A French Communist

Turns out (WSJ subscription required, I've lectured my readers about this before) Kerry doesn't just look French, he is French (or at least partly so).

Mr. Kerry comes from an American family, albeit one with members who settled here. James Grant Forbes, Mr. Kerry's and Mr. Lalonde's common grandfather, was descended from the Brahmin Forbes family of Massachusetts. He went into banking and married Margaret Winthrop in 1906. Her ancestors were Pilgrims. Mr. Forbes was drawn to foreign business and financed railways, coal and steel businesses across the globe. When World War I began in 1914, he was living in Paris and remained in France for most of the rest of his life.

His daughter Rosemary was John Kerry's mother. Rosemary's younger sister, Fiona, is Mr. Lalonde's mother. In World War II, Rosemary fled to the U.S. and married Richard Kerry, John's father. Fiona fled to England. There, she met a French resistance activist, Alain Lalonde, the descendant of a Jewish man named Levy. Alain's father had changed his name to Lalonde, converted to Catholicism and settled in Paris. Brice Lalonde was born in 1946.

His cousin, the subject of the article, is also what you would call, a bit of a commie.

Both men grew up to become politicians running for president of their respective countries. Mr. Lalonde was a leader of the 1968 Paris student revolt, and in the 1970s he helped found the French chapter of Friends of the Earth. He never joined a political party, though the Greens drafted him as their candidate for president in 1981. He served as Minister of Environment in a socialist government from 1988 to 1991

What does this all mean? It means, the French love Kerry.

Today, the people of Saint-Briac (population 2,000) are excited about the blood tie Mr. Lalonde has with the Democratic nominee for president. And like most Frenchmen, they are rooting for Sen. Kerry to unseat George W. Bush, whom they blame for poisoning Franco-American relations in the dispute over whether to invade Iraq. A recent poll in Le Figaro showed 78% of French adults would vote for Mr. Kerry if they could, compared with 9% for Mr. Bush.

American's should be skeptical.