Revealing article by Todd S. Purdum in NYT about JK's early years...

[flpoljunkie]

http://nytimes.com/2004/05/16/politics/campaign/16KERR.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=

JOHN KERRY'S JOURNEY | THE EARLY YEARS

Prep School Peers Found Kerry Talented, Ambitious and Apart


By TODD S. PURDUM

CONCORD, N.H. — He was a champion debater, a good student, a strong and graceful athlete in a small, judgmental universe that prized such skills and knew him well. But for five formative years, John Kerry stood a step apart at St. Paul's School, gaining achievement more than acceptance.

Danny Barbiero, a middle-class boy from suburban Long Island who was Mr. Kerry's best friend, remembers how they made common cause in a boarding school full of Pillsburys, Peabodys, Pierponts and Pells. One day, Mr. Barbiero went to see a favorite teacher, the school's first black faculty member, and found someone else already there.

"I went into his apartment," recalled Mr. Barbiero, now an employee benefits consultant. "And he said, `This is Johnny Kerry. He's just feeling a little out of sorts because he thinks people don't like him.' I said, `Who cares what people think! You're obviously a terrific person.' "

Mr. Kerry is 60 now and running for president of his country, not of his class. But to a striking degree, the personal qualities that propel him — and daunt him — are the same ones that buoyed and bedeviled him when he was 16 and striving to succeed at St. Paul's, then an austere all-boys enclave, the seventh school Mr. Kerry had attended by the time he arrived here in eighth grade.

Mr. Kerry has always been a pace apart in every world he has inhabited — from grade school to college to Vietnam to the Senate — moving forcefully and successfully through diverse milieus without ever being fully of them. To his critics, his ambition has always been just a little too obvious, his manner too calculating. To his friends, his tenderheartedness and complexities have been too little understood. Always and everywhere, his seriousness has stood out.

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[Bozita]

1. Purdom should begin work on a similar piece about Dumbya

Nobody in the major media thought of that back in 2000.

My apologies to Gail Sheehy who wrote the excellent dyslexia article on Dumbya in Vanity Fair.