A KERRY REPUBLICAN.(The Talk of the Town)(Republican Grant Winthrop campaigns for Democrat John Kerry)

Someday, no doubt, students of class politics will reach a consensus on precisely when it was that George W. Bush's chucking of his family's patrician--and moderate--ethos reached the point of irretrievability. (Was it when he said he didn't read the newspaper? Or had his father put in the fix way back in 1988, with the pork rinds?) Future historians who find themselves examining the resulting countertrend, whereby the Rockefeller Republicans who were betrayed by Bush came around to betraying him back, might end up taking a look at Grant Winthrop.

For the most part, Winthrop has been a Party loyalist: his political vita includes a run in the 1976 California primary as a Gerald Ford delegate and a contribution to Rick Lazio's Senate campaign against Hillary Clinton. And although John Kerry is a first cousin--their mothers, the Forbes girls, were sisters--Winthrop helped raise money for his friend William Weld's bid to unseat Kerry in the 1996 Massachusetts Senate race.

Last year, however, at a memorial service for Kerry's mother, Winthrop took his cousin aside and lamented the Republican Party's rightward turn. "I told John I was thinking of switching parties, and John said, 'Don't do it,' " Winthrop recalled the other day in his office at Milbank Winthrop, an investmentadvisory firm. "John told me, 'It's better for me if you can raise money from Republicans.' " And so it is that Winthrop has come to serve on the finance committee of Kerry's campaign in New York.

"Republicans for Kerry," Winthrop said, chuckling. "There isn't any official organization, though I did look into having some bumper stickers printed. It's a growing movement." This spring, for instance, he was in Jackson Hole, where he heard about some local Republicans who, he says, "absolutely can't stand George Bush. I ended up coming home with a couple of checks." So far, Winthrop and his wife have raised more than two hundred thousand dollars, and, he says, more than twenty of the people he's collected checks from are registered Republicans. Winthrop's two tables at a two-thousand-dollar-a-plate Kerry fund-raiser at the Sheraton New York last month were within spitting distance of the dais. Among his guests was Theodore Roosevelt IV, one of Bush's more vocal Republican critics.

Winthrop is a ruddy and sportsmanlike fifty-five years old. He lives on Fifth Avenue but ...