The New Republic

High school reunions are inherently unkind. But, for John Kerry, the
fortieth gathering of the St. Paul's class of 1962 was particularly
bad. The key episode took place in a Concord, New Hampshire,
restaurant, not far from the school itself. Kerry wasn't at the
dinner. That, however, didn't prevent him from looming over the
evening. Toward the meal's end, the class president, a Boston
lawyer named Lloyd Macdonald, rose to give a toast. He wanted to
celebrate his classmates who had devoted their careers to public
service. As he ticked off the names--FBI Director Robert Mueller;
the State Department's top lawyer, Will Taft; federal Judge Alvin
A. Schall--the sexagenarians bathed the room in loud applause. But,
when Macdonald uttered the name of the junior senator from
Massachusetts, the response was somewhat different. According to
witnesses, only scattered boos broke the silence.Kerry didn't leave boarding school a popular man. Forty-two years
after the fact, many of his classmates still mock him. They chide
him for being a teachers' pet and a selfish hockey player. ("What
you need to remember," says Macdonald, "is that John never passed
[the puck].") In fact, they dislike him so much that they've
frequently helped his political opponents. Haven Pell, a St. Paul's
graduate and Washington financial adviser who raised cash for
William Weld's 1996 race against Kerry, told me, "It was very
interesting, the number of the St. Paul's class of 1962 who went
out of their way to be supportive of Bill Weld."

High school social status, of course, should be meaningless in a
presidential race. But, in at least one way, Kerry's boarding-school
years do matter: They contradict the conventional portrait of him.
According to most newspaper profiles, Kerry is the ultimate
establishmentarian. "Mr. Kerry fit right in with the Northeastern
elite," John Tierney wrote last month in The New York Times. On
paper, this is certainly true. Kerry's middle name is Forbes, as in
the Forbes shipping fortune. Winthrop blood ties him to the earliest
days of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. And, at every stage in life,
the establishment has seemingly renewed his membership; first by
admitting him to one of its fanciest boarding schools, then by
accepting him to Yale, and then again by tapping him to join Skull
%amp% Bones.

But, for all these patrician trappings, Kerry has never been fully
accepted into the blue-blood world. In fact, during his time at St.
Paul's, a cradle of the old wasp aristocracy, Kerry was an
outsider: an unwelcome Catholic among high-church Episcopalians;
the son of a Foreign Service officer and, thus, a relative poor
boy; an earnest liberal among rock-ribbed Republicans. "He felt
like he didn't fit," says Kerry's best boarding-school friend,
Daniel Barbiero. In response to his estrangement, Kerry followed
the pattern set by generations of immigrants. He became an
ambitious, hard-working striver--the opposite of the ideal of
effortlessly achieving aristocracy. Douglas Brinkley writes in his
biography of Kerry, Tour of Duty, "Given [the] class-consciousness
of St. Paul's School, Kerry felt especially compelled to prove
himself." It's this work ethic and craving for approval, shaped by
his inability to easily assimilate into the elite, that has come to
define Kerry's persona and his candidacy.

St. Paul's is one of the few places in the United States where a
Forbes scion could feel like an outsider. The school was born in
1856, about 70 years after nearby Exeter and Andover academies had
begun accepting students. But, because the older schools were
founded in revolutionary times, they had cultivated a distinctly
American ethos, wrapping themselves in democratic rhetoric. St.
Paul's, on the other hand, bore all the marks of Henry James's and
Edith Wharton's times. Above all, it had a Jamesian fetish for
English aristocracy. Unlike the academies, St. Paul's explicitly
affiliated itself with the Episcopal Church. (For many years, the
school's catalogue began, "St. Paul's is a church school ... .")
English nomenclature, borrowed directly from Eton and Harrow,
penetrated the institution's every cranny. St. Paul's doesn't have
"eleventh and twelfth grade"; it has "fifth and sixth form." It is
led by a rector, not a headmaster. For a time, as baseball was
emerging as the national pastime in the latter half of the
nineteenth century, St. Paul's forbid the game, only permitting
students to play cricket. In other words, even by the standards of
Choate, the Knickerbocker Club, and Porcellian, St. Paul's was a
stuffy place.

By the time Kerry arrived at the school in 1958, the old wasp
establishment was coming under assault. World War II had given
birth to a new spirit of egalitarianism. But that spirit had hardly
begun to infiltrate St. Paul's. In his 1961 annual report, the
school's rector assured alumni that he hadn't introduced
meritocratic admissions standards: "We have not sought to comb the
country for the very ablest boys attainable nor have we used
scholarship funds to entice the unusually able boys to our school."
And it showed. John Kerry's class hardly represented America. It
had no Jews--at least, no self-identified Jews--or African
Americans. His schoolmates included a descendent of President
William Howard Taft, an heir to the Corning glass fortune, and a
host of kids with names like Whitney and Pierpont. Barbiero arrived
at the school from Far Rockaway, New York. Introducing himself to a
classmate, Chad Floyd, he mentioned his Long Island roots: "He
said, 'Long Island? I have a relative who has a parkway named after
him on Long Island,' which is the William Floyd Parkway. And Phil
Heckscher [another new classmate] told me the same. I thought they
were both joking. Two guys in a row who say that they have a parkway
named after them in Long Island? You've got to be kidding."

Kerry may have had a moneyed pedigree, but he didn't have money. By
the time the Forbes family fortune reached his mother, it had been
subdivided into an extremely modest sum. (Kerry's mother, Rosemary,
who trained to be a nurse, was one of eleven children.) Nor was his
father's Foreign Service salary robust enough to foot the school's
exorbitant tuition. Kerry attended St. Paul's thanks to the
beneficence of his childless great-aunt, Clara Winthrop, who
volunteered to cover the costs. "We weren't rich," Kerry's sister
Diana told The Boston Globe last summer. Or, as Joe Klein put it in
The New Yorker, Kerry's family belonged to "a threadbare, erstwhile
aristocracy."

Under most circumstances, and in most U.S. settings, Kerry's shabby
gentility would not have disadvantaged him. But St. Paul's was an
extremely status-conscious place. As Brinkley writes in his
biography, "At St. Paul's, unless you had a lot of money and wore
the right clothes and had parents who belonged to the right clubs,
you could be made to feel inadequate, born on the wrong side of the
tracks." Fitting in--to be a "reg," or regular guy, as the St.
Paul's kids said--meant having the right pair of loafers, the right
Brooks Brothers suit, and the right ring belt. Kerry certainly
dressed the preppy part. But there were obvious ways in which he
could not keep up. While his classmates summered in Europe (or even
took private jets to the Continent for long weekends), Kerry spent
his breaks working as a Teamster in Somerville, Massachusetts, for
the First National Stores, loading food onto trucks. He frequently
borrowed money from friends. And, if his relative poverty weren't
apparent enough, Kerry always had richer classmates issuing
reminders of their bigger bank accounts. Barbiero recounted to me a
symbolic incident. One of Kerry's poorer classmates had carefully
compiled a record collection that was his proudest possession--and
everyone in the school knew it. But a rich classmate couldn't
stomach the satisfaction felt by Kerry's friend, so he ventured
into Concord and bought out the record store. According to
Barbiero, Kerry empathized with the collector. "John was upset
about this and thought it was a nasty thing to do."

Kerry's lack of wealth wasn't all that separated him from his
classmates. As a child, Kerry had been deeply Catholic, serving as
an altar boy and toying with joining the priesthood. At St. Paul's,
it wasn't easy for Kerry to keep his faith. On Sunday mornings, he
would take a taxi into Concord for Mass--and then have to return to
attend two mandatory Episcopal services at school. In other words,
every week, he was forced to remind his classmates of his religious
affiliation. And, given his classmates' attitudes toward
Catholicism, Kerry would probably have preferred to keep his faith
to himself. When Bobby Kennedy attended St. Paul's in 1939, his
mother, Rose, pulled him from the school after only a month because
she couldn't stomach its anti-Catholic ethos. While that attitude
atrophied somewhat, it hadn't entirely disappeared by the late
'50s. Barbiero told me, "There were jokes about Catholics. I had
more than one classmate tell me that 'those people' had their own
clubs and own societies, and they weren't part of our society."

Even though Barbiero wasn't Catholic himself, many classmates simply
assumed he was because of his Italian name. It didn't make for an
easy social life. Together, he'd join Kerry in the study of the
school's chaplain, where they would commiserate over their shared
social exclusion. Kerry responded strongly to his outsider status,
compensating for it by working hard and intensely craving success.
"He acted like Horatio Alger on the make," writes Brinkley,
"believing that the social order should be based on temerity and
merit." Like the character Max Fischer in Rushmore, he went about
St. Paul's founding and joining clubs, from the Concordian Literary
Society to the debating team. He created a political union called
the John Winant Society, where he would deliver earnest perorations
with titles like "The Plight of the Negro." Where most of his
colleagues viewed admission to Harvard and Yale as a fait accompli,
Kerry stressed over his collegiate future. "He desperately wanted to
get into Yale and worked hard to get there," says Barbiero.

Unfortunately for Kerry, his boarding-school comrades regarded
ambition as a cardinal sin. His schoolmate Stanley Resor says, "A
lot of people resented his ambition." Achievement wasn't frowned
upon. But you were supposed to downplay your accomplishments, to
make them look effortless. At Yale, during the blue- blood heyday,
the attitude was symbolized by varsity athletes, who wore their
letter sweaters inside out to de-emphasize their achievement--never
mind that the sweaters' interior stitching kept the letters
perfectly clear to all observers.

So, instead of winning him respect, Kerry's hard work earned him the
derision of his classmates. In fact, St. Paul's created an entire
folklore about Kerry, much of it embellished. More than anything,
they mocked Kerry for styling himself after John Kennedy, imitating
the president's voice and haircut, as well as exploiting his
identical initials. "He signed his papers JFK," says Macdonald.
According to Pell, Kerry would practice writing his initials on his
blue jeans and "just kinda went around telling people that he's
going to be president." What irked so much about this comparison?
To them, this ambitiousness was selfish and self-indulgent. As they
liked to joke, JFK means "Just for Kerry."

These accusations of selfishness trailed Kerry wherever he went,
especially in sports. Kerry's enemies contend he was a disaster in
the hockey rink and on the soccer pitch--a puck and ball hog who
cared more about looking stylish than scoring. Pell says, "You
couldn't get that kid to pass the salt. A ball or puck delivered to
John Kerry was into a black hole. It never came back again." Most
damningly, as Resor describes, Kerry used to take "big rink turns."
Playing hockey requires quickly switching directions on the ice,
shifts that require an expenditure of considerable energy. But this
wasn't Kerry's preferred tactic. Instead, he refrained from
suddenly changing his course and took more circuitous, less
efficient routes to find his way back to the action.

But, despite the prevalence of JFK-fixation and rink-turn stories
among Kerry's classmates, it's not at all clear they're true. Many
of his friends deny he was a selfish player. "He just wasn't a ball
hog," says his soccer teammate Larry Rand. Or consider the JFK
charge. There's no doubt that Kerry had enormous affection for
Kennedy. He represented the Democratic candidate in a class debate.
Outside the school dining hall, during the election year, he would
emphatically make Kennedy's case. (This wasn't a popular argument to
make. In the school's mock elections, Republican presidential
candidates had triumphed in every election after 1860, when St.
Paul's voted against Abraham Lincoln.) But, for all Kerry's Kennedy
worship, it's not clear that he ever went as far as his critics
allege. Almost everyone who mentions Kerry's rampant use of his
initials admits the stories are hearsay. And his friends tell a
very different tale. They testify that Kerry never vocalized his
desire to become Kennedy and never exploited his initials. "I never
heard him talking about being president," says Rand. According to
Barbiero, "It was other people who teased him about the JFK thing;
that was just a coincidence of time and place. Here you got this
young guy very interested in politics, ... and then at the same
time his initials were JFK, and there was hysteria for Kennedy. That
was coincidence, and that was something he had to deal with. But
that wasn't something of his making."

How then to explain the preppy hatred for Kerry? In part, the answer
has to do with the changing times. During the late '50s and early
'60s, the blue bloods' grip on power was coming to an end. For a
long time, St. Paul's and the other New England boarding schools
were the Ivy League's main pipeline. Every year, St. Paul's sent
about half its class to Harvard and Yale. By the end of the '60s,
with the introduction of the SAT and a new democratic spirit in the
admissions offices, that era of dominance had ended. As William F.
Buckley lamented in a 1968 Atlantic piece, "You will laugh, but it
is true that a Mexican-American from El Paso High with identical
scores on the achievement tests, and identically ardent
recommendations from the headmaster, has a better chance of being
admitted to Yale than Jonathan Edwards the Sixteenth from Saint
Paul's School." With his hardworking style, Kerry represented the
new meritocratic ethic, where success wouldn't depend on blood and
charm but the earnest accumulation of achievements. Of course,
Kerry may simply not have been very likeable. But, at least in
part, Kerry was hated because he embodied the emerging reality that
the old insular world could no longer afford to be so insular.

Strangely, the decline of the New England boarding schools' prestige
has hardly diminished their capacity for producing politicians,
from Middlesex's William Weld to St. George's Howard Dean to
Andover's George W. Bush. In fact, the political strength of this
group has a lot to do with their adherence to boarding-school
mores. Instead of acting like "Horatio Alger on the make," they
have embodied the old aristocratic spirit of "effortless
achievement." They've successfully convinced the public that they
are not conventional Washington politicians guided by personal
ambition. During his campaign for Kerry's Senate seat, Weld
famously jumped into the Charles River, highlighting his devil-may-
care attitude toward politics. For his part, Bush has made an art
form of his ability to efface his ambition, even saying during the
2000 campaign that he'd be fine if he lost the race. Inevitably,
this effortless style elicits praise from the press: These
boarding-school pols are "comfortable in their own skin."

While the boarding-school style may lend itself to campaigning, the
striver's style has a decidedly mixed record. A whole other genre of
politicians has been penalized for trying too hard, as Al Gore will
testify. And now the classic gripes about the striver are being
lobbed at Kerry yet again. According to the reporters on the trail,
not to mention the Bush campaign, Kerry's great character flaw is
his ambitiousness, manifesting itself in a willingness to say
whatever it takes to please crowds. The New York Times' David
Halbfinger wrote last month, "[Kerry] may tailor his stands to an
audience or even run away from past positions." By trying too hard
to win audiences, he is said to project a phony persona. As the
political consultant Donna Brazile told The Washington Post last
year, "It's like someone put him in clothes that don't fit."

There's an irony in this criticism of Kerry. In their profiles,
journalists attribute his "aloofness" to his Brahman heritage and
chalk up his "stiffness" to his patrician style. But this diagnosis
misunderstands the true nature of the elite nurtured by places like
St. Paul's. The media actually wants Kerry to become more
patrician, not less; to discover his inner wasp; and to adopt a
carefree attitude. In a way, it's profoundly unfair. He has spent a
lifetime overcoming the St. Paul's ethos. But, now, that's exactly
what's demanded of him.

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