Every Day Is Extra

by John Kerry

  When his mother uprooted the family to Europe, hoping to find a cure for Aunt Milly’s disease, Pa was plunked down in school in Vienna, their first stop. Every day he would take the streetcar to a school where classes were in German. Later he was sent off to several boarding schools in Switzerland, one near St. Moritz and one near Rolle, on Lake Geneva. My father talked fondly of his time at those schools. I imagine they provided something of a family for him. He once showed me a small picture album he kept with photos of his friends at school, their names handwritten in the margin. I never asked him, but I am certain his good memories of that time contributed significantly to my parents’ decision to send Peggy, Cameron—Cam for short—and me to school in Switzerland.

  After the wandering family returned to the States, Pa was enrolled as a sophomore in Phillips Andover Academy and, from there, Yale University, graduating in the class of 1937, which included, among other notables, Potter Stewart, who went on to become an associate justice of the Supreme Court, and Texas oil magnate Perry Bass. I found it interesting that the history of the class of 1937 is entitled “A Rendezvous with Destiny.”

  That destiny seemed to manifest itself quickly. The summer of 1939, before my father’s senior year at Harvard Law, he traveled to Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a small, sleepy French seacoast town in Brittany. The Emerald Coast, as it was known, welcomed vacationers to its beautiful, rocky shore with its interspersed wide beaches during the grande marée—the great tides, when the moon’s pull is at its greatest. This phenomenon produces thirty feet of ocean rise and fall, stranding small sailing boats and fishing vessels on the harbor bottom and exposing miles of sand when the tide goes out. It is the same gravitational onslaught of ocean that sends the sea rushing in to the famous Mont Saint-Michel at the speed of a galloping horse. As kids, we would visit the Cluny Abbey. We would walk out on the sand as far as we were allowed because of the quicksand, and then we would race in as the tide came up, our own game of tag with a powerful force. Later in life, my cousins and I waited expectantly for every grande marée so we could dig in the sand, near the house my mother’s family had there, for small sand eels—lançon—and search for octopuses in the rocks. Nothing will ever adequately describe the sheer pleasure of bare feet curling into the still-wet tidal sand; the wind, warm and soothing, as we would dart among the newly exposed rocks and probe around in holes with long metal hooks, occasionally pulling a live octopus out and turning it inside out before beating it madly with a wooden hammer to soften the meat. Children can get lost for memorable hours in such activities.

  Saint-Briac, France, and Europe more generally had been home for my mother’s extended family since 1912, when my maternal grandparents, James Grant Forbes and Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, moved from Boston. Grandpa was working as a partner at William Blair, where he was involved with Pietro Giannini in the founding of the Bank of America. This was the work that most immediately brought him to a life with one foot in England and one in France. In reality, though, I am convinced it was in his blood.

  Grandpa was born in Shanghai, China, where his father was engaged in business together with a Chinese partner. The Forbes family had long been involved in the China trade, shipping furs, silver, manufactured goods, cloth, wood—whatever would sell in China in return for loads of tea, silk, porcelain and decorative furniture. It was a lucrative trade, though accompanied by dark references to opium as also being part of the cargo. Much of the history of Boston was built on the courage and tenacity of those who went to sea to find riches in far-off lands. Our family boasted many an adventurer who was part of that history.

  Why my maternal grandparents chose to be such longtime expatriates has never been satisfactorily explained to me, and, regrettably, I never explored it as much as I now wish I had. Of course, the 1920s and ’30s were filled with the stories of Americans living a high life in Europe, and many a college student since has been affected by the films and books chronicling that period. Indeed, during my years at Yale, I ran with the bulls in Pamplona and attended many a bullfight in search of Hemingway.

  What I do know is that Grandma embraced the full measure of aristocratic English country life. She had strong (and expensive) tastes and enthusiastically spent money to support the lifestyle she wanted. We children grew up with wonderful stories of our grandparents’ adventures in their young lives—stories that seemed to leap out of the pages of novels and movies. My Forbes grandparents produced four boys and seven girls: James, Jock, Griselda, Eileen, Angela, Rosemary, Ian, Alistair, Iris, Monica and Fiona. Almost Cheaper by the Dozen. Grandpa traveled like crazy for business, but he seems to have returned long enough to get Grandma pregnant, and then off he’d go again for more business, leaving Grandma to cope with this large brood.

  The family lived in two wonderful and well-known English country houses in Surrey: Squerryes Court and Barrow Green.

  During these early years nothing was spared. There were nannies, chambermaids, chauffeurs, gardeners, nursemaids, cooks, butlers and, of course, horses and dogs—multiple dogs! In effect, the children were raised by nannies, which was thought normal among families of means, so parenting was more of an organizational task than a hands-on operation. Nannies would make sure the children took their baths, dressed in their matching pajamas and nightgowns and then presented for their good-night hugs and acknowledgments. They wore made-to-order clothes from London’s best children’s stores, including beautiful velvet capes with their names embroidered in them, each of which later was folded away in the playroom of the restored house my generation was privileged to stay in. We would dress up and play in their no longer wearable or suitable treasures from an earlier age.

  When it came time to go on vacation, Grandma would rent three houses on the Brittany coast of France. The children would pile into a rented bus to travel to the ferry and then another bus would collect them across the channel, and off they went to the villas and a regimen of beach calisthenics, great meals, games and tea—and, of course, all the adventures of a sprawling family at play.

  Sometime in 1928 my grandfather bought a beautiful property on a promontory in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, the next town over from the rented villas. He named the property Les Essarts (which means “the Clearing” or “the Open Space”). The house boasted then, and still does, what I am convinced is one of the great views in the world, looking west through a Japanese tree my grandfather planted, across a rocky bay to the far cliffs of the Cap Fréhel peninsula and, beyond that, the peninsula that is Brittany itself, jutting out to form the southern border of the English Channel. The house looks directly at Fort La Latte, a medieval castle that was prominently used as the site of climactic battles in the Kirk Douglas–Tony Curtis film The Vikings (1958). For years, we children would make a pilgrimage to the fort and, with our cousins, my sister Diana and I would reenact the final battle scenes on the top of the turret, jumping around and terrifying onlookers with our erstwhile derring-do!

  Les Essarts became the center of prewar life for my mother and her family. From 1928 until the German invasion of Poland, the family enjoyed idyllic times with a household of teenage energy bursting at the seams. The home itself was an enormous, rambling Victorian structure. In the pictures I’ve seen of it, I thought it was dark and foreboding, but the family loved it. Grandpa was particularly attached to it. It was at his insistence that it was eventually rebuilt after the war. My mother never had formal schooling. While the boys in the family went off to Eton, my mother and her sisters were tutored in a little house on the property. Today that house is used as a spillover room when the main house gets crowded. She and her siblings led an active and adventuresome life, carefree and, yes, even spoiled, though for that generation, at that moment, it wasn’t thought of in the same way we would characterize their upbringing today.

  It was into this household that my father appeared in 1939. He had visited Saint-Briac as a younger boy and now was back to study sculpture during his summer break before his last year of law school. It was there
that he was introduced to Rosemary Isabel Forbes, the middle sister of the Forbes girls, all of whom were enjoying a summer interlude. And it was there that my mother and father fell in love. It’s hard to imagine how they would not: a dashing young law student from Harvard studying sculpture and a beautiful, somewhat shy but engaging young American living abroad with the winds of war blowing in the background. Their meeting seemed destined to be more than a passing acquaintance.

  My mother’s sister Angela, a drop-dead gorgeous, intelligent and independent soul, had just married Frederick Winthrop from Hamilton, Massachusetts. She was living on the Winthrop farm called Groton House, named after the town in England from which our great-grandfather eight times over, John Winthrop, departed on the Arabella to become the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was he who, several days out from Boston, delivered the famous sermon saying, “We shall be as a city upon a hill,” a sermon quoted by John F. Kennedy and later by Ronald Reagan.

  During this same summer just before World War II started, Angela and Fred also visited Les Essarts. Rosemary casually asked Angela to stay in touch with Richard Kerry. She did, inviting him to Groton House for Easter lunch the next spring. It was there that my father confided to Angela that Rosemary had accepted his proposal, showing her a telegram that said simply: “Yes with love. Rosie.”

  • • •

  I REMEMBER THE sound of broken glass crunching beneath my feet. I was holding my mother’s hand, walking through the ruins of Les Essarts. In the summer of 1945, my mother’s beloved home had been bombed and burned by the German army as it was being driven out of Saint-Briac. It was now 1947. I was four years old. This was my mother’s first visit back to France, only two years after the war ended. It was my first trip out of the United States, and at a quite young and tender age. I didn’t really know where I was or what was happening, but I distinctly remember some of the sights and sounds, as well as certain feelings and emotions. Everything was new and clear in these earliest moments of my memory—the very reason I am sure of my few memories of this long-ago time.

  My mother was crying, which upset me. I had never seen her cry. I didn’t know why she was so distressed, but I dutifully walked alongside her. A stone staircase rose up into the sky. It stood alone at one end of the rubble. A chimney similarly pointed into the sky above the ruins at the opposite end of what had been the house. That’s it—all I remember—but this image of destruction and my mother’s tears stayed with me, later developing into a powerful impression of the consequences of war. As I went on in life, I was extremely conscious of my journey from the war of my parents into the war of my generation. This earliest of introductions to the consequences of war was an improbable beginning for anyone, but in our family it seemed normal.

  • • •

  OUR HOME WAS Millis, Massachusetts. My father practiced law at Palmer & Dodge in Boston, while Mama was a hands-on mother, taking care of Peggy and me.

  A Boston suburb, the town was more rural than urban back then. We lived adjoining a small farm, called South Farm. I distinctly remember swimming in the pond and being terrified of eels, which I thought were snakes, a phobia that haunts me to this day. Millis was home to the Cliquot Club Company, a soda bottler. The factory filled the air with wonderful smells. I wondered what happened inside, and I dreamed of growing up to become the Eskimo who appeared on the labels. My sister Peggy and I dressed up in our heavy snowsuits in the middle of summer to play Eskimo. It’s a wonder we didn’t pass out from heatstroke. Other days, I sat in the lap of the farmer driving the tractor, his skin leathery from the sun, his vocabulary marked by a colorful string of expletives any time the tractor backfired or the oil leaked. I was proud of this early education in cuss words—magical phrases my parents said I should never use and quickly forget, a certain incentive to judicious deployment at the appropriate time. I remember sitting for hours in his lap as we plowed or harrowed a field. I was mesmerized by the constant growing rows of plowed earth, expanding outward in neat lines. Later I would get to drive a tractor at Groton House, and to this day I could be very happy just plowing away, measuring the progress as I went. I found it enormously satisfying. Occasionally Pa would plop me on his lap so I could steer the Jeep up the driveway using the rhododendron bushes as guideposts. Life was simple and fun.

  These days I have a warm, visceral sense of life in Millis. It was a Main Street America sort of town where people knew each other. Our babysitter was Helen Cassidy, the daughter of the folks who owned the farm just down the street—Cassidy’s Farm. We would stop off there for one thing or the other, and I would walk around the farmyard near the barn. Once I witnessed the beheading of a chicken. I’ll never forget the sight of all the other chickens running around the yard squawking in protest. I stayed away from the barn after that. The Cassidys were wonderful neighbors. Years later when I was running for office, they would reappear in my life and remind me of some of the adventures of those early days.

  Suddenly, one day, all that ended and we were off to Washington, D.C., where Pa took on new challenges, first at the Navy Department and then, shortly thereafter, in the Foreign Service, as Secretary of State John Foster Dulles undertook a major expansion of the State Department. I knew none of that at the time. All I knew was that I hated saying goodbye. Goodbyes were to be a running thread throughout my childhood.

  In Washington, D.C., we first lived in Georgetown at 2725 Dumbarton Street, directly opposite the home of the noted columnist Joe Alsop. He had a wonderful parrot that I was privileged to taunt occasionally. I started school a few blocks away at Jackson Elementary School on R Street and ultimately went on to St. Albans School by the National Cathedral.

  St. Albans was demanding. I remember distinctly what happened when we got unruly: a certain Mr. Spicer would grab us by the neck in a pincer vise between his thumb and forefinger and squeeze us into submission. It was painful and served its purpose of quickly taming whatever boisterous enthusiasm I or others may have been pursuing. There was a demerit system of some kind and it was possible, with enough demerits, to earn Saturday morning attendance at school to walk off your demerits in the courtyard. I earned my way into several Saturday sessions.

  I played seventy-five-pound football in the fall, wrestled in the winter and played baseball in the spring, an early introduction to a three-sport cycle that would mark my years through college. I was, thanks to my mother, an avid Cub Scout. At some point during my mother’s years in England she had met Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of Scouting. She became a huge believer, promptly enrolling Peggy as a Brownie and then a Girl Scout and me as a Cub Scout. But Mama didn’t just throw us in and watch from the sidelines. She was also my den mother, the leader of our pack. Future Fox News journalist Brit Hume was in my Cub Scout den, and I must have done something very bad to him that would go on to haunt my political career. But I loved Scouting, embracing the projects with huge enthusiasm and earning my way up to Webelos (“We’ll Be Loyal Scouts”), which is the jumping-off point from Cub Scouts to Boy Scouts.

  My father had an elaborate set of tools from Sears, Roebuck. They took over the basement at 3806 Jenifer Street, where he would disappear for hours working on bookshelves and cabinets. My great achievement at that age was gaining sufficient confidence from him to be allowed to use the band saw by myself. I would busy myself carving out jigsaw puzzles and making unusable objects. One sad day it came in handy, though, when I found my beautiful Cairn puppy, Sandy, run over and dead in the gutter of Reno Road, just around the corner from our house. Sandy was my first pet—the first animal I knew that I saw dead. I remember when I picked him up out of the gutter how stiff, cold and motionless he was. I wondered about a living thing going from such bubbling energy to cold and motionless. My mother and I had the first of several conversations about death.

  I built Sandy’s coffin with my father’s help. We all got up early one morning and drove out to Virginia, where my mother had helped the Potomac School develop a nature trail
—which is still there today—and we buried him on a peaceful rise overlooking the trail. I have a wonderful picture of Sandy and me sitting in Pa’s chair, quite content with ourselves. I have always remembered Sandy as my pal, my very personal friend. He was a wonderful companion, and because of him I have always had a dog whenever I can since that time—including on my boat in Vietnam.

  Religion entered my life. I had attended Mass with my grandmother and with my parents, but like most kids, I was looking around the church and waiting to be sprung from the service. It was that period when practicing families shared the experience and habit of attending but without much meaning. It wasn’t until I began to prepare for my First Communion at Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase, Maryland, that I started thinking about what we were doing and why—which is exactly the reason children begin to prepare then. I remember being genuinely, deeply moved at receiving First Communion. The preparation, which in my case included being slapped by a nun when I was roughhousing in line while waiting to march to a classroom, gave me a genuine sense of anticipation for this moment when I would be able to experience bringing Jesus into my soul. I knew nothing about transubstantiation, but I was convinced that taking Communion was going to bring me closer to God, which was important to me and everyone in my group. When the day arrived, I was resplendent—or so I thought—in my white suit. Along with the rest of the recipients, I felt an incredible sense of well-being when the moment finally came. I felt like things were right and good and the way they were meant to be. The same was true later of my confirmation at Blessed Sacrament, with the same sense of anticipation and of good and enriching things happening to me. At confirmation, the bishop stood in front of us and asked questions. At the first question, my hand shot up along with others, but lo and behold, His Excellency called on me. I stood up and almost shouted the answer. My parents were shocked but proud.