Richard John "Dick" Kerry (July 28, 1915 – July 29, 2000), the father of Senator John Kerry, volunteered as a test pilot for the U.S. Army Air Corps 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. He was raised as a Roman Catholic.

Kerry 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 joined the U.S. Army Air Corps. 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 there.

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, Ala., in January 1941.

Kerry's father, Frederick A. Kerry (born Fritz Kohn), was born in the town of Horni Benesov, 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). The Kerry-Kohns were Jewish, but the family concealed its background upon migrating to the United States, and raised the Kerry children as Catholics. A Czech historian has shown that Ida is a descendant of Sinai Loew, one of three older brothers of Rabbi Judah Loew (1525-August 22, 1609), a famous Kabbalist, philosopher and talmudist known as the Maharal of Prague who some say invented the infamous character of the Golem. 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. 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.

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." Critics of John Kerry describe the book as anti-American.

Richard Kerry was the father of 4 children:

• Margery A. Kerry, b. 11/11/1941
• John Forbes Kerry, b. 12/11/1943
• Diana Kerry, b. 04/16/1947
• Cameron F. Kerry, b. 09/06/1950

External links

• Star Spangled Mirror on Amazon.com ISBN 0847676498
• Kerry's World: Father Knows Best a New Republic column by Frankin Foer on CBSNEWS.com