The Not So Favorite Son

By Amanda Ripley/Boston

John Kerry's critics like to say he is not actually from Massachusetts. That's a quibble. Kerry has lived in the Boston area more than anywhere else for at least 41 of his 60 years. He is a direct descendant of the first Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. His great-great-grandfather was a Massachusetts Senator. Kerry has represented the state for two decades, winning re-election three times--even when voters had attractive alternatives. Compared with Senator Hillary Clinton of New York, Kerry qualifies as a state mascot. The truth is, John Kerry is from Massachusetts--but he is not of Massachusetts.

It's an important distinction. And that's the lesson Kerry's hometown has to offer in this election, just as Arkansas and Texas contributed their stories of Slick Willie and Dubya. The conversation about Kerry in the restaurants and backyards around Boston is laced with disappointment in a man who has always preferred the national stage to the neighborhood pub. "People here like talkers. You go to any bar in the city, and it's full of b.s. artists," says Joe Keohane, editor of the Weekly Dig, an alternative newspaper in Boston. "I don't think he ever mastered the political dialect." Many people say they voted for Kerry, but he took up little space in their hearts. They already have their hometown family, and its name for four decades has been Kennedy.

Still, conversations about Kerry often end with grudging respect, with an acknowledgment that the tenacious Senator has learned from the mistakes he has made in Massachusetts. "I'm getting to the point now where I respect the amount that he tries," says Paul Sullivan, a veteran political journalist at the Lowell Sun, the newspaper in the Boston suburb where Kerry got his political start. Kerry is not the most natural politician--in a state where politics is second nature. Says Sullivan: "Every day of his life, he puts on shoes that are too tight and not on the right feet." This is the story of Kerry's political apprenticeship.

Kerry's career as a politician began and almost ended in Lowell, a blue-collar city about an hour's drive northwest of Boston. Kerry moved to Lowell in 1972, three years after he returned to the U.S. from Vietnam. Back then Lowell "looked like Berlin after World War II," former mayor Robert Kennedy says. The mills were boarded up, and houses were burned out. In the overwhelmingly Italian and Irish community, people knew their neighbors and their neighbors' cousins twice removed. And nobody knew Kerry, who had parachuted into Lowell because it was part of the state's Fifth District and the congressional seat was open. Locals would later call the maneuver "Kerrymandering."

In a city with 12% unemployment, Kerry and his new wife Julia bought one of the nicest houses around. "It seemed at the time just ridiculous," says Sullivan. Then a teenager, Sullivan campaigned against Kerry outside the polls. Like most other Democrats, he expected state representative Paul Sheehy to win. Sheehy fit the part. His family had been in Lowell since the 1880s. He was one of seven children of a fire fighter. "Sheehy was the first to go to college. He was your basic Irish success story," Sullivan says.

Sheehy, who supports Kerry for President, has not forgotten Kerry's tone deafness back then. Sitting in his backyard in Lowell, he describes the perception of the young candidate. "He was not well received by anyone, being an outsider, telling people you don't have anyone smart enough to represent you here, bringing in [campaign] people who couldn't even vote here."

Kerry failed to win Lowell's support in the primary but made it to the general election anyway because of a surprisingly strong showing in neighboring affluent towns like Concord. "They ran a masterful campaign. He had an ability to fund raise. He was good at organizing," Sheehy admits. But during and after the fiercely competitive primary battle, Kerry ignored a basic rule of politics: he failed to reach out to the other candidates. "He was not good at developing relationships. He needed to do that to show him as a human being, not an ogre," Sheehy says. "He should have said, 'Listen, I'll support you if you win this primary, and I'd like you to do the same.'" Meanwhile, the Lowell Sun viciously attacked Kerry for his antiwar stance, and the carpetbagger-hippie label stuck. Senator Ted Kennedy campaigned for Kerry for the first of many times, but Kerry lost the general election to a Republican. And his reputation as a "blow in" was thus entrenched in political lore. A year later, someone threw a rock in the window of his Lowell home. By 1976 he had moved to the more upscale Newton, abandoning politics until 1982.

These days, at the Acre Pub in Lowell, where a beer costs $1.50 and a dog named Lulu lives in a bed next to the video-game machines, nobody remembers that Kerry once bought the house a round of beer during his 1972 campaign. In fact, nobody at the bar can even imagine Kerry being here. It doesn't fit the narrative. "A guy that's married a gazillion dollars cannot possibly understand what the workingman wants," says Paula Reynolds, 62, a retired electronics-plant worker, referring to Kerry's second wife Teresa. Never mind that the state's other Senator has his own millions. Says Dave Brunelle, 47, a sheet-metal worker: "The Kennedy family has done so much for Massachusetts. As far as I'm concerned, there's very little they can do wrong."

Kerry has had 32 years to build a better story line for himself in Massachusetts. As Senator, he helped win federal money for low-income housing and for preserving Lowell's industrial-age history. He came back to visit even when there were no cameras around. But he has yet to find an identity that resonates. Says Sullivan: "You ask people, 'What is Ted Kennedy's most important issue?' It's health care. You can talk about John McCain, and people know [his issue] is government waste. The core essence of John Kerry seems to be political ambition. It's 'Wait until he gets there. When he gets to the White House, he'll be President!'"

At the Acre Pub, when I ask Reynolds what she remembers about Kerry's legacy, she offers only this doozy: "He burned the American flag in front of the post office here at the end of the war." Kerry has unequivocally denied that he ever burned a flag anywhere. In a story earlier this year, the Sun reported it could not find any proof the incident ever happened. Yet the rumor has thrived in Lowell for 30 years.

After Kerry's defeat, he went to law school and got a job with the district attorney's office for Middlesex County, just outside Boston. Although he came to the post with almost no experience, he was quickly promoted. Kerry was a natural in court, according to J. William Codinha, who worked closely with him in the D.A.'s office. Kerry has said he won all 25 to 30 cases he prosecuted. The current D.A.'s office could not confirm this, but Codinha says he does not remember Kerry ever losing. "He's comfortable on his feet. He can make a clear, articulate argument. He understands the mechanics of trying cases," says Codinha, who is now a partner at Nixon Peabody in Boston and remains a friend of Kerry's.

The pinball-machine case was a classic Kerry victory by willpower. In the late 1970s, Kerry called Codinha and said he thought they could prosecute Howie Winter, leader of the Irish mob in Somerville, Mass. Winter had been bullying bars and clubs into replacing their pinball machines with his machines--which were cash cows for Winter. Kerry said he had two club managers who were willing to testify, but Codinha was sure they would change their mind once they learned who Winter was. "I said, 'These guys are going to go south on us. We don't have a witness-protection program. We don't have the money.'" Kerry would not be deterred. "He said, 'If I can get the money, if I can put together a witness-protection program, we can make the case,'" Codinha remembers, laughing. "You'd have to be 25 to believe you could do this."

But Kerry did it. He got the funds, he set up the witness-protection program, and although he and Codinha had to bring back a rattled witness who fled to the Virgin Islands during the trial, they won the case.

Kerry's success as a prosecutor is telling. He liked to probe a problem until he found an opening. When he ran the office, he gave out jobs on the basis of merit, not patronage. He wasn't looking to make friends. All things considered, it's a small miracle Kerry ever got elected in Massachusetts. Says Codinha: "Boston is a parochial town. It's very important for politicians that people know their faces and know their families. And John couldn't care less."

It's possible that Kerry would never have been elected to public office had it not been for Ray Flynn. In fact, one could argue that Kerry would not be running for President had Flynn, mayor of Boston from 1984 to 1993, not supported him when no one else in the Democratic Party apparatus would.

On a Sunday afternoon in July, sitting on the deck of his daughter's house in Quincy, Flynn still looks the quintessential Boston politico. It is his grandson's second birthday, and there's a party going on. A stream of red-haired relatives comes through, each paying respects to Flynn. All the while, he cradles his infant granddaughter in his arm and talks politics like a man who has never left the racetrack.

Flynn is everything Kerry is not. He is an Irishman who still lives in the same South Boston house he bought in 1968. His mother cleaned offices, and his father was a union dockworker. When he was mayor in the 1980s, about 10 of his relatives were on the city payroll. In 1993, Flynn got injured trying to defuse a racially charged fight at South Boston High. Flynn was known for his way of talking quietly to people and listening just as intently. In the midst of Flynn's third term, President Clinton made him the U.S. ambassador to the Vatican.

When Kerry returned to politics in 1982 to run for Lieutenant Governor, the two men hardly knew each other. In the days leading up to the race, Kerry was worried that he would lose, according to John F. Kerry, the 2004 biography written by Boston Globe reporters. At a Labor Day festival in Boston shortly before the primary, the two men had their first conversation, Flynn says. At the time, Flynn was an enormously popular city councilman. And he knew only that Kerry had gone to Vietnam. "I just felt that, hey, this was a rich kid who could've avoided military service, and he didn't. It was no more complicated than that," Flynn says. "I said, 'I admire your service to your country. I don't know if you're going to win or not--probably not. But if you want me to support you, I'd be happy to do it.'" That day, Kerry's campaign held a press conference to announce Flynn's backing. Flynn sent his supporters into the streets on Kerry's behalf. "That was the end of it. He won, obviously," says Flynn, taking a sip of his cocktail.

Two years later, when Kerry catapulted into a Senate race, he got Flynn's support again--and it was even more crucial. Flynn campaigned for Kerry against the wishes of labor unions and his old friend Tip O'Neill. Flynn says he supported Kerry out of loyalty. The relationship was straightforward and pragmatic, as Kerry's tend to be. "We've never been out to dinner, never sent each other a card," says Flynn, sounding a little mystified.

By this time, Flynn was Boston's mayor, which meant he could send some 7,000 of his supporters into the streets to campaign for Kerry. Two weeks before the primary, Flynn introduced Kerry to union leaders at their annual breakfast at the Boston Park Plaza Hotel. He also escorted Kerry to the city's Irish pubs at happy hour. "It was a bit awkward for him. It's not exactly the place where he would hang out," Flynn says. "But people just needed a little reassurance." Kerry won the primary, just barely. In 1984 he was elected to the U.S. Senate.

After all these years, though, Kerry may have lost the backing of Ray Flynn. Citing his opposition to Kerry's support of abortion rights, Flynn says he is not sure whom he will vote for this year. And the more he talks, the more it sounds as if he still does not know who Kerry is. "John never went out of his way to talk to people that don't agree with him or do anything that didn't fit into his grand plan," he says at one point. Yet later on, he relates how Kerry quietly brought pizza and sports books to his son Ray Jr. when the young man was hospitalized with severe depression.

As the campaign heats up, an old story about Kerry's Massachusetts days has been circulating in the national media--but as it turns out, only half of it has been told. It starts with Kerry arriving at a fund-raising event at the Irish American Association in a Boston suburb in 1996. State representative William Reinstein, the class clown of the statehouse, strode over to Kerry and introduced himself as Butchy Cataldo, a former legislator. Kerry, long mocked by local pols for spending too little time in the state, fell headlong into the trap. "Butchy!" he said, slapping Reinstein's back and telling him how good it was to see him again. The story spread like butter through the halls of the statehouse.

Reinstein died in 1998, but his daughter Kathi-Anne Reinstein remembers him telling her the tale. "My father was a complete comedian," says Reinstein, who now represents the district her father once did. But she says the rest of the story is more instructive. "Kerry and his office did call my father up and say, 'We're sorry. We get it. We're going to do better.' And anytime I have called John Kerry's office, they have been amazing. He's absolutely fantastic to me and my district."

Last year, after a police officer's widow in Reinstein's district had packed all her belongings, she was told she could not move into federally subsidized housing because she made $38 more than the maximum allowed. Reinstein asked Kerry's office for help. A staff member immediately called the woman and her son, Reinstein remembers. "The son called me in tears ... All of a sudden, [he's] getting calls from Senator Kerry's office. You don't understand how much that means." The woman was accepted into the housing complex. Today, whenever Reinstein sees Kerry, he always remembers her name.

Even in Lowell, where old-timers still resent Kerry's opportunistic first campaign so long ago, they give him credit for improving his human relations. "A lot of people thought he was aloof," says current mayor Armand P. Mercier. "But his staff was always there for us. He didn't let Lowell's needs go by the wayside." During the 1972 race, Mercier was head of the Lowell Housing Authority. Kerry, struggling for local credibility, asked to meet with him. Kerry arrived at Mercier's office more than an hour late, Mercier says, and the first thing he did was ask to use the phone. "I said, 'Actually, I do mind. I've been waiting an hour and a half,'" Mercier remembers. Fourteen years later, he saw Kerry again, at an event in Lowell. "He came right over to me and said, 'I'm on time, Armand.'"

Kerry will get Mercier's vote in November and, according to a recent poll that shows him 29 percentage points ahead of President Bush, enough others to carry the traditionally Democratic state. Says Mary Ann Richards of Lowell, speaking for so many others: "He doesn't spin my wheels, but I'm voting Kerry."