal grandparents were Austro-Hungarian Jewish immigrants who converted to Catholicism) and his mother was Episcopalian. He was raised with an elder sister Margaret, a younger sister Diana, and a younger brother Cameron. The children were raised in their father's Catholic faith, and John served as an altar boy.
Kerry was originally considered a military brat, [citation needed] until his father was discharged from the Army Air Corps.[year needed] Kerry lived in Groton, Massachusetts his first year and Millis, Massachusetts afterwards before moving to the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C. at age seven, when his father took a spot in the Department of the Navy's Office of General Counsel and soon became a diplomat in the State Department's Bureau of United Nations Affairs.
As members of the Forbes and Dudley–Winthrop families, his maternal extended family enjoyed great wealth. Kerry's parents themselves were upper-middle class, and a wealthy grand-aunt paid for him to attend elite boarding schools such as Institut Montana Zugerberg in Switzerland. Through his maternal ancestry, Kerry also descends from Rev. James McGregor who was among the first 500 Scots-Irish immigrants to Boston Harbor in the 18th century.
At the age of ten, Kerry's father took a position as the U.S. Attorney for Berlin. When Kerry was twelve, he crossed into the Soviet Occupation Zone to visit Hitler's bunker and ride through the Brandenburg Gate. If Kerry had been captured, it would have caused an international incident.
In 1957, his father was stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Oslo, Norway, and Kerry was sent back to the United States to attend boarding school. He first attended the Fessenden School in Newton, Massachusetts, and later St. Paul's School in Concord, New Hampshire, where he learned skills in public speaking and began developing an interest in politics. Kerry founded the John Winant Society at St. Paul's to debate the issues of the day; the Society still exists there. In 1960, while at St. Paul's, he played bass in a minor rock band called The Electras with six of his classmates. The band had about five hundred copies of one album printed in 1961, which they sold some of at dances at the school; it was made available on streaming platforms many years later.
A young John Kerry (in white) aboard the yacht of President John F. Kennedy, in August 1962
In 1962, Kerry attended Yale University, majoring in political science and residing in Jonathan Edwards College. By that year, his parents returned to Groton. While at Yale, Kerry briefly dated Janet Auchincloss, the younger half-sister of First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy. Through Auchincloss, Kerry was invited to a day of sailing with then-President John F. Kennedy and his family.
Kerry played on the varsity Yale Bulldogs men's soccer team, earning his only letter in his senior year. He also played freshman and junior varsity hockey and, in his senior year, junior varsity lacrosse. In addition, he was a member of the Psi Upsilon fraternity and took flying lessons.
In his sophomore year, Kerry became the chairman of the Liberal Party of the Yale Political Union, and a year later he served as president of the union. Amongst his influential teachers in this period was Professor H. Bradford Westerfield, who was himself a former president of the Political Union. His involvement with the Political Union gave him an opportunity to be involved with important issues of the day, such as the civil rights movement and the New Frontier program. He also became a member of Skull and Bones Society, and traveled to Switzerland through AIESEC Yale.
Under the guidance of the speaking coach and history professor Rollin G. Osterweis, Kerry won many debates against other college students from across the nation. In March 1965, as the Vietnam War escalated, he won the Ten Eyck prize as the best orator in the junior class for a speech that was critical of U.S. foreign policy. In the speech he said, "It is the spectre of Western imperialism that causes more fear among Africans and Asians than communism and thus, it is self-defeating."
Kerry graduated from Yale with a bachelor of arts degree in 1966. Overall, he had lackluster grades, graduating with a cumulative average of 76 over his four years. His freshman-year average was a 71, but he improved to an 81 average for his senior year. He never received an "A" during his time at Yale; his highest grade was an 89.
Education
- Graduated - Yale University
- law degree - Boston College Law School
Career
- United States - Special Presidential Envoy for Climate
Recognition
Germany: Grand Cross 1st class of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany
France: Grand Officer of the Legion of Honour