John Kerry

John Kerry is an American politician who is the 68th and current United States Secretary of State. He served as a United States Senator from Massachusetts from 1985 to 2013, and was chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Kerry was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 Presidential Election but lost to incumbent George W. Bush.

The son of an Army Air Corps veteran, Kerry was born in Aurora, Colorado. He attended boarding school in Massachusetts and New Hampshire and went on to graduate from Yale University class of 1966, where he majored in political science and became a member of the influential Skull and Bones secret society. He enlisted in the Naval Reserve in 1966, and during 1968-1969 he served four months short tour of duty in South Vietnam as officer-in-charge (OIC) in the Swift Boat. For this service he was awarded the military medals, including Silver Star, Bronze Star, and three Purple Hearts. Ensure a prompt return to the United States, Kerry joined the Vietnam Veterans Against War, in which he served as a nationally recognized representative and as an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. He appeared before the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, where he is the United States military policy in Vietnam to be the cause of "war crimes."

After receiving the JD from Boston College Law School, Kerry worked as an assistant district attorney and co-founder of a private firm. He served as Lieutenant Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts from 1983 to 1985, where he worked on an early forerunner of the National Clean Air Act. He got tight Democratic primary in 1984, the U.S. Senate and was sworn in the following January. On the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he held a series of hearings from 1987 to 1989, which were the forerunners of the Iran-Contra affair.

In 2002, Kerry voted to authorize the president "to use force if necessary to disarm Saddam Hussein," but warned that the administration should exhaust its diplomatic way before going to war. Kerry based his 2004 presidential campaign on opposition to the war in Iraq. He and his running mate Senator John Edwards lost the race, finishing 35 electoral votes for the Republican ticket headed by President George Bush (just 19 short of the 270 needed for election). Later he created Keeping America Promise PAC.

Kerry became chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in 2009, and in 2011 he was appointed to the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction. Having been nominated by President Barack Obama to succeed outgoing Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and then confirmed by the U.S. Senate by a vote of 94–3 on January 29, 2013, Kerry assumed the office on February 1, 2013.