© 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.
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.
