John Kerry and St. Paul's School - An Outsider's Recollections

Published on Tuesday, August 3, 2004 by CommonDreams.org

John Kerry and St. Paul's School - An Outsider's Recollections
by John Brown

"If you can remember the sixties, you weren't there."
-- Robin Williams

"Be Careful."
-- A St. Paul's School alumnus, giving the author of the below advice after reading it

"He doesn't pass the puck."
--Regarding John Kerry's hockey-playing at St. Paul's, according to the perhaps unsubstantiated view of an SPS alumnus [not cited in the original article]

I have practically no hair left on my head, did not marry a billionaire, and am not running for president of the United States. But John Kerry and I -- dare I say -- have quite a lot in common.

At a certain stage of our lives, that is. We both went to St. Paul's School, Concord, New Hampshire, in the early 1960s.

And not only did we both attend an isolated, oh-so-preppy, all-boys, upper-crusty, Republican-leaning, conservative Episcopal boarding educational institution before flower power and the anti-establishment revolution burst on the national scene, but we both entered SPS as outsiders.

(Full disclosure: I never actually met Kerry. While we happened to be at St. Paul's during the same decade, Kerry, class of '62, had just graduated when I, class of '66, arrived at SPS as a "third former," a freshman.)

As I look back, the Kerry I never knew and a few other lesser mortals such as myself were a breed apart at SPS: "acceptable" outsiders carefully chosen to inhabit the narrow world of St. Paul's School for several years. For all its silly exclusiveness, St. Paul's back in the 60s did start accepting students, not the children of alumni, whose families were not totally linked to the upper crust of the eastern US establishment -- especially if those non-traditional students were not too-too different (that is, if they were white and non-Jewish).

Was it a premonition, among those running the school (by this I mean its influential alumni), that America, a constantly evolving, splendid mixture of numerous nationalities, was undergoing, after the somnolent Eisenhower years, drastic social and political changes, major societal transformations to which SPS graduates felt their beloved school, which so comfortably, so assuredly, reminded them of their high but now potentially endangered delicate social status, had no choice but to adapt or else "become history"? Probably. By the 1960s, moreover, the WASP prep elite knew the world was becoming increasingly global, and it realized, not to its complete dissatisfaction, that it was to their old school's advantage (and, of course, their own, since the schools they attended were so much a part of their life and definition of themselves) to include students who'd seen the outside world. (By the end of the Vietnam War, ironically enough, this privileged, narrowly based but -- let's be fair -- not particularly oppressive and sometimes enlightened caste, seeking to diversify and internationalize itself, was essentially on its way out, most of all for demographic reasons but also because it was condemned by its own children -- and those it adopted like John Kerry -- for a disastrous, idiotic conflict in Southeast Asia brought about by its "best and brightest.")

Now, among the Desirable Diversity Materials at SPS in the 60s, I would speculate that John Kerry was numero uno among the least not too-too different, and probably, on an SPS outsider scorecard, the most acceptable "not one of us here at St. Paul's." Sure, he had an Irish, not English or Scottish, last name, but his middle name, after all, is Forbes, about as blue blood as it gets. No one knew his grandfather was Jewish, and from Central Europe to boot. Yes, no one; not even -- John Kerry/Kohn/presidential candidate himself, or so he says [added, 8/29/2015].

In the diversity game, by the way, I'd say I beat Kerry hands down (not a plus, of course, at St. Paul's School in the 60s, which could only take small doses of diversity for fear of being overrun by the lumpen). My middle name is Turkish, "Halit." My godfather was a Turk, an artist who arrived in New York in the 1930s to decorate his country's pavilion at the New York World's Fair. He came to visit my parents for a weekend but ended up living with them for two years. And my other middle name is Marie, given to me at as a result of the insistence of the Polish priest who baptized me in Boston, Mass, that a Christian saint had to be honored in order to balance my "Muslim" middle name. So the Holy Mother of God was chosen as a proper designation for me. But I won't bore you with family lore.

More important, especially for historians who will leave no stone unturned about a future Kerry administration: What did a presidential candidate and an obscure scribbler like myself have in "diversity common" as schoolboys at SPS? An answer to this question might tell us a bit more about a complex and intelligent man, John Kerry, whose years at St. Paul's, the media agree, had a formative influence on his life.

First, Kerry is a Catholic. So am I. Second, Kerry is a foreign service brat. So am I. Third, at St. Paul's I was "poor," since my family's income was my father's meager foreign service salary (my father's family apparently lost everything in the Depression, although he seldom talked about that). I think Kerry, also as the son of a poorly remunerated diplomat, may have felt, at times, as I did: a bit like Oliver Twist at for-the-rich-boys SPS (my brother, whom I love dearly, also attended St. Paul's, and went on to become a millionaire in business; ah, the joys of sweet revenge).

Kerry and I also probably shared political views which were not mainstream at right-wing, politically and culturally reactionary SPS. Early on, the man now running for president of the United States was proud to have John Kennedy's initials, and did not hide his sympathies for the Democratic party (I can see him wearing the button "if I were 21, I'd vote for Kennedy"). As for myself, even if I've never been able to decide whether I'm an anarchist or monarchist, I certainly never was a Goldwater supporter -- and today do not agree with his modern admirers, especially if they intend, on top of that, to vote for one of the worst, most parochial presidents in history, George W. Bush, who has done so much to destroy America's image and credibility abroad.

But back to JFK. According to the press, he used to go to Catholic church on Sundays after the Anglican service in the School chapel. So did I, at least in my early years, together with a handful of other Catholics who could not forget that outside the Church there is no salvation; Roma locuta est, causa finita est.

I grew up abroad hearing foreign languages and attending non-English speaking schools, just like the Democratic presidential contender, accused by his opponents of being "French." My father, a francophile, sent my brother and me to French-language écoles when he was posted in Paris and Brussels. At anglophile Sn' Paul's, I felt like a true Gaulois (also slightly Italian, since my family had lived four years in Rome), particularly when I arrived at the School, so often regretting, in ice-cold Concord, the sybaritic joie de vivre of "l'Europe aux anciens parapets," to quote Rimbaud in his Le Bateau Ivre. Didn't you too, Jean Kerry, miss being "intercontinental" (as Dubya once dismissed a bilingual reporter who had the audacity of addressing the French president in his language), especially when you got to New England to continue your education, fresh from your schooling in Europe and fluent in French?

So, if we ever meet, Senator, we'll speak the tongue of la douce France together, en cachette, in a distant corner so as not to be heard conversing in the language of the new enemy from old Europe. Maybe your "Afro-Euro" spouse, a person of, apparently, great charm and sophistication, would do us the pleasure of joining us; she, after all, declared at the Democratic convention, in what some might consider multilingual excess, that "Y a todos los Hispanos, y los Latinos; a tous les Franco Am'ricains, a tutti Italiani; a toda a familia Portugesa e Brazileria; and to all the continental Africans living in this country, and to all the new Americans in our country: I invite you to join in our conversation, and together with us work towards the noblest purpose of all: a free, good, and democratic society."

But I must get back to the main theme of my ruminations, or I will lose you, my precious reader. How did St. Paul's try to mold an outsider like myself into an acceptable SPS product? An answer to this question might tell us something about the early days of that other, far more important outsider, John Kerry.

As I look back, St. Paul's tried to make a proper Christian gentleman out of me in three ways.

First, the School (I cannot imagine not capitalizing it) constantly reminded me and my classmates that, because we were "Paulies," we were superior to everyone else. Not only were we superior to the average high school Joe Blow in Concord, New Hampshire (which we seldom visited because being off-campus was a no-no, except for going to harmless activities such as attending services in a Christian church inferior to, but nevertheless related, to the Church of England), but we also were superior to other preppies from lesser learneries such as Andover and Exeter. Sure, some other boarding schools had better sports teams, but at St. Paul's we acquired that unique trait, snobbery (acquiring too much knowledge was, of course, avoided, since it might interfere with learning proper manners). By the time you were in the sixth form, you were a snob and proud of it. You spoke, behaved, and dressed differently from the lower classes (everyone who didn't go to St. Paul's). Just by the way a fellow combed his hair, wore his tie, or farted (I won't give the secret away), you could tell that he had gone to St. Paul's.

Second, it was pounded into us that we were boys -- boys to made into (gentle)men. Like other pre-sex rev prep schools, St. Paul's was proudly all male, and "masculine" qualities were constantly drilled into us: discipline, endurance, loyalty, non-creativity. It wasn't a jock school, but sports, especially hockey and crew, were taken very seriously. Somewhere, we all knew, those creatures called girls or "broads" did exist; just to remind us that they did, and I suppose as a way to reaffirm our maleness by contrast, the School allowed for rare dances with neighboring proper girls' private schools and opened its gates for a weekend or two to members of the fair but little-known sex personally invited to visit the School by the boys themselves. But women as a rule were not part of the St. Paul's world, even if some of the faculty -- including the Rector himself -- had wives, one of whom, married to a teacher of European history, I fell in love with at the age of 15 for several months. Mrs. K had the most gentle, the most tender face I have ever seen.

So by the sixth form we were all snobby gentlemen. But were we Christian?

St. Paul's, after all, prides itself on being a church school. Its current Rector, who annoyed some alumni when it was learned that he was getting paid half a million dollars a year, is a very simpatico Episcopal bishop whose earlier incarnation was that of a marketer. Religion, even if propagated by a former employee of Procter & Gamble, is part of the SPS tradition, and I suppose that we Paulies, by the time we reached the age of 17 or 18, had become Christian, if by being Christian you mean having sung (off key) hymns in chapel too early in the morning and stayed half-awake during interminable sermons. By the sixth form, I can assure you, we had all heard of that big book called the Bible, even if we were unable to quote it (or at least I wasn't, even though I had memorized my Catholic catechism as a kid).

So that was the façade: proper Christian gentlemen. By the time we graduated, we could all play the St. Paul's role -- and I can't deny it could be fun at times showing off your SPS credentials, especially by thinking you were impressing people by having a slightly phony British accent. But what was the reality behind this camouflage? The reality was an outsider-unfriendly environment shaped not so much by the School's high-minded standards as by the fact that we were all away-from-home adolescents locked up in a closed-off, hierarchical, unreal little world (of great natural beauty, surrounded by woods and lakes) that we were constantly rebelling against. The perfect setting for Lord of the Flies: The Sequel, starring John Kerry. Senator, do you mind if I play Piggy?

We rebelled in basically three ways to demands from on high that we act as proper Christian gentlemen. First, in a still apolitical time, we reacted against the insistence that we behave properly (that is, as properly brought up, eager-to-please-adults Paulies) by displaying what was known as "bad-at" -- bad attitude. Bad-at was a state of mind and applicable to all situations at School, from the classroom to the sports field, and it's not impossible that John Kerry, for all his eager commitment to his studies and extra-curricular activities, did not on occasion fall victim to bad-at's narcotic-like lure. With bad-at, you sent signals to the Rector on down that you really didn't care about St. Paul's, its rules, standards, regulations, requirements, demerits (you got demerits if you weren't a good boy; after too many demerits, your punishment was engaging in what was known as "work," e.g., cutting grass while under the close supervision of an odious, physically repulsive, anti-Semitic member of the school staff nicknamed "Toad"; I cannot fault the school, however, for trying to be true to its standards by exhibiting impeccable British upper class prejudices, which make no distinction between work and punishment). You showed bad-at in an infinite variety of ways: the way you wore your tie, the way you answered questions in class, the way you rowed (I always "caught crabs," not entirely by accident), the way you rolled your eyes during chapel. I demonstrated very conscious bad-at once by cutting my nails during study hours -- and the teacher guarding over us, who was known as "The Albino" because of his blond crew cut and sheet-white face, reprimanded me with colder stares than usual for engaging in an improper activity with a nail clipper (did he think I was getting prohibited sexual satisfaction from contact with a metallic object?). One of my best friends at SPS, with whom I remain in touch, told me some time ago that he was once taken aside after chapel by the Rector and told in no uncertain terms: "My boy, I have observed that you are showing bad attitude. That is not acceptable behavior at St. Paul's." Or words to that effect.

Second, with no girls around, we (or at least I) could not resist the temptation (I use that word as a collapsed Catholic) of masturbation, stimulated, I must confess, by regular supplies of Playboys (1) and other pornographic magazines provided by a generous rich classmate, one of the few Orientals (or "Asian," as is said today) at that time at the School (I couldn't afford the luxury of buying dirty pictures). While my Catholic conscience at first bothered me for engaging in this sinful act, I soon accepted it as a necessary form of not unpleasant, but somewhat selfish, sexual release -- which, it turns out, may have actually been medically good for me in the long run, since, as I recently learned in a newspaper article, teen masturbation may help prevent prostate cancer (so I have St. Paul's to thank for sparing me, at least up to now, of this debilitating male affliction, which I'm glad to hear Senator Kerry has overcome, but -- I cannot resist making this tasteless remark -- is a malady from which he unfortunately suffered perhaps because he may have been too busy in serious, physically exhausting school activities to find time to engage in the shameful onanism that I secretly practiced under my SPS sheets). As for homosexuality -- the question frequently in the back of the mind of tolerant ladies willing to date ancient preppies like myself -- none of it was openly visible at St. Paul's during my time there (1962-66). One boy, who had gone to a British public school, once intimated sotto voce to a classmate (we were then in a third form dorm) that we could "beat each other off"; there were no takers, and I personally was repelled. As for our officially revered teachers, no doubt some of them were gay; among these modern-day-in-Concord-New Hampshire Socrateses (no teasing) was the brilliant, Yale-educated Gerry Studds, who taught us American history and went on to the House of Representatives, where he openly announced his homosexual preferences in 1983.

Third, to demands that we be Christian (which, according to the religious texts we pretended to read in courses like "Sacred Studies," meant being kind to one's fellow man) we reacted with a favorite (in those days) schoolboy tool: sarcasm, saying one thing but meaning another with the intent of offending or mentally hurting someone, preferably weaker than oneself. Did John Kerry use sarcasm? Maybe as a star on the debating team but, assuredly, only to win arguments, not to insult his opponents. Whatever Kerry did during his orations, sarcasm, seen as an ideal verbal weapon of mass distraction at SPS, was incessantly wielded against fellow classmates. There was great respect, if not fear, for those who could use it best. One member of my form, who had a terrible case of acne and ended up with the nickname of "Za," was a genius chess player, master pianist, and very smart mathematician with perhaps the highest IQ in the class; but what he was really admired for was his mastery of sarcasm and giving people nicknames. Was Za the creator of the moniker for Richard Lederer, our wonderful English teacher who went on to become a best-selling writer on the English language? Mr. Lederer (we always addressed teachers as "Mr. this" or "Mr. that") was branded as "Supercool" because his pedagogic skills were matched by what appeared to be, even to his worshipful students, an incredibly huge ego -- a well justified self-veneration on his part, since he has produced remarkably witty books on the magical mysteries of the ever-changing, titillating tongue of Shakespeare.

There were, of course, many other forms of rebellion, too many to be listed here (e.g., drinking, but no drugs that I knew of; but maybe as an outsider, which I always remained, I was never allowed in the school's deepest student dissent cells where pot might already have made its way). More generally, though, there was a subterranean mood among my classmates that the "proper Christian gentleman" label being imposed upon us (and perhaps I felt this imposition more than most, since I was an Euro Cadillac) was a lot of b.s. As I said, we were not political, but you could sense dissatisfaction with the status quo in that artificial paradise called St. Paul's School in 1966, the year I graduated; our mood can still be sensed in the cartoons of Gary Trudeau, a member of our class, who has immortalized us by the drawing of our portraits in the '66 SPS yearbook, probably the only valuable thing I'll leave to my grandchildren if I ever have any. Not long after our class left SPS (most of us, I'm quite sure, with great, I won't say post-masturbatory, relief), this pre-hippie mood was to spread all over campuses in the country; and even today I cannot help but to listen or read, over and over again and with quite strong, almost tearful feelings (I know, proper Christian gentlemen shouldn't display vulgar emotions), Dr. King's memorable passage in his 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech:

Let freedom ring! From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

These are the unforgettable words that remind me of my liberation from St. Paul's at age 18 (with a high school degree, thank God, and feeling like Steve McQueen making it across the Swiss border on his German Army motorcycle in The Great Escape, filmed in 1963.)

Ah, freedom from St. Paul's School! Let that freedom ring! It is the type of freedom from an oppressive regime -- such as the one, based on fear of the outsider, that is maintained by the current retrograde, retromingent, reactionary administration -- that I hope John Kerry, even if he is a proper Christian gentleman, will bring to our country for the next four years.

After the most Dubya-ous, error-filled era in America's brief, miraculous history, when following the tragedy of 9/11 we -- all of us, red, white and blue -- were ambushed by a faux Texan with mad (cow) boy disease from (where else? Andover!) who is unable to speak our own unique American language, when, due to his self-imposed provincialism, fundamentalist anti-intellectualism, and "preemptive" wars to win elections and support at home, we lost the respect of mankind, ohmygod (if I may quote the younger generation) are we glad that help is on the way -- and that that help is coming from someone, John Forbes Kerry, who at least recognizes the existence of an outside world and who (to be sure, with a certain noblesse oblige offputting to those less wealthy than he) at least tries to understand needs of Americans less fortunate and ambitious than himself.

1) Among these Playboy magazines the one I remember most was the 1964 issue featuring "Girls of Russia and the Iron Curtain Countries." The glossy photos of these lovely ladies from an unknown world lie at the origin of my life-long fascination with Russia; probably more, I must confess in my old age, than the fear of nuclear war, the orbiting of the Sputnik, or the classics of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, all cited by American Slavicists as reasons for catching the Russian bug which, once caught, remains with you forever. I went on to write my dissertation at Princeton on an obscure late eighteenth-century Russian nobleman, Andrei Timofeevich Bolotov, whose interest in western science was expressed (among other ways) in his efforts to cure one of his serfs of hemorrhoids with the aid of electricity. For more on the Playboy magazine mentioned above, see Steven A. Grant and John H. Brown, The Russian Empire and Soviet Union: A Guide to Manuscripts and Archival Materials in the United States (G.K. Hall, 1981), p. 181. [now available online at http://quest.grainger.uiuc.edu/RussianManuscripts/]

John Brown, a former Foreign Service Officer, compiles a daily Public Diplomacy Press Review available free by requesting it at johnhbrown30@hotmail.com Aside from public diplomacy, the Review covers issues such as propaganda, anti-americanism, foreign public opinion, and educational exchanges.

Image (the Chapel at St. Paul's School) from