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Bush, Kerry both sons of privilege

By Robin Abcarian
Los Angeles Times

KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS John Kerry is shown in this photograph from the 1966 class yearbook at St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where he completed 12th grade.

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Born to a family with deep roots on the Eastern seaboard, a powerful place in U.S. history and blood ties to European royalty, he was pushed out of the nest into a socially competitive boarding school where he often felt out of place. But that school — and his name — would help pave the way into an Ivy League college.

At Yale, he was tapped for the most exclusive secret society. The adventurous, first-born son of a father who was a pilot during World War II, he too learned to fly and served his country during wartime.

His first run at political office was a disaster. Accused of carpetbagging and trading on his famous name, he was thumped badly. But he dusted himself off and went to work. Years later, he would again try his hand at politics. He would succeed, and spectacularly.

Inherited status

	AP President Bush is pictured during his student years at Yale University, which John Kerry also attended.

Now he is running for president of the United States. And that's the curious thing: While this thumbnail biography describes President Bush to a T, it also describes his presumed Democratic rival, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Indeed, the lives of both candidates, painted in broad strokes, are a classic portrait of American privilege. "These people are definitely in the American hereditary upper class," said Gary Boyd Roberts, a Boston genealogist who has traced Bush and Kerry's lineage and discovered they are distantly related (branches of their family trees cross eight times, Roberts said; at the closest point, they are eighth cousins). They also are descended from medieval kings.

How has privilege played out in their lives? Very differently, as it turns out.

Bush, the true social and political aristocrat, has spent much of his life publicly distancing him from his patrician roots, while quietly availing himself of family connections. "Privilege completely and utterly defines George Bush," said his biographer, Texas journalist Bill Minutaglio. "I don't think it's pejorative to point that out."

Kerry, whose family glory lies in an illustrious and historic past, has worked energetically to secure his place in the upper reaches of American society, twice marrying heiresses. "His parents came from modest wealth," said his biographer, historian Douglas Brinkley. "He was always a little cash poor for the milieu he was running around in. He's like the F. Scott Fitzgerald figure looking into that world with one foot in and one foot out."

A "paradox"

Novelist Christopher Buckley, an acerbic social observer who wrote speeches for Bush's father when he was vice president, said of the two political rivals: "Bush set out to distance himself from the world of Eastern establishmentarian privilege. ... The funny thing is that Kerry sort of looks more like the guy who was born with the silver spoon, but economically, his circumstances were far less golden. That's the paradox."

The Bush family, which prizes loyalty, has a nearly genetic aversion to being portrayed as privileged or hifalutin'. The president's grandmother, Dorothy Walker Bush, so disapproved of displays of what she called the "la-de-das" that her son, George Herbert Walker Bush, took to leaving the first-person pronoun out of sentences. That led, some believe, to his famously tortured syntax.

The Bushes are deeply sensitive to any portrayal that implies their success is not due to hard work. No one disputes that the Bush men are hard workers, nor that they have left the family bosom often to make their way. But their triumphs — on Wall Street, in the oil business, in real estate — have gone hand-in-hand with long-standing social and financial connections that have been nurtured and handed down in the family with the sort of loving care that other families take with precious heirlooms.

The Bushes are famous for making friends, and even more important, for keeping them and calling upon them when launching businesses and political campaigns. In their new book, "The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty," Peter and Rochelle Schweizer call this phenomenon "the amazing Bush family money machine."

Although George W. Bush has striven mightily to purge traces of the patrician from his bearing — at Harvard Business School, where he earned an MBA, he chewed tobacco, eschewed opera for country music and wore cowboy boots — his family's illustrious history is an inescapable fact. His grandfather, Prescott Bush, was a U.S. senator from Connecticut; his father, of course, was the 41st president. His younger brother, Jeb, is the governor of Florida. At least three recent Bush biographies contain the word "dynasty."

"I know they have a stated aversion to what I think they call the D-word," Buckley said. "It's a becoming modesty, but as a practical matter ... if it walks like a dynasty, talks like a dynasty and quacks like a dynasty, it seems to me it's a dynasty."

"Dynasty, schmynasty," Jeb once snapped.

Still, the perquisites of growing up in a family named Bush are considerable. George W. Bush was sent to Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., and though a mediocre student was accepted to Yale as an undergraduate, where his grandfather and great uncle were on the board of trustees. When he applied to law school at the University of Texas and, according to biographers, no family strings were pulled, he did not get in. He was accepted by Harvard in 1973, however.

"Being the son of George Herbert Walker Bush, right there, that is helpful," Harvard classmate Nathaniel Butler told Minutaglio.

Kerry and his family are far less familiar to Americans. On his mother's side, Kerry is descended from two important early American families, the Winthrops and the Forbeses.

Pilgrim roots

Pilgrim leader John Winthrop was the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The Forbeses made a fortune in shipping. Kerry's grandfather, James Grant Forbes, was a successful international businessman with a vacation home in Brittany, which is still in the family.

By the mid-early 20th century, much of the wealth had dissipated, but some vestiges remained. Naushon Island, off the coast of Massachusetts, is owned by a Forbes family trust. Kerry also receives a modest amount of money from three family trusts.

Kerry's father, Richard, was the son of a Czech immigrant who changed his name from Kohn to Kerry and converted to Catholicism from Judaism before immigrating to the United States, as The Boston Globe discovered and revealed to Kerry

The Globe also discovered that Kerry's grandfather, a successful businessman, killed himself in a restroom in Boston in 1921, when Kerry's father was 6. The family was left with enough money that Kerry's father was able to attend boarding school at Andover, Yale as an undergraduate and Harvard law school, before he embarked on a career in the foreign service.

John Kerry, one of four children, attended prep schools (in Switzerland, Massachusetts and New Hampshire), lived with his family in Berlin and Oslo, Norway, and spent holidays at the 300-acre Massachusetts estate of his uncle and aunt. A maiden great-aunt, Clara Winthrop, paid for Kerry's tuition. At St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, where Kerry finished 12th grade, he was surrounded by very rich classmates.

"We were comfortable," Kerry told Brinkley. "But by St. Paul's standards, I would never have called myself rich."

"The Bushes have real wealth," Brinkley said. "The Kerrys never saw a million dollars in their life."

Friend of the rich

But Kerry palled around with millionaires. He dated Jacqueline Kennedy's half sister, Janet Auchincloss, the summer before college and was invited sailing with President Kennedy, the boyhood idol whose initials he shares. Kerry during summers sold encyclopedias and loaded trucks, jobs he says he found for himself.

Bush's summer jobs were procured by his father — including work on an oil rig and later a stint in an inner-city mentoring program.

Like their fathers, Kerry and Bush would go to Yale.

Bush did not love Yale. He has blamed his disaffection on the intellectual arrogance he perceived on campus. He graduated in 1968, a time when his well-known father was closely allied with the Nixon administration and the anti-war movement was gaining steam.

Kerry led the debate team at Yale, became president of the Political Union and was tapped, as Bush would be two years later, for Skull and Bones. Many friends understood that he wanted to be president.

"I have always found it very curious that some people hold Kerry's ambition against him," Brinkley said in an interview. "It's what (historian) Richard Hofstadter called 'the anti-intellectual strain in American politics.' ... You are supposed to become an accidental president."

Indeed, some speculate that this is the secret to Bush's success. No one expected him to be president; Jeb was supposed to run, according to family lore. George W. Bush, as many have noted, was a case study in the power of lowered expectations. His protracted boyhood did not truly end until he turned 40, stopped drinking and became a born-again Christian.

Wealth by marriage

While Kerry may not have been born with a silver spoon, he has married into substantial wealth. His first wife, Julia Stimson Thorne, is an heiress who once described her upbringing as "palaces, princesses and privilege." Kerry's second wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, inherited part of the Heinz food-company fortune. Money from both wives has helped Kerry propel his political career.

"Think left, marry right," the novelist Buckley joked.

In contrast, Bush's wife, Laura, was a product of West Texas' middle class. Their marriage has survived at least one rocky period, caused by his drinking.

His subsequent sobriety and his devotion to Christ is the story that Bush has used to define himself, a narrative that in many ways has allowed him to neutralize the role that privilege has played in his life, according to Evan Cornog, whose book "The Power and the Story" examines how presidents craft their personal stories and how voters respond.

"If you look at his life story ... a guy trading off privilege and taking advantage of his father's connections, a wild and not very responsible person, his central story is the renunciation of alcohol," Cornog said. "Sin and redemption. And he's made amazing use of that story."

Bush has avoided references to his privileged life. Kerry seems to have embraced it — although in the decidedly political context of reminding voters he volunteered to serve his country in wartime. "I thought it was important," he says in a recent TV commercial, "when you had a lot of privileges as I had had, to go to a great university like Yale, to give something back to your country."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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