The Making Of John Kerry

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So at times Kerry and his defenders find themselves reduced to insisting that he had an all-American childhood. "Two years when you're 11 or 12 does not a Swiss education make," says sister Diana tartly. Kerry carefully walks a line between praising his parents for the breadth of his upbringing and acknowledging the price he paid for it. Yes, he admits, 12 years old is young for a child to be sent to boarding school in a foreign country. "I would not do that — I did not do that to my children," he says. "But it taught you a lot of independence. It taught you how to get through, I guess is the word."

That lesson left Kerry with an aura of self-sufficiency — critics would say self-centeredness — that was apparent by the time he was back in the U.S. for prep school and that would shape his choices for years to come: to be an aggressive overachiever in a high school where most kids worked hard at appearing not to work hard, to enlist in a war his father thought was misguided, to protest it when he returned and to build a political career much more as a soloist investigating wrongdoing than as a legislator who knew how to play nice with other Senators and get his bills passed in the process. Even as a campaigner, Kerry sometimes seems all alone, towering above the crowd, speaking in a deadly Washington dialect. That was one reason the arrival of his old Vietnam brothers on the stage helped turn around his fortunes on the way to the Democratic nomination. His Vietnam comrades, like the tight circle of friends he was finally able to form at prep school and college, ultimately gave Kerry a sense of belonging in ways that his earliest years had not.

MAKING FRIENDS ...
One day in 1959, Danny Barbiero, a student at the exclusive St. Paul's School (S.P.S.) in Concord, N.H., dropped by the apartment of his housemaster, the Rev. John Walker. Walker was known among the students for being sensitive and interested in everything, and Barbiero liked to swing by to talk about music. That day, another student was visiting as well. "This is Johnny Kerry," Walker said as he introduced Barbiero. "He's worried because he thinks people don't like him."

Barbiero, an Italian-American kid from Long Island, N.Y., could tell that Kerry was cut from a different cloth than most of their Waspy classmates — which is why they became fast friends. "I liked his serious nature. I liked that he could have his feelings hurt," Barbiero says. "People were hard at St. Paul's. The whole thing was to be casual and sarcastic and nonchalant. Johnny wasn't like that at all. He wasn't sarcastic or mean. He had no use for cliques. He had a very high sense of social fairness."

Bush and Kerry had very different experiences in their respective prep schools. Each arrived as an outsider — Bush as a cocky Texan with an attitude, Kerry as a Catholic in a proudly Episcopal redoubt, a passionate Kennedy Democrat among generally apathetic Republicans. Whereas Kerry (like Bush's father) was a star athlete, playing ice hockey and soccer, Bush founded the stickball league at Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., the one sport designed to be played purely for the fun of it and even by the uncoordinated kids. Kerry established a political debating society; Bush founded a mock political party called the Non-Competitors. Where Kerry is universally described as ultraserious, Bush was a clown, able to do the hard work of lifting spirits, rallying a crowd as an Andover cheerleader, displaying a wicked gift for telling stories and dispensing nicknames. Kerry ultimately found happiness at St. Paul's by gathering a small group of close and like-minded friends. By the time he was a senior, Bush came in second in the vote for big man on campus, and it wasn't by being a genius or a jock; it was by force of personality and his gift for making friends.