Wednesday, December 28, 2011

Very Different Personages

Like Madeleine Albright, Catholic, John Kerry, discovered as an adult a hidden ancestry that showed his father's family had been Jewish shortly before emigrating from Europe to America. What more could be learned about this presidential candidate's grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry, formerly known as Fritz Kohn?

© 2004 by Linda Minor
"So you see, my dear Coningsby, that the world is governed by very different personages from what is imagined by those who are not behind the scenes."
    Benjamin Disraeli, in his novel, Coningsby,
    published in London (1844)


Fred Kerry
Frederick A. Kerry
 
Rosemary Isabel Forbes made an odd choice when she married Richard John Kerry, whose father, Frederick (Fred) A. Kerry, who shot and killed himself at the Copley Plaza Hotel in November 1921. 


Fred Kerry had been born in Bennisch, then part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, around 1873 to the Benedict Kohns (one source says Fred was "Fritz" Kohn, son of a Jewish brewer in what is now Horni Benesov, Czechoslovakia, and changed his name to Frederick Kerry in 1901 or 1902 and then converted to Catholicism). He was married to a college-educated musician, Ida Loewe from Hungary, and they had a four-year-old son, Eric Frederic Kerry, when they departed in 1905 from Genoa, Italy to live in Chicago. His business address there was 1744 First National Bank building, where he was extremely busy, judging from a somewhat comical news item that appeared in the Racine Daily Journal on October 11, 1909 under the headline, "Ran an Auto into North Side Saloon":

Tuesday, December 27, 2011

Control by a "Hidden Hand"

Is it a mere coincidence so much of today's wealth can be traced back to opium barons of the past? This blog is about Gold--the symbol of political, financial and global power--and our primary interest is in tracking the historical roots of today's power. In 2004 I was fascinated by my electoral choice for the American Presidency coming down to two men inducted into a secret society that annually "taps" only 15 new members. What are the odds of that? Would we learn something about how our world is controlled--and by whom--to look into the background of one of these men? Thinking at the time that those who supported George W. Bush were so embarrassed by his policies that they would switch to his opponent, I chose to research John Forbes Kerry. His ancestry is equally illustrious and even more shocking.

Who "Controls" Our World?
"Governments do not govern, but merely control the machinery of government, being themselves controlled by the hidden hand."
    Benjamin Disraeli, speaking through fictional character
    Sidonia, based on Lord Rothschild, in Coningsby 
Rosemary Forbes Kerry's Ancestors

Born in Paris in 1913, Rosemary Forbes Kerry overlooked her husband's parentage, finding him acceptable perhaps because he had attended Phillips Academy and had just graduated from Yale in 1937 when they met at her parents' summer home in Brittany. They married in 1941, shortly after he received a degree from Harvard Law School

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The Untitled Aristocracy

 © 2004 by Linda Minor
There is, however, in New England, an aristocracy, if you choose to call it so, which has a far greater character of permanence. It has grown to be a caste, not in any odious sense, but, by the repetition of the same influences, generation after generation, it has acquired a distinct organization and physiognomy....A scholar is almost always the son of scholars or scholarly persons. He comes of the Brahmin caste of New England. This is the harmless, inoffensive, untitled aristocracy to which I have referred, and which I am sure you will at once acknowledge.
--Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., Elsie Venner (1859) [1]

The Call to Arms

John Forbes Kerry accepted the Presidential nomination at a speech at the Democratic Convention in the summer of 2004 amid rousing oratory praising him as a patriotic veteran who volunteered to serve his country in the war in Vietnam. The details of what inspired his decision, however, were not revealed. Identifying the forces that motivated Kerry to enlist in the Navy in 1966 reveals much more about him than the fact that he served on combat duty in the war. Let's go back to 1966 to find out.

Kerry was recruited by William Putnam Bundy (Yale, Skull and Bones 1939), John F. Kennedy's assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs, who made a speech at Yale University in 1966. Three years after Kerry's "hero," President Kennedy, had been violently murdered while beginning his plan to withdraw all American forces from Indochina, Bundy arrived at Yale to support the war Kennedy had vowed to end. Immediately after JFK's assassination, Lyndon Johnson had reversed Kennedy's National Security Memorandum 263 and kept Bundy on in the same position as before.

Following the Yale speech, where he was "greeted as a legacy of the slain president," Bundy paid a visit to his own nephew, Harvey Bundy III, a resident of Jonathan Edwards College at Yale, who shared a large suite complete with fireplace with roommates including John Kerry. Bundy remained there "into the wee hours of the morning." [2] Bundy's advice to the young men was to be trained as officers for the war in Vietnam—to serve where their country needed men of their calibre and breeding.  He meant, of course, men from that class of “untitled aristocracy,” who were bred to lead the masses and control events.