An ersatz Boston Brahmin

The ‘campaign biography’ has become a familiar enough phenomenon in any American presidential year. So it should be said straight away that this book, with the slightly teasing adjective in its subtitle, is in no way representative of that genre. Far from being a dazzling encomium of the qualities of the Democratic candidate in this autumn’s presidential election, it offers a cool (and at times almost chilling) assessment of the various episodes that have gone into the making of the career of the present junior senator from Massachusetts.

The perspective from which it is written is, it has to be said, predominantly a local one. All three authors are on the staff of the Boston Globe and, perhaps inevitably, they tend to assume a keener interest in the intricacies of politics as practised on Beacon Hill than is likely to prove to be the case, at least in this country. On the other hand, they have undeniably worked hard, relying for their research on a whole host of sources, including an eminent Austrian genealogist.

One of their more intriguing discoveries is that John F. Kerry — for all his proud use of those famous initials — has himself virtually no claim to be Boston Irish at all. There is no Honey Fitz (the nickname of his colourful grandfather that the first JFK eventually gave to the presidential yacht) anywhere in the background of his successor. Instead, he turns out to be the grandson of a Jewish refugee from the Austro-Hungarian empire, who presented himself at Ellis Island in 1905, already bearing the somewhat improbable surname of Kerry (thanks to anti-Jewish feeling among the Austrians the family’s original name of Kohn had been ditched some four years earlier).