The Beacon Hill Nightmare.(John Kerry's mortgage)

GSTAAD, FEBRUARY 13

THE story of Sen. John Kerry's mortgaged home in Beacon Hill is worth looking at. What made the papers was the suggestion that his access to it, in usufruct, was threatened by the sheer size of the loan and the attendant obligations of financing it. All of this, of course, in the context of his need for money to finance the ongoing campaign for the presidency.

There are several perspectives one needs in order to evaluate the problem of Mr. Kerry's mortgage. The first, of course, is that if you own a house valuable enough to warrant a loan of $6 million, you are living, by common standards, in an economic stratosphere, the implications of which require adjusting to normal standards of evaluation. If you hock the Hope Diamond for $10 million, attention focuses on your owing $10 million whereas, properly, it should focus on your owning the Hope Diamond.

Sen. Kerry's widely publicized point is that he has had to finance his campaign by using his own resources, which are limited. But of course that is Hope Diamond talk. If a bank lends you $6 million, it knows it's going to get the money back.

How? Well, Sen. Kerry is not wealthy, but he does have undisclosed assets. That is, assets undisclosed to the public, but not to the bank. All the bank needs is approximately $200,000 per year in interest payments, which is a little more than Sen. Kerry's income as a senator.

Where else would the bankers look, if they thought themselves threatened? Well, of course, to the property on which the loan was made, namely the house on Beacon Hill. There is a difficulty, which is that the house is jointly owned by Mr. Kerry and his wife. She has to be careful, even though she made out a prenuptial agreement with John. If he divorced her, one assumes, she would keep the house, to say nothing of her fortune.

Bear this poignancy in mind, that Mrs. Kerry is not permitted, under the law, to give Mr. Kerry more than $2,000 when he is running for office. Now some may classify this as a problem of the idle rich. But this would be flippant. It is a big enough story of a human ...