Aristocracy in America, the case study on John Forbes Kerry

John Forbes Kerry is a study in aristocracy in America founded on birth and wealth, both of which he has acquired from others. He is a member of a tiny elite in this country that attempts to convey it has a unique pedigree. He is aloof because he has lived a life of separateness and he has been made to believe he is superior to the average citizen. Most of Mr. Kerry's "pedigree" has been widely known for some time: the families Forbes, Winthrop, Thorne, Stimson and most recently, Heinz. What is not as well known is his lineage to Fritz and Ida Kohn, from a Moravian village named Horni Besenov, once called Bennisch, near the Polish border. That their story became fully known only in 2002 as the result of an initiative of a Boston Globe reporter begs the question as to whether their origins did not fit well with Senator Kerry's image of himself. If so, then one wonders what he really thinks about the rest of us.

June 2, 2004

Addendum

They're smart. They're brave. They've got a great sense of humor. Don't ya just love 'em!

"Jon Karry" jokes being passed around the villes of Iraq gotta be among the funniest in the world. No one, repeat no one can construct and tell a joke better than the American GI. (110106)

Phil Brennan, writing "There's something missing there" for newsmax.com, puts his finger on a most salient point for all Americans. He wrote this:

“When F. Scott Fitzgerald told Ernest Hemingway that the rich are different than you and me, Hemingway agreed, because, ‘They have more money.’”

There are important issues associated with the distribution of income and wealth in this country, and in others. Researchers broadly agree that the gap between rich and poor has grown since the 1970s.

But not many of us talk about an area where there is an important sociological difference between people in this country, the aristocracy of America. We should.

Thomas Jefferson thought about it. In a letter to John Adams of October 28, 1813, Mr. Jefferson said he agreed with Adams’ assessment that there is a “natural aristocracy among men.” He said, “The grounds of this are virtue and talents.”

Jefferson also talked about an “artificial aristocracy, founded on wealth and birth, without either virtue or talents.”

The idea that aristocrats are defined by virtue and talents is quite arguable. The idea that there is a group of people "founded on wealth and birth" who see themselves as aristocrats is real in this country, and it is this idea that we wish to pursue in this case study of John Forbes Kerry, senator from Massachusetts, a man running for the presidency of the US.

Spanish Crown Prince Felipe of Bourbon and his wife Princess of Asturias Letizia Ortiz toast next to Juan Carlos of Spain and Queen Sofia during the wedding reception at the Royal Palace in Madrid. Photo credit: Ballesteros, AFP

The notion of aristocracy is mostly associated with Western Europe. If you paid any attention to the recent royal wedding in Spain, you would have seen nearly all Europe’s royalty and aristocracy there, along with some Americans, including the president of the World Bank.

World Bank President James Wolfensohn (R) and his wife, Americans, arrive at the Torrejon airbase in Madrid, May 21, 2004 to attend the wedding of Spanish Crown Prince Felipe and his fiancee and future princess Letizia Ortiz. Photo credit: Dani Cardona, Reuters.

Many of us think we are without an aristocracy in the US. The truth is, however, that the majority of our Founding Fathers were aristocrats. They had power, money, social standing, and they could point to family bloodlines. Indeed, the Founding Fathers fomented a revolution that was fought mostly by commoners. Mostly "Average Joes" have fought all the wars for this country.

Phil Brennan, mentioned at the opening, suggests that most aristocrats in the US have obtained that wealth not from their own work, but rather from “the exertions of long dead ancestors.” Brennan calls this group of people a “tiny elite” that emotes a “unique pedigree.” He comments:

“There is nothing quite like these people. Unlike the moneyed class whose great wealth sets them apart, this small group of native aristocrats does not regard wealth as a point of pride. Ancestry is everything, so much so that being poor as a church mouse fails to banish one from the company of those born to the manor.

“But the thing that really sets these people apart is…there is something missing in their makeup …It is that sense of separateness and superiority that at once provide advantages denied to the overwhelming majority of Americans, while at the same time depriving them of any real understanding of what ordinary life in this nation is all about, or the nature of the lives of their fellow Americans. And that’s the key ingredient of what is missing in their makeup.”

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) is running for president of the US. He presents an interesting case study of aristocracy in our country.

Senator Kerry’s full name is John Forbes Kerry, interestingly, initials “JFK.” His father is Richard Kerry, a first generation American.

Richard’s father died when he was six, so he grew up largely without a father. We are going to come back to Richard's father, John's grandfather, later. Richard's family at the time of his father’s death was not at all wealthy. Nonetheless, the family was able to assemble enough money to send him to Yale and then on to Harvard Law School. He joined the Army Air Corps during WWII and became a test pilot. This photo of Richard was provided to AP courtesy of John Kerry. He then moved his family to Washington, worked in the Department of the Navy’s Office of the General Counsel, and then achieved his goal of getting a job with the State Department’s Bureau of United Nations affairs as the fledgling UN began to form. He would spend a great deal of time in Europe, first participating in the rehabilitation of post-war Germany, the development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and finally served as a chief political officer at the American Embassy Oslo. In between, he also served as an aide to the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. History says Richard was a bit of a maverick, a critic of government, and an avid foreign policy aficionado.

Richard married Rosemary Forbes, whose background was quite different. This photo of Rosemary was provided to AP courtesy of John Kerry.

She was born in Paris in 1913, the daughter of James Grant Forbes. This family can trace its roots to the marriage of a Scotsman named Solvathius Forbes to Maravilla, daughter of King Gregory the Great, in 870 AD. We’ll not go through the genealogy except to say that Rosemary’s father was born in Shanghai, China, where his family, from Boston, had amassed a fortune from the opium trade and merchant banking. James was a successful international lawyer and banker.

Perhaps as important, James Grant Forbes married Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, who came from a family with deep roots in Massachusetts history going back to John Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony (photo is of a painting of John Winthrop by Van Dyke, courtesy of Images of American Political History). So it is with Rosemary Forbes that we see some signs of aristocracy in the Kerry lineage. You will learn later that Richard’s lineage had no such signs.

A point that might be made here is that Richard married into the Forbes and Winthrop families, families with a long and proud ancestry filled with wealth. You will see more of this "marrying into" the ancestry as we move forward with the senator.

John Kerry in Yale debate team photograph. Photo courtesy of Boston Globe, in its special project, "John F. Kerry, a candidate in the making," by Mike Kranish, June 15, 2003

Let’s now come to John Forbes Kerry, the first son of Richard and Rosemary Forbes Kerry. He was raised a Roman Catholic, and graduated from Yale in 1966 with a BA in Political Science. As is well known, he joined the Navy, became an officer, and served in Vietnam. He separated from the Navy in 1970.

While at Yale, he met a 19 year old woman named Julia Stimson Thorne, who was the twin sister of his best friend, David Thorne. Her lineage can be traced back to the 17th century to William Thorne who arrived in America from France in 1638. Thorne's relatives include Henry Stimson, the secretary of state under President Hoover and secretary of war under Presidents Roosevelt and Truman. The family subsequently established roots in New York and Philadelphia. Her family consisted of bankers, merchants, doctors, railroad people, stockbrokers, philanthropists, and even the US Marine Corps. Her father was a banker.

Phil Brennan describes her lineage this way:

“Massachusetts is the locus of one branch of the native aristocracy, Long Island's Suffolk County is the other. Julia Thorne, John Kerry's discarded first wife, is a member of one of the Suffolk County elite families, a small group who have been clinging to the shores of the Great South Bay in communities such as Bay Shore, the Islips, and Oakdale. In his meticulously researched book, 'Along the Great South Bay,’ Harry W. Havemeyer, a certified member of the Suffolk aristocracy, catalogues their ancestry, which runs back to earliest colonial times.”

As said earlier, Julia Thorne met Kerry when he was at Yale. She was 19. He graduated, joined the Navy, served in Vietnam, and maintained a relationship. On his separation from the Navy in 1970, they were married. She was 26, and an Episcopalian. We have not been able to pin down for sure that their wedding was a Catholic wedding. We have seen reports that it was, and Mr. Kerry later sought an annulment of this union from the Church, which seems to underscore that it was. However, we have also seen wedding announcements in the press at the time that said they were married at the Thorne family estate. Traditionally, the Catholic Church demands that the marriage ceremony be in a church, but perhaps their diocese made an exception or had different rules, or had different rules for Mr. Kerry only.

The "Catholic" questions are relevant to this discussion, in large part because Senator Kerry has always emphasized that he is a Catholic and because being a Catholic was important in Boston society. Indeed, the US press has long labeled Kerry a "Boston Brahmin" because of his aristocratic Catholic roots.

Their wedding has been described as “glittering.” It was important enough to make the New York Times, which wrote:

"Miss Julia Stimson Thorne, whose ancestors helped to shape the American republic in its early days, and John Forbes Kerry, who wants to help steer it back from what he considers a wayward course, were married this afternoon at the 200-acre Thorne family estate (on Long Island).”

The article noted that Miss Thorne's cream-colored dress had been worn by her ancestor, Catherine Peartree-Smith, who married Elias Boudinot IV, who served as president of the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation. The story noted, "Alexander Hamilton was best man at that wedding and among those present was George Washington.”

Ms. Thorne’s family was reportedly worth $300 million.

Mr. Kerry ran for Congress in 1972 from the Lowell, Massachusetts area. His wife, Julia, participated in the run for office. He was badly beaten. His anti-Vietnam protests did not sit well with voters, no matter what medals he had won. There was also much written about his shopping for districts from which to run, having thought about three, and then finally selecting Lowell. It was by all accounts a nasty election. Mrs. Kerry did not like politics.

With this loss in hand, he attended Boston College Law School, graduated with a Doctorate of Jurisprudence (JD) in 1976, and was admitted to the Bar that same year. John and Julia had two daughters while he attended law school, Alexandra and Vanessa.

Following law school, he became a prosecutor for Middlesex County, Massachusetts, the largest county in the state. The district attorney at the time was John Droney. Droney earlier had served as the Cambridge coordinator for John F. Kennedy’s first race for Congress, in 1946; became district attorney in 1959; and held on to the office for the subsequent two decades. Droney, however, suffered from Lou Gehrig’s disease (ALS) and in 1978 promoted Kerry to be his first assistant, as the story goes, because Kerry presented a first-class image for Droney..

Reporting for New Yorker in May 2004, in an article entitled "Kerry's Trials," Jeffrey Toobin said that it was unusual for such a new and young lawyer to be promoted so quickly to this position. Toobin quoted John Markey, a colleague of Kerry’s during this period, saying this:

“John was not from the same socioeconomic background as most of the other prosecutors, that’s for sure. Most people came from local communities. They were kids who worked their way through Suffolk law school or maybe night law school. To become first assistant, traditionally, you had to pay your dues and work your way up.”

There are varying accounts about what Kerry did in this job, and we will not belabor them here. Droney ran a successful election in 1978, and Kerry did not see a great future in remaining as Droney’s first assistant, so he left. In 1979, he joined with a colleague at the DA’s office, Roanne Sragow, to open a law firm called Kerry & Sragow.

A high visibility murder case broke for them in 1982, good timing as Kerry was running in a five-way primary for lieutenant governor. He won and was placed on the ticket with Michael Dukakis. Together, they won the governor’s house.

Kerry and his wife, Julia, sport 1982 campaign buttons

It was right after the election of 1982 that Mr. Kerry and his wife, Julia, separated. They divorced in 1988. It is not our purpose to get into the details of what went wrong here. Julia Thorne has written two books published in the 1990s about her struggles with depression and divorce. One, entitled, You’re Not Alone: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey Through Depression, was published in 1994; the second, A Change of Heart: Words of Experience and Hope for the Journey Through Divorce, was published in 1996. In both books, Ms. Thorne describes how distasteful she found being a “political wife.” We’ll leave it at that.

There are two aspects to this event that we do find curious, however.

First, there has been a great deal written about Mr. Kerry's infidelity between the time he separated from Ms. Thorne and the time the divorce became final, oft times with women of ancestry, wealth or contemporary fame, or all of that. The infidelity is one issue. Being unfaithful to his lawful wife during a separation when she was dealing with tough bouts of depression and was raising his two young girls is quite another.

Perhaps more curious, Kerry filed with his Catholic diocese for an annulment. He did this in 1997, two years after he had remarried and eight years after he achieved a civil divorce from Ms. Thorne. We have not been able to confirm for sure whether he obtained the annulment or not, but the evidence we have seen indicates he did. If he did, we do not know when the Church granted it.

We’re skipping a bit ahead of our timeline here, but this annulment issue is not trivial. Seeking an annulment from the Catholic Church for most people is a time-consuming and intrusive process. Ms. Thorne initially objected to the process in a most vigorous and public way, but eventually cooperated with it. But let’s set all that aside.

Instead, let's focus on Catholic doctrine. The Church does not recognize a civil divorce. Once married, always married is the rule. While Mr. Kerry had a legal civil divorce in hand prior to marrying his second wife, the Church would not recognize that divorce from his first wife and therefore would not recognize the second marriage, because the first marriage had not be annulled. The Church would recognize the second marriage, in this case to Teresa Heinz, if the first were annulled. That would likely have been important to Mrs. Heinz, since she was a Catholic, some say an avid Catholic..

Even though Kerry obtained a divorce from Julia Thorne and later married Teresa Heinz, the Church would consider him still married to Julia Thorne and not to Teresa Heinz because his marriage to Thorne was not annulled. In addition, without this annulment, and given his marriage to Teresa Heinz, the Church would deny him and Teresa Heinz access to the sacraments, such as communion. In effect, in the eyes of the Church, Teresa Heinz could not be married to Mr. Kerry because Mr. Kerry was still married to Julia Thorne. Kerry apparently disregarded all this, married a second time any way, but then decided he needed an annulment from Julia Thorne and filed for such in 1997, some nine years after divorcing her.

Many people might contend that none of this is important. We disagree. First, the annulment process is intensive, and in fairness to Ms. Thorne, anyone would find it very hard and depressing to dig up all the facts of a failed marriage, especially nine years after the fact. That Ms. Thorne was already fighting off rough bouts of depression would just make her situation worse.

It is also important to recognize that to get this annulment, Mr. Kerry would have to level a bill of particulars to justify the annulment, which might well include a bill of particulars against Ms. Thorne. The annulment process is a private one, and should remain so. But it is natural to be curious about what Mr. Kerry's justification might have been to seek the annulment from Julia Thorne.

From a doctrinal standpoint, a Catholic annulment, or a declaration of nullity or invalidity, is a statement of fact, by the Catholic Church, that a valid marriage never existed. The annulment process says, “from the very beginning, there wasn't what was necessary for this relationship to be called a marriage.” Assuming his annulment petition were approved, that means he presented supporting rationale that argued successfully that no actual marriage occurred in the eyes of the Church between John Kerry and Julia Thorne. As we have said, this is a private matter, but there is nothing obvious to those of us on the outside that would seem to support such a conclusion. We'll probably never know. In the context of our theme about ancestry, the elite and power, and knowing the history of the Catholic Church in Boston, we have to wonder whether the Church bent the rules for Mr. Kerry and Teresa-Heinz Kerry because of their money, power and pedigree.

In 1997, Ms. Thorne told the Boston Globe the following:

“(The annulment request) was disrespectful to me…and devoid of any sense of humanity of what this means to me and the children. I cannot look my children in the eyes or stand before them with integrity and know in my heart that I have contributed in any way to a process that invalidates and nullified the union from which they were created.”

Let’s get back to our timeline. Kerry was elected lieutenant governor in 1982, served only two years in this office, and then ran for the US Senate, filling the seat vacated by Paul Tsongas, and won in 1984. He has been the junior senator from Massachusetts since.

Now fast-forward to 1990. Senator Kerry attended an Earth Day rally also attended by Senator John Heinz III (R-PA). Senator Heinz introduced Kerry to his wife, Teresa Heinz. The next year, in 1991, Senator Heinz died in an airplane crash when the chartered airplane carrying him to Philadelphia crashed into a helicopter. In 1992, Senator Kerry ran into Teresa Heinz again at an Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. President George H.W. Bush had sent her there to represent US non-government organizations (NGOs). Kerry and Teresa Heinz began dating in 1993 and were married in 1995.

There is much to address here in the context of our theme, American aristocracy.

Let’s start with Teresa Heinz, shown in this photo courtesy of Wilkipedia.com. She was born on October 5, 1938, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, in Lourenco Marques (now named Maputo), Mozambique, of Portuguese parents, when Mozambique was a Portuguese colony. Her father was an expatriate doctor who ran a cancer clinic in Mozambique. The family fled in 1975 after the Portuguese withdrawal from Mozambique, which was followed almost immediately by a war between the new Marxist-Maoist Government of Mozambique and South African and Rhodesian insurgents. Reports we have seen indicate that her family lost almost everything.

Teresa’s father was Dr. Jose Simoes Ferreira, Jr., a tropical disease specialist. His wife, Teresa’s mother, was Irene Thierstein. (Family portrait courtesy of Wilkipedia.com)

Teresa attended a boarding school on South Africa, and in 1960 earned her bachelor’s degree in romance languages and literature from the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Upon graduation, she left Africa, went to Geneva, Switzerland where she did graduate studies at the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva and earned her advanced degree in 1963. She remained in Geneva as an interpreter and met Senator John Heinz on a tennis court in Geneva in 1963. Heinz was working at a Swiss bank during his summer break from the Harvard Business School. They ended up marrying in 1966. Teresa came to the US then, her first visit to the US. We believe she became an American citizen around this time.

Most Americans are familiar with the name “Heinz.” They are the ketchup people. H.J. Heinz founded the company in 1869. He was Senator Heinz’s grandfather. Senator Heinz, shown in this photo courtesy of Carnegie Mellon University Libraries, attended Yale and graduated with a history degree in 1960. In 1963, he graduated from Harvard Business School with an MBA. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1971, serving Pennsylvania's 18th district, and was elected to the Senate in 1976, winning re-elections in 1982 and 1988.

The point to be made in the context of our theme is that Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, Portuguese by birth, a UN translator by vocation, married into the Heinz family, and with that marriage came the family name, its high standing in the US, and its enormous wealth.

Senator Heinz had earlier inherited control over his family’s foundations. Mrs. Heinz was offered the chance to fill her husband’s vacant seat in the Senate, but refused. Instead of taking the senator’s seat in Congress, she was offered and accepted the chairs of The Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies which her deceased husband had been handling. She is also said to have inherited $500 million for her personal use.

There is a great deal written favorable and critical of how Teresa Heinz has been allocating Heinz philanthropic money. These positive ratings and criticisms are worth studying, but they are not part of what we wish to pursue, so we will not discuss them.

The point we wish to highlight is that Senator John Forbes Kerry, with his Forbes lineage that is tied to the Winthrop family as well, first married Julia Thorne, whose family had $300 million and whose lineage could be traced back to the 17th century and a family that became an American success story. That marriage apparently suffered from the rigors of Mr. Kerry’s political aspirations and was severed, first through separation, then divorce, and then through Catholic Church annulment. Mr. Kerry’s second marriage was to Teresa Heinz, a foreign-born UN translator five years his senior who married into the Heinz family and its fortunes. At the time of Kerry’s marriage to her, she controlled key elements of that family’s enormous philanthropic organization and herself was worth $500 million.

Ancestry and access to wealth clearly have been an important part of John Forbes Kerry's life.

What we have presented up until now is widely known by those who pay attention to the subject. There is a great deal written about the subject. We have simply summarized it. We believe that the case is very clear that ancestry and access to wealthy people are central to Senator Kerry's life's experience, and they are therefore central to the man.

It turns out that there is a crucial part of the story, however, that came to be known in the public sphere only recently. It is the story of John Forbes Kerry's grandfather, Richard Kerry's father. We said earlier we wanted to talk about him. Now is the time to do that.

Frederick Kerry was that man.

Konigen Luise, built in 18971 for North German Lloyd, German flag, the ship on which Fritz Kohn and his wife Ida sailed to America. Photo and data courtesy of Ellis Island Foundation

Frederick Kerry's name was actually Fritz Kohn. He was born to Jewish parents in Prussia. He changed his name to Frederick Kerry in 1902 and made his way to the United States in 1905. When he and his family arrived at Ellis Island, he described the family as Germans from Austria. Passenger records available on-line through the Ellis Island Foundation reflect that passenger Frederick Kerry, whose ethnicity was Austria German, and whose place of residence was Vienna, Austria, arrived in the US at the age of 32 on May 18, 1905 aboard the Konigen Luise from its point of departure, Genoa, Liguria, Italy. Ida Kerry, his 28 year old wife, came as well, logged in with the same data as Frederick.

By all accounts, Frederick and Ida were faithful Catholics their entire lives in the US. This was common for people from the region from which they came. Many were non-believers anyway, and they saw status in being Catholic. In the US, they raised their children as Catholics. Frederick is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Brookline, near Boston. The family originally lived in Chicago, and Frederick became a fairly successful businessman. The family moved to Boston and once again his business seemed to work well. However, by 1921 Frederick was despondent and reportedly bankrupt. He committed suicide in Boston in 1921, leaving behind very little material wealth.

In the 1980s, Senator Kerry learned that Frederick’s wife, John’s grandmother, Ida, was Jewish. It was not until the late 1990s that Richard (shown in his later years in this photo, courtesy of Boston Globe, in its special project, "John F. Kerry, a candidate in the making," by Mike Kranish, June 15, 2003), stricken with cancer, told John that Frederick had committed suicide. But Richard reportedly never told John that Grandfather Frederick was a Jew. It was not until 2002 that John Kerry learned that Frederick was born a Jew. This news came to him as the result of research begun by a Boston Globe reporter named Michael Kranish, who enlisted the help of prominent genealogist Felix Gundacker who, in turn, sought the help of Jiri Stibor, a Czech with ready access to mounds and mounds of musty files and archives.

John Kerry was aware that his mother was Jewish by birth, and had a hunch that his grandfather Frederick was as well, because he made some limited efforts to trace him during European trips. But it was not until he was told by Kranish in 2002 that he learned the details. According to Kranish, Kerry’s response was this:

"This is amazing...fascinating to me. This is incredible stuff. I think it is more than interesting; it is a revelation....It has a big emotional impact, because it obviously raises questions: I want to know what happened, why did they do this, what were they thinking, what was the thought process, and why, once they got over here, they never talked about it."

It is hard to understand why Senator Kerry did not know about these things earlier. He certainly had the resources to get the whole story on his own, especially when he learned of his grandmother's background. But from his own remarks in 2002, he surely seems in the dark, and knows precious little. One is compelled to ask why.

John Kerry watches the America's Cup race on the USS Joseph P. Kennedy in 1962. Photo credit: Robert Knudsen, White House, courtesy JFK Library and Boston Globe, in its special project, "John F. Kerry, a candidate in the making," by Mike Kranish, June 15, 2003

Our going-in assumption is that the Fritz and Ida Kohn lineage did not fit well with John Forbes Kerry’s image of himself and the tiny group of elite that he was afforded by his mother, Rosemary Forbes of the Forbes and Winthrop lineage; by his first wife, Julia Thorne of the Thorne lineage and wealth; and by his second wife, who married into the Heinz family, and ended up with $500 million and access to many millions more.

You might be interested to know in closing that Teresa-Heinz Kerry has not done much for the people of Mozambique, and has not returned. She has said she is concerned the money would not be managed properly. John Murphy, writing "Teresa Heinz Kerry grew up in Mozambique," published on February 24, 2004 in the Baltimore Sun, said this:

"The cancer clinic that Heinz Kerry's father founded in Maputo is still open today. The manicured lawns are overgrown with weeds, the radiology equipment is long broken, leaving the patients with no treatment choice other than chemotherapy.

"Last week, a toddler with a facial tumor the size of a baseball was wandering the hallways. He is one of 16 children at the clinic suffering from cancer who lack adequate treatment, said Laura Velouro, 53, a nurse who also once worked with Heinz Kerry's father.

"Her family's childhood home is also still standing overlooking the Indian Ocean, next to the Ministry of Defense. It is used for office space.

"Heinz Kerry's decision to not return despite clearly having the means to do so is not unusual among many former residents of Mozambique. 'They have idealized memory of history,' says Marta Vilar Rosales, 34, an anthropologist from the University of Lisbon studying the personal histories of Portuguese colonialists. 'These people don't want to lose the idealist view of what happened to the country. They wouldn't be happy to come here.'"

Perhaps these people in Mozambique just don't fit Heinz Kerry's mold either.

Family members of a woman with AIDS pose for a photo outside the woman's hut in Mozambique. Making HIV positive pregnant women the focus of HIV/AIDS treatment programs in Africa has proven the most effective way to battle the pandemic on the continent, African health ministers heard at a conference in Rome. Photo credit: Alexander Joe, AFP

Sadly, we are left to agree with the thrust of Phil Brennan's comments when it comes to Senator Kerry. In Kerry's case, ancestry and wealth are everything and the likelihood is very high that something is missing in his makeup. That "something" most probably is that he has very little "real understanding of what ordinary life in this nation is all about, or the nature of the lives of (his) fellow Americans."

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Opening cartoon credit: Robert Ariail, The State, South Carolina, presented by Daryl Cagle's Professional Cartoonists Index, Slate

Here's a look at the homes available to Senator Kerry and his wife, Teresa, courtesy of AP and the Washington Times and Urban Legends

A $4.7 million mansion in Georgetown,, Washington, DC

A $6.9 million townhouse on Louisburg Square in the Beacon Hill section of Boston.

A $9.2 million summer home on the Nantucket waterfront on Brant Point.

A $3.7 million estate in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania

A $5 million ski lodge in Ketchum, Idaho, which is a 15th-century English barn that was disassembled and imported to the U.S.