Kerry's childhood seems rather lonely. As a little boy, he was moved from place to place before attending a "very strict" school in Switzerland, where he was one of only three English-speaking boys. Kerry learned, at an early age, to depend on himself.
At St. Paul's, a posh prep school in New Hampshire, Kerry was not popular. On the hockey team, he was called "Keep-the-Puck Kerry" because he didn't like to pass to his teammates as he skated toward the goal. Barging into pickup games on the school's frozen ponds, he was known for stealing the puck from younger boys and shooting it into the woods. At a Republican Episcopalian school he was a Democrat and a Roman Catholic who worshiped John F. Kennedy. The boys reportedly joked that his own initials—also JFK—stood for "Just For Kerry." (Kerry told NEWSWEEK that the nickname is "bogus," made up a few years ago by a mean-spirited Boston Globe columnist.) Prep-school boys of that era were not supposed to grasp or grind; the ideal was "effortless grace." Kerry committed the cardinal schoolboy sin of showing his ambition.
The sneers "did bother John a lot," says Danny Barbiero, a classmate who was also a social outcast. "He's a lot more sensitive than he shows." Kerry's answer, says Barbiero, was: "Be better." He excelled at everything. At Yale he played wing on the soccer team (scoring three clutch goals in his last game against Harvard), was elected president of the Yale Political Union and was tapped by Skull and Bones. The last was sweet revenge: most of the preppies who made fun of Kerry would have given their trust funds to be tapped by the elite secret society.
As a young naval lieutenant and Swift Boat captain, Kerry struck some of his fellow officers as a condescending glory-seeker. By trying to imitate JFK's PT-109 exploits, he was supposedly putting his men at risk. But his enlisted men did not see it that way, according to historian Douglas Brinkley, who interviewed Kerry's crews for his new book, "Tour of Duty: John Kerry and the Vietnam War." The enlisted men "were suspicious at first," says Brinkley, because Kerry had longish hair for the military (the Kennedy look again). But they quickly learned that they could depend on him as a brave—but not foolhardy—combat leader. Kerry the amateur yachtsman was a very skillful boat handler; fluent in French, he was able to read old colonial river maps.
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