John Kerry /

John Forbes Kerry (born December 11, 1943) is the senior United States Senator from Massachusetts, and chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He became the senior Senator from Massachusetts after the 2009 death of Senator Edward M. Kennedy. He is currently the 10th most senior Senator. He was the presidential nominee of the Democratic Party in the 2004 presidential election, but lost by 34 electoral votes to incumbent President George W. Bush. Senator Kerry is a decorated Vietnam veteran, and was a spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War when he returned home from service. Before entering the Senate, he served as an Assistant District Attorney and Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts under Michael Dukakis, who ran for President in 1988. Kerry is the child of Richard Jerry Kerry (1915–2000), a Foreign Service Officer and an attorney for the Bureau of United Nations Affairs, and Rosemary Forbes Kerry (1913–2002), a World War II nurse and member of the wealthy Scottish-American Forbes family. He has three siblings: two sisters, Diana (born in 1947) and Margerie (aka Peggy; born in 1941) and a brother, Cameron (born in 1950), Cameron Kerry was picked to be Barack