http://www.france24.com/en/20121225-john-kerry-france-connection-secretary-state
Reacting to President Barack Obama’s recent nomination of John Kerry as the next US secretary of state, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius praised his future counterpart’s “personal commitment to Franco-American friendship”.
A large part of the interview is linked to the 2004 election and the nastiness of the GOP calling Kerry French, but they refer to his family in France.
The Massachusetts senator attended a Swiss boarding school as a child, learning to speak fluent French –which reportedly worked wonders in courting his wife, Teresa Heinz, whose parents were Portuguese.
He spent summers at his maternal grandparents’ luxurious home in Saint-Briac-sur-Mer, a village in the north-western coastal region of Brittany. And he counts Brice Lalonde, a former French green party leader and an environment minister in the early 1990s, as one of his first cousins (Lalonde did not respond to an interview request for this article).
Kerry’s ties to France are indeed part of the reason that “reactions to his nomination have been extremely positive on both the right and left in France”, according to Nicole Bacharan, a specialist in French-American relations and national fellow at Stanford’s public policy think tank, the Hoover Institution.
“He’s obviously very competent and very knowledgeable about foreign policy,” Bacharan said. “But of course the French like him especially because he knows France well and speaks good French.”
What the article does not say is that, earlier this year, when it became clear Francois Hollande was going to be elected and that the WH and the SoS had all but ignored the socialist party in France and looked as supporting Sarkozy, Kerry was the person who met with a couple of Hollande's envoys to talk about foreign policy.
And please, ignore the last paragraph. Unfortunately, French people, particularly in an American think tanks, are not immune to group thinking.
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