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Richard John Kerry was born July 28, 1915. He is the father of Senator John F. Kerry. In his youth, Richard Kerry attended Phillips Academy. He then graduated from Yale University in 1937. He also received a degree from Harvard Law School in 1940.
Kerry met his wife, Rosemary Forbes, in 1937 while taking a course in sculpture in the French coastal town of Saint-Briac. The couple married in Montgomery, Al. in 1941.
He then joined the U.S. Army Air Corp., volunteering as a test pilot. He flew DC-3's and B-29's stateside in Alabama. After a bout with tuberculosis, he was mustered out of the military. After his service in the military he became an assistant district attorney for the southeastern district of Massachusetts. He moved to Washington DC in 1949, where he worked in the office of the General Council for the Navy Department. He joined the State Department in 1951 and served in the Bureau of United Nations Affairs and the Office of Legal Adviser. He was a Legal Adviser to the U.S. High Commissioner of Germany, James B. Conant, as well as the U.S. Attorney for Berlin.
In 1956 he joined the Foreign Service as was assigned as executive assistant to U.S. Senator Walter F. George, Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Richard taught at the NATO Defense College in Paris in 1958 before being named Chief of the Political Section of the Americian Embassy there.
In 1976, Kerry and his wife Rosemary, sailed together in a 35 foot sloop from Marblehead, MA across the Atlantic Ocean to Ireland. Richard J. Kerry died July 29, 2000.
Richard Kerry's father was Frederich A. Kerry. He was born "Fritz Kohn" in the town of Horni` Benesov, in what is now Moravian-Silesian Region of the Czech Republic. Frederick immigrated to the U.S. arriving at Ellis Island with his wife Ida and son Erich on May 18, 1905. The Kerry-Kohn's were Jewish, but the family concealed its background upon immigrating to the U.S., and raised the Kerry children (Erich, Mildred, Richard) as Roman Catholics. Two of Ida's siblings, Otto Loewe and Jenni Loewe, died in Nazis death camps (Theresienstadt and Treblinka), after being deported from Vienna in 1942.
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