Kerry dodges thorny issues but Irish ancestry is a load of blarney
He has an apparently Irish last name and he wears it proudly along with the shamrock he sports every year at Boston's St Patrick's Day parade. He resembles another famously Irish Democrat from Massachusetts who was elected president in 1960. He even shares JFK's initials.
Backed by the Kennedy clan, the senator, whose wife Theresa is part of the Heinz ketchup empire, also has the support on this side of the water from Tony O'Reilly, Heinz's former boss.
Many supporters have been fooled into thinking the senator was as green as the hills of Kerry but, as it turns out, his Irish ancestry is a load of blarney. Mr Kerry is, in fact, Jewish.
For years, he had sought to know the true story of his immigrant grandfather, Frederick A Kerry, who established the family in Boston and then mysteriously took his own life.
The Boston Globe hired a genealogist to untangle Mr Kerry's roots and discovered his grandfather, who came to the US in 1905, was born as Fritz Kohn, the son of Jewish parents, in what was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mr Kohn converted to Catholicism when he changed his name to Kerry in 1902.
Mr Kerry's paternal grandmother was also Jewish and converted to Catholicism before marrying Mr Kerry's grandfather. Mr Kerry was raised a Catholic.
The Globe also reported details of how Mr Kerry's grandfather had committed suicide at the Copley Plaza Hotel in Boston in 1921, shooting himself in the head in a hotel toilet.
Running for president, Mr Kerry expected there would be intense interest in his life, beyond the usual curiosity about his maternal roots in the Forbes and Winthrop families, two of New England's most prominent clans.
Mr Kerry acknowledged that some voters in Massachusetts, the nation's most Irish-American state, may have had the impression that he had Irish roots. He said that he knew of no Irish ancestry and that he had always tried to correct misstatements about it.
His new-found Jewish roots will probably do him no harm and Mr Kerry has a reputation for political expediency not seen since the Clinton administration. He has ducked and weaved on a variety of politically contentious issues, including the invasion of Iraq, first condemning, then supporting it, depending on which way the wind was blowing.
Obviously the details of Mr Kerry's family tree have no bearing on his fitness for office. His reactions are relevant only because they seem to fit his career-long pattern of equivocation and calculation trying whenever possible to have it both ways.
Ambivalence on a thorny issue is no sin in a politician. An aversion to being pinned down on any issue is. When Mr Kerry's grandparents made a decision, they stuck with it. That's clearly one gene he didn't inherit.
