IT'S NOT THE CHAIM THAT GETS YOU, IT'S THE COVER-UP (via pj):

Search for Kerry's roots finds surprising history (Michael Kranish, 2/2/2003, Boston Globe)

For years, US Senator John Forbes Kerry had sought to know the true story of his immigrant grandfather, Frederick A. Kerry, the patriarch who established the family in Boston and then mysteriously took his own life.

The senator searched phone books and the Internet and quizzed his cousins, but he was only able to learn fragments of family history.

The story, it turns out, began in a small town in the Czech Republic that once was part of the Austrian empire. Birth records there show that Frederick A. Kerry was born as Fritz Kohn to Jewish parents, according to a genealogy specialist hired by the Globe. Kohn changed his name to Kerry around 1902 and emigrated to the United States in 1905, eventually moving to Boston. [...]

As Kerry runs for president, he is in many ways on a voyage of self-discovery. He said he had expected there would be intense interest in his life, going beyond the usual curiosity about his Boston Brahmin maternal roots in the Forbes and Winthrop families, two of New England's most prominent clans.

Kerry acknowledged that some voters in Massachusetts, the nation's most Irish-American state, may have had the impression that he had Irish roots. He said that he knew of no Irish ancestry and that he had always tried to correct misstatements whenever he learned about them. [...]

Kerry spokeswoman Kelley Benander said the senator has corrected any misstatement he became aware of. When she was read three examples from Globe clippings in which the senator was misidentified as Irish-American, she repeated that Kerry had corrected misstatements when he read or heard them.

An understandable mistake, assuming neither he nor any of his aides read the stories about him in the most important media outlet in his state... Posted by Orrin Judd at February 3, 2003 8:16 PM