1. Richard John Kerry was an American Foreign Service officer and lawyer.
13 Facts About Richard Kerry
2.
Richard Kerry was the father of politicians John Kerry and Cameron Kerry.
3.
John Richard Kerry has said that although he knew his paternal grandfather had come from Austria, he did not know until informed by The Boston Globe in January 2003 on the basis of their genealogical research that Fred Richard Kerry had changed his name from "Fritz Kohn" and converted from Judaism to Catholicism nor that Ida's brother Otto and sister Jenni had died in Nazi concentration camps.
4.
Richard Kerry attended Phillips Academy, graduated from Yale University in 1937, and received his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1940.
5.
Richard Kerry joined the United States Army Air Corps in World War II and volunteered to become a test pilot.
6.
Richard Kerry flew C-47s and B-29s until contracting tuberculosis, after which he was discharged.
7.
Richard Kerry moved to Washington, DC, in 1949, where he worked in the office of the General Counsel for the Navy Department.
8.
Richard Kerry entered the American foreign service and served as a diplomat in positions both in the United States and at foreign embassies, including in Germany and Norway.
9.
Richard Kerry served as a lawyer in the Bureau of United Nations Affairs.
10.
Richard Kerry authored The Star Spangled Mirror: America's Image of Itself and the World in 1990.
11.
In retirement Richard Kerry engaged in his passion for sailing, making several Atlantic crossings, sailing the New England and Nova Scotia coasts solo, and racing sloops.
12.
Richard Kerry met nurse Rosemary Isabel Forbes in 1938 in Saint Briac, France, where he was taking a course in the sculpture of ship models and she was training as a nurse.
13.
Richard Kerry died in at Massachusetts General Hospital on July 29,2000, from prostate cancer complications, one day after his 85th birthday.