Richard Kerry
| Richard Kerry | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Personal details | |
| Born |
Richard John Kerry July 28, 1915 Brookline, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Died | July 29, 2000 (aged 85) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S. |
| Cause of death | Prostate cancer |
| Resting place | Mount Auburn Cemetery |
| Spouse(s) |
Rosemary Isabel Forbes (m. 1941–2000; his death) |
| Relations |
Alexandra Forbes Kerry (granddaughter) Vanessa Bradford Kerry (granddaughter) |
| Children | Margaret, John, Diana, and Cameron |
| Parents | Frederick A. Kerry Ida Lowe |
| Education | Phillips Academy |
| Alma mater |
Yale University Harvard Law School |
| Occupation | diplomat, lawyer |
| Religion | Roman Catholicism |
Richard John Kerry (July 28, 1915 – July 29, 2000) was an American Foreign Service officer and lawyer. He was the father of politicians John Kerry and Cameron Kerry.
Kerry was born in Brookline, Massachusetts, to Austrian-born shoe merchant Frederick A. "Fred" Kerry (May 11, 1873 – November 23, 1921) and Hungarian-born musician Ida Löwe (February 20, 1877 – January 19, 1960). He had an elder brother Eric (born c. 1901) and an elder sister Mildred (born 1910). Fred and Ida had changed their names from "Fritz and Ida Kohn" to "Frederick and Ida Kerry" in 1900 and converted from Judaism to Catholicism in 1901 or 1902. They were baptized at the same time as Eric. Fred's brother Otto also embraced Catholicism and took on the "Kerry" name. The "Kerry" name, widely misinterpreted as indicative of Irish heritage, was reputedly selected arbitrarily: "According to family legend, Fritz and another family member opened an atlas at random and dropped a pencil on a map. It fell on County Kerry in Ireland, and thus a name was chosen." Leaving their hometown Mödling, a suburb of Vienna where they had lived since 1896, Fred, Ida, and Eric emigrated to the United States in 1905, living at first in Chicago and eventually moving to Brookline, Massachusetts, by 1915.
For a time, Fred Kerry was prosperous and successful in shoe business. Because of his wealth, the family was able to afford to travel to Europe in the autumn of 1921, returning on October 21. A few weeks later, on November 15, Fred Kerry filed a will leaving everything to Ida and then, on November 23, walked into a washroom of the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston and committed suicide by shooting himself in the head with a handgun. The suicide was front-page news in all of the Boston newspapers, reporting at the time that the motive was severe asthma and related health problems, but family members stated that the motive was financial trouble: "He had made three fortunes and when he had lost the third fortune, he couldn't face it anymore", according to Eric's daughter Nancy. John Kerry has said that although he knew his paternal grandfather had come from Austria, he did not know until informed by The Boston Globe in January 2003 on the basis of their genealogical research that Fred Kerry had changed his name from "Fritz Kohn" and converted from Judaism to Catholicism nor that Ida's brother Otto and sister Jenni had died in Nazi concentration camps.
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