In that earlier version the reporter stated that when Kerry came home for vacation from his Swiss boarding school and his parents were out of the country, Kerry was sent to stay with his aunt and uncle on the farm.
Reuters' editors must have yanked that part out of the story. It did read like a hit piece on Kerry, which surprised me being that it was from Reuters.
#66 My hat's off to the author of this piece, this Patricia Williams. Some stories just don't need any satirical spin. For this one you don't need to read between the lines. The dry recitation of facts and faithful reproduction of quotes is more than enough. Some situations are just simply impossible to parody.
I found a link to the first version of the Reuters story here; and it is different...
The last three paragraphs of that earlier article read as follows:
"Let me tell you something," Kerry said during the discussion of agricultural issues. "In fact I lived on a farm when I was a young kid. My parents, when we lived in Massachusetts, we lived on a farm and I learned my first cuss word sitting on a tractor with the guy who was driving it."
A campaign aide said (my comment: the campaign aide's statement is probably in response to skeptical media types who had never heard that little gem from Kerry before, and questioned its basis in fact) that when Kerry's parents were abroad, he often spent vacations from his Swiss boarding school at his aunt and uncle's farm in northeastern Massachusetts.
"When I was twelve years old, my passion was being allowed to go out and sit on the John Deere and drive it around the fields and plow. And I learned as a kid what it was like looking back and see those furrows, and see that pattern and feel a sense of accomplishment, and end up dusty and dirty and tired, but feeling great, looking back at that field that you'd plowed," Kerry said.