I wonder - - whether possibly Kerry has always been on the fringes of being really in the super blueblood, royal echelon that he actually aspires to belong to. In the picture where he is just a teenage kid sitting on the boat in one of the occasional "meetings" with JFK, you can see the look of the awed outsider on his face. The feelings of inferiority, of being actually an "imposter" seemed to motivate him to behave socially in the snobby way all the "right" people thought one should behave - even when it involved treating a fellow human being shamefully. Even now, he doesn't actually make all that much money in the Senate and lives off a rich woman. If he were to be elevated to "king of the country", that is exactly how he will view it, and we would be the unwilling benefactors to a "let them eat cake" tyrant. I pray for the man to get a real life free of this bondage of raw ambition.
I think you're on to it. Kerry came from an impecunious branch of the Forbes family and had to rely on contributions from wealthy relatives to pay tuition at St. Paul's and Yale. He could "summer" on Naushon because his mother was a Forbes, hence the middle name. The island is owned by a trust set up by another Forbes a long time ago. He made a fortune in the China Trade, much of that trade being opium.
He can become what he thinks those around him want him to be. I saw it back in the seventies when he would do "coffees" at different people's homes. I arranged several for him in those days. His language would change, along with his positions on the issues of the time, according to what kind of people were at the gathering. If you listen to his affected pronunciations in his now-infamous testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations committee in 1971, you'll see what I mean. You can see it again today when he gives speeches in the heartland during which he drops the "g" while speaking. "As I was sayin' " or "are you talkin' to me?" He's trying to sound like one of the guys. He's always tried to do that.