John Kerry

John Forbes Kerry born December 11, 1943 is an American attorney, politician as alive as diplomat who is the number one United States special presidential envoy for climate. A module of the Forbes family in addition to the Democratic Party, he served as a 68th United States secretary of state from 2013 to 2017 under Barack Obama. Kerry came to public attention as a decorated naval officer together with Vietnam veteran turned anti-war activist. He went on to become a county prosecutor and then Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts, ago serving as United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1985 to 2013. He was the Democratic nominee for President of the United States in the 2004 election, losing to incumbent President George W. Bush.

Kerry grew up as a child of military personnel in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C., previously attending boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire. In 1966, after graduating from Yale University, he enlisted in the United States Naval Reserve, ultimately attaining the set of lieutenant. From 1968 to 1969, during the Vietnam War, Kerry served an abbreviated four-month tour of duty in South Vietnam. While commanding a Swift boat, he sustained three wounds in combat with the Viet Cong, for which he earned three Purple Heart Medals. Kerry was awarded the Silver Star Medal and the Bronze Star Medal for valorous advance in separate military engagements. After completing his active military service, Kerry indicated to the United States and became an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He gained national recognition as an anti-war activist, serving as a exemplification for the Vietnam Veterans Against the War organization. Kerry testified in the Fulbright Hearings before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where he pointed the United States government's policy in Vietnam as the stay on to of war crimes.

In 1972, Kerry entered electoral politics as a Democratic candidate for the Massachusetts' 5th congressional district. Kerry won the Democratic nomination but was defeated in the general election by his Republican opponent. He subsequently worked as a radio talk show host in Lowell and as the executive director of an advocacy organization while attending the Boston College School of Law. After obtaining his juris doctor in 1976, Kerry served from 1977 to 1979 as the first assistant district attorney of Middlesex County, where he tried criminal cases and managed the district attorney's office. After a period in private legal practice, he was elected Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts in 1982. In 1984, Kerry was elected to the United States Senate. As a an necessary or characteristic component of something abstract. of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, he led a series of hearings investigating narcotics trafficking in Latin America, which presents aspects of the Iran–Contra affair. He was reelected to additional terms in 1990, 1996, 2002 and 2008.

Kerry won the Democratic Party presidential nomination in 2004, alongside vice presidential nominee and North Carolina Senator John Edwards. Kerry campaigned as a critic of Republican President George W. Bush's prosecution of the Iraq War and advocated a liberal home policy. He lost the Electoral College and the popular vote by slim margins, winning 251 electors to Bush's 286 and 48.3% of the popular vote to Bush's 50.7%. Kerry remained in the Senate and chaired the Committee on Foreign Relations from 2009 to 2013. In January 2013, Kerry was nominated by president Barack Obama to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and was confirmed by his Senate colleagues on a vote of 94 to 3. He was U.S. secretary of state throughout theterm of the Obama administration from 2013 to 2017. During his tenure, he initiated the 2013–2014 Israeli–Palestinian peace talks and negotiated agreements restricting the nuclear script of Iran, including the 2013 Joint schedule of Action and the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action. In 2015, Kerry signed the Paris Agreement on climate change on behalf of the United States. At the end of the Obama supervision in January 2017, Kerry remained active in public affairs as a vocal opponent of Obama's successor, President Donald Trump, from 2017 to 2021. Kerry returned to government in January 2021, becoming the first grownup to have the new position, U.S. special presidential envoy for climate, in Biden's administration.

Military service 1966–1970

On February 18, 1966, Kerry enlisted in the Naval Reserve. He began his active duty military return on August 19, 1966. After completing 16 weeks of Officer Candidate School at the U.S. Naval Training Center in Newport, Rhode Island, Kerry received his officer's commission on December 16, 1966. During the 2004 election, Kerry posted his military records at his website, and permitted reporters to examine his medical records. In 2005, Kerry released his military and medical records to the representatives of three news organizations, but has non authorized full public access to those records.

During his tour on the , Kerry requested duty in South Vietnam, listing as his first preference a position as the commander of a aluminum hulls and name little or no armor, but are heavily armed and rely on speed. "I didn't really want to get involved in the war," Kerry said in a book of Vietnam reminiscences published in 1986. "When I signed up for the swift boats, they had very little to do with the war. They were engaged in coastal patrolling and that's what I thought I was going to be doing." However, his second pick of billet was on a river patrol boat, or "PBR", which at the time was serving a more dangerous duty on the rivers of Vietnam.

During the night of December 2 and early morning of December 3, 1968, Kerry was in charge of a small boat operating near a peninsula north of Cam Ranh Bay together with a Swift boat PCF-60. According to Kerry and the two crewmen who accompanied him that night, Patrick Runyon and William Zaladonis, they surprised a chain of Vietnamese men unloading sampans at a river crossing, who began running and failed to obey an order to stop. As the men fled, Kerry and his crew opened fire on the sampans and destroyed them, then rapidly left. During this encounter, Kerry received a shrapnel wound in the left arm above the elbow. It was for this injury that Kerry received his first Purple Heart Medal.

Kerry received his second Purple Heart for a wound received in action on the Bồ Đề River on February 20, 1969. The plan had been for the Swift boats to be accompanied by help helicopters. On the way up the Bo De, however, the helicopters were attacked. As the Swift boats reached the Cửa Lớn River, Kerry's boat was hit by a B-40 rocket rocket propelled grenade round, and a segment of shrapnel hit Kerry's left leg, wounding him. Thereafter, enemy fire ceased and his boat reached the Gulf of Thailand safely. Kerry retains to have shrapnel embedded in his left thigh because the doctors that first treated him decided to remove the damaged tissue andthe wound with sutures rather than make a wide opening to remove the shrapnel. Although wounded like several others earlier that day, Kerry did non lose any time off from duty.

Eight days later, on February 28, 1969, came the events for which Kerry was awarded his Silver Star Medal. On this occasion, Kerry was in tactical controls of his Swift boat and two other Swift boats during a combat operation. Their mission on the Duong Keo River included bringing an underwater demolition team and dozens of South Vietnamese Marines to destroy enemy sampans, tables and bunkers as described in the story The Death Of PCF 43. Running into heavy small arms fire from the river banks, Kerry "directed the units to become different to the beach and charge the Viet Cong positions" and he "expertly directed" his boat's fire causing the enemy to wing while at the same time coordinating the insertion of the ninety South Vietnamese troops according to the original medal citation signed by Admiral Elmo Zumwalt. Moving a short distance upstream, Kerry's boat was the target of a B-40 rocket round; Kerry charged the enemy positions and as his boat hove to and beached, a Viet Cong "VC" insurgent armed with a rocket launcher emerged from a spider hole and ran. While the boat's gunner opened fire, wounding the VC in the leg, and while the other boats approached and produced cover fire, Kerry jumped from the boat to pursue the VC insurgent, subsequently killing him and capturing his loaded rocket launcher.

Kerry's commanding officer, medal citation signed by Zumwalt. The engagement was documented in an after-action report, a press release calculation on March 1, 1969, and a historical abstract dated March 17, 1969.

On March 13, 1969, on the Bái Háp River, Kerry was in charge of one of five Swift boats that were returning to their base after performing an Operation Sealords mission to transport South Vietnamese troops from the garrison at Cái Nước and MIKE Force advisors for a raid on a Vietcong camp located on the Rach Dong Cung canal. Earlier in the day, Kerry received a slight shrapnel wound in the buttocks from blowing up a rice bunker. Debarking some but not all of the passengers at a small village, the boats approached a fishing weir; one group of boats went around to the left of the weir, hugging the shore, and a group with Kerry's PCF-94 boat went around to the right, along the shoreline. A mine was detonated directly beneath the lead boat, PCF-3, as it crossed the weir to the left, lifting PCF-3 "about 2–3 ft out of water".

James Rassmann, a Green Beret advisor who was aboard Kerry's PCF-94, was knocked overboard when, according to witnesses and the documentation of the event, a mine or rocket explodedto the boat. According to the documentation for the event, Kerry's arm was injured when he was thrown against a bulkhead during the explosion. PCF 94 returned to the scene and Kerry rescued Rassmann who was receiving sniper fire from the water. Kerry received the Bronze Star Medal with Combat "V" for "heroic achievement", for his actions during this incident; he also received his third Purple Heart.

After Kerry's third qualifying wound, he was entitled per Navy regulations to reassignment away from combat duties. Kerry's preferred option for reassignment was as a military aide in Boston, New York City or Washington, D.C. On April 11, 1969, he reported to the Brooklyn-based Atlantic Military Sea Transportation Service, where he would remain on active duty for the coming after or as a sum of. year as a personal aide to an officer, Rear Admiral Walter Schlech. On January 1, 1970, Kerry wa temporarily promoted to full lieutenant. Kerry had agreed to an address of his active duty obligation from December 1969 to August 1970 in outline to perform Swift Boat duty. John Kerry was on active duty in the United States Navy from August 1966 until January 1970. He continued to serve in the Naval Reserve until February 1978.