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THE CANDIDATE?S WIFE
by JUDITH THURMAN
Teresa Heinz Kerry is an uncharted element on the road to the White House.
Issue of 2004-09-27
Posted 2004-09-20
or read from the New Yorker Here
The child of nature was a creature invented by the Romantics, whose cult of authenticity informed the literature of the next two hundred years. His direct descendant is the protagonist of countless modern films and novels: the prisoner of a false self revolting against the artifice of conventional narrative. On the face of it, Teresa Heinz Kerry makes an unlikely rebel. She is a sixty-five-year-old Catholic billionaire, born into the colonial society of Mozambique, whose tastes, pieties, and hobbies?cultivating roses and collecting still-lifes?are those of a traditional, if not Victorian, lady. But when she calls herself ?a child of Africa? one can hear an echo of Rousseau, and it reverberates in the impulsive salvos (playful, caustic, or profane) for which she has been ridiculed as ?bonkers? and ?a loose cannon.? The natural woman refuses to suppress her ?lan or subordinate her character to a role. ?I don?t want to lose myself,? she said to me recently, ?because if I do then I think my husband loses something, too.?
Three years ago, when John Kerry was discussing a potential Presidential race with a small circle of advisers, his wife ?blessed his decision and accepted it as a partner,? a member of the group recalled. ?She said she knew what was involved, but, to be fair, no one does, and any thinking human being would have qualms. She certainly made it clear that she would be her own person, and we wondered if she was going to be perceived as a breath of fresh air or as a threat; if her straight speaking would motivate voters?women in particular?or if we were going to spend the campaign watching our back, tensed for a blowup. We called it the Teresa factor.?
The role of First Lady is, in many respects, as archaically courtly as the title, and history suggests that a woman who plays it may be forgiven for weaknesses perceived as feminine?Betty Ford?s depression, Jackie Kennedy?s extravagance, Pat Nixon?s fragility, Nancy Reagan?s faith in astrology?but not for strengths perceived as manly. In a deeply pious country founded by Puritans, the spouse of a President is also, to some extent, the minister?s wife. She commands sympathy and reverence only so long as her conduct is irreproachable or her husband?s isn?t. Though she is not ritually invested with the sins, evils, or ill luck of the tribe, she is nevertheless a scapegoat of sorts?a propitiatory figure saddled with the culture?s burdensome ideals of wifely and maternal virtue.
Heinz Kerry has made a feminist issue of her entitlement to express herself, and if she were a man, she says, no one would denigrate her as ?opinionated.? She lectures knowledgeably on the inequities that confront women in the workplace and champions the excluded and discounted women of the Third World. One of the lucky charms that she wears on a necklace (another is a four-leaf clover that Kerry gave her one Valentine?s Day) is a religious medal that her dying mother received from her confessor. He got it from Mother Teresa, who embodies the vocation for which Heinz Kerry would best like to be known?tireless caregiving. Her father, a Portuguese-born oncologist, had hoped that she would become a doctor, ?and she kind of wanted to,? a close friend, Wren Wirth, the wife of Tim Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, says, ?though she wanted to get married and have children even more.? At the height of the women?s movement, in the nineteen-seventies, she was the stay-at-home mother of three little boys for whom, she says, she washed cloth diapers. She calls herself ?a spokesman for women?s ability to be at the center of the family.?
But Heinz Kerry intends to be the first spouse of a President employed outside the White House (Hillary Clinton gave up her legal career when her husband was elected), and though she performs her share of the expected campaign chores?reading to toddlers and laying wreaths?some of her speeches and seminars on the hustings would not be out of place at Davos. They have focussed less on John Kerry?s legislative achievements, human qualities, or political agenda than on her own eventful biography and the work of the Heinz Endowments, a charitable enterprise seeded by the family fortune of her first husband, H. John Heinz III, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania.
Many of the voters who come out to meet Heinz Kerry are middle-aged working women, chafing at constraints they have outgrown, and they applaud her defiance in breaking the mold of First Lady-like self-effacement. (Breaking molds is otherwise known as iconoclasm.) Kerry himself admires his wife?s intellect and independence, he told me, and he seems to accept stoically, if not with relish, that she is ?saucy.? Even if he doesn?t, ?he wasn?t blind,? she says. ?He knew what I would be like, what he was getting.?
Nevertheless, recent approval ratings for the infallibly sunny and conventional Laura Bush, who is her husband?s greatest booster, are vastly superior to Heinz Kerry?s (seventy-two per cent, according to a poll taken by the Los Angeles Times, to thirty-five per cent). Even many Democrats admire Mrs. Bush. Americans in large numbers, regardless of their party, tell pollsters that they don?t vote for a First Lady and that their opinions of Laura or Teresa won?t influence their decision on Election Day, but the two wives have a significant influence on voters? perceptions of the candidates. Kerry?s image is still sorely deficient in the warmth and human definition that Heinz Kerry herself possesses and might lend him. The adviser involved in Kerry?s early strategy meetings told me that he is surprised by her reluctance ?to trim the sails? of what he and others describe as a ?self-referential? presentation that has often dwelled, at inopportune moments, on her memories of Heinz and on his legacy. ?She made some stirring and lovely speeches, particularly during the primaries, when you thought, Goddam right, Teresa!? he said. But her habit of running on private rails rather than on the main line has dissipated some steam from the campaign. ?It isn?t as if there have been no specific conversations with Teresa about the necessity to fill in the picture,? the adviser said. ?John had a few himself, but he would ask others to convey the message.? Perhaps, he reflected, she tends to reject criticism imperiously ?because she?s used to tremendous deference. When you have so much money, and give so much away, everyone, from governors on down, courts your approval. I think she sometimes has problems with a secondary role.?
On the campaign trail with Heinz Kerry, I occasionally closed my eyes and concentrated on her diction and accent. She pronounces folksy locutions with upper-class British vowels, sultry Portuguese s?s, and pizzicato t?s. Her repartee is quick, with a Gallic tartness. Backstage at a fund-raiser in New York, she bantered with her son Andre, who recently moved to Pittsburgh from Stockholm, in perfect French and the convincing Swedish of a Bergman spoof. The Hispanic press in South Florida was disappointed, last spring, that she declined to be interviewed in Spanish, which she speaks fluently, though with the occasional Italian verb. She explained that it would take three weeks to get her vocabulary up to speed for a serious policy discussion, but that she would be happy to oblige the reporters with a little ?chitchat.?
Despite her linguistic prowess and her worldliness, Heinz Kerry has, at times, a deaf ear for the nuances of slang, code, condescension, and vulgarity in English?for the emotion of the language. ?There are these bizarre moments that make you shudder,? the Kerry adviser said. ?Like calling herself African-American to black audiences.? She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband?s health-care proposals as ?idiots,? and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word ?scumbags? to describe some of her detractors. I doubt that she knows the literal meaning of ?scumbag,? but perhaps, after forty years in America, nearly thirty of them as a political wife, observing how the flaws and contradictions of a personality as complex as hers are melted down for ammunition by the other side, she should have learned it. Close friends attribute her lapses of discretion to ?na?vet?.? Heinz Kerry says that they are a form of resistance to enforced conformity. ?I don?t like to be told, for told?s sake,? how to behave, she says, ?because I lived in a dictatorship for too long.?
During Heinz Kerry?s childhood, Mozambique?a colony of Portugal for some four hundred years?was ruled by the Fascist government of Ant?nio Salazar. She hasn?t been back to Mozambique since April of 1974, when she was thirty-five, and married to John Heinz. It has changed too drastically, she says, and she is afraid the experience would be distressing. On that visit, she took her three sons to see their grandparents. Christopher, the baby, was a year old, and his brothers, Andre and John, were four and seven. The family was scheduled to return to the United States on April 25th, but the borders were closed and the airport shut down. That day, Salazar?s heir, Marcelo Caetano, had been ousted in a bloodless military coup. Its leaders were a cadre of young Army officers, many of whom had fought in their country?s African wars and returned home?like some of their American contemporaries in Vietnam?radicalized by the destruction they had helped wreak. They pledged free elections, the restoration of civil liberties, and an end to colonialism.
When the news from Lisbon reached Louren?o Marques, the capital of Mozambique, stunned and ecstatic people took to the streets. Teresa Heinz and her father attended the first open meeting of frelimo (Frente da Liberta??o de Mo?ambique), which had been waging a guerrilla war of liberation for more than ten years, and they joined the vast throng of celebrants marching through the ?cement town.? (The expression, which refers to the European enclaves in Mozambique?s urban centers, alludes to their solidity rather than to their ugliness. Most Africans lived in wretched shanties on the outskirts, which were known as ?cane towns.?) The parade took her up and down familiar, still well-kept avenues lined with jacaranda trees dripping pale blossoms, past the Museum of Natural History, next door to which her grandmother had lived, and past the colonial villa on the cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean where she and her siblings grew up.
In the early months of Kerry?s campaign, Heinz Kerry rarely gave a speech or an interview that wasn?t redolent with nostalgia for the sensations of her childhood (the steamy vibrance of New Orleans reminded her of home, she said, as did the palm trees and tile roofs of Florida and the earthiness of Pittsburgh), and she continues to invoke what she sees as Africa?s lessons about nature, race, freedom, dependence, and survival. When she urges Americans to exercise their right to vote, she likes to observe that her father was seventy-one when he cast his ballot in a free election for the first time.
Heinz Kerry?s father moved back to Portugal with his wife after the Socialist regime of Samora Machel came to power in Mozambique, in 1975, and the country became independent. Machel nationalized private property. ?My father wanted to die there,? she told me with bitterness. ?He didn?t come to make money to take back to Portugal. He had nothing in Portugal.? But, as crime rose and the economy crumbled, white nationalists who had supported frelimo felt, she said, increasingly embattled and marginalized. ?The Portuguese colonials were not bad people compared to the crooks who took over,? she told a reporter in Fort Lauderdale last March, and added that she could empathize with the Cuban exile community in South Florida because her parents had also ?lost everything to the Communists.?
Heinz Kerry was in Fort Lauderdale to address a group of women supporters at a luxurious faux hacienda on the intercoastal waterway. It was a hot morning, and on the opposite bank workmen building a new mansion had taken their shirts off, and were gawking and gesturing, none too politely, at the ladies milling on the terrace and in the garden. Some members of the construction crew had evidently gone to the trouble of lowering a scaffold from which to spray a graffito, about ten feet high, in red paint, on the side of the bulkhead: ?Liberals Ruin U.S.A.?
The guest of honor arrived late, as she tends to. Her staff tries to keep her to a tight schedule, but she says that she?s ?too old to be bossed around.? As a speaker, she often gives more of herself than she is asked for, lingering in reception lines and becoming absorbed in an anecdote or the answer to a question. She speaks in an intent, unhurried fashion, and without notes. Her facts are hard and her command of them impressive, though her tone is whispery and caressing. Heinz Kerry describes herself as shy, and in the early months of the campaign she often hid in the corner of a stage, blushed at an introduction, covered her face, or did an awkward little pirouette of embarrassment before grabbing a mike with both hands and ad-libbing for an hour. Part of her reserve seems to be a reluctance to perform or emote on command. ?My back goes up,? she says. It also rises when she is asked questions that she considers demeaning, hostile, or intrusive, and she is, apparently, unaware that her provocative rebuffs encourage reporters to keep asking them. A friend in Washington who has known her well for decades sees her displays of intemperance as a function of anxiety. ?When Teresa is calm and relaxed, in a small group, among supporters, or one on one, she is an utterly delightful human being: loving, funny, and kindhearted. Her friends adore her, and she?s devoid of malice. But she?s very spoiled, and it?s not clear to her that in politics the attention?which she likes?comes with heat.?
Heinz Kerry has an unlined complexion, elegant gestures that punctuate her speech, and the well-tended simmer of a retired Latin film star. Her dark eyes are widely set and, like her temper, have an emphatic flash. She dresses with expensive understatement, however. A consultant versed in the semiotics of campaign style may have suggested the bright-red ensemble that she wore to the Democratic Convention (red is said to telegraph sentimental warmth to women voters), but throughout the spring she travelled in the same three or four black, taupe, or beige designer suits. She accessorized her outfits with a misshapen straw hat; prescription sunglasses; a cardigan; Chanel boots; a large diamond ring; a Herm?s satchel; a rhinestone campaign pin and a polyester scarf with a print of Kerry?s initials that she helped design; and her necklace of charms. In the name of truth-telling, but also because she enjoys the incredulity of younger people when they hear that she is sixty-five, she makes a point of mentioning her age and the fact that she is married to a man five years her junior. She says that she would like to be a model for older women who feel sexually disenfranchised, and to ?liberate them from the feeling that they die as women? when their youth is gone.
It should be said that Heinz Kerry is routinely cornier and more cordial than she is high-handed or inflammatory. (One of her favorite adages is ?Put your arms around the problem, and it begins to get solved.?) But she sometimes seems bored when others speak. On camera, her tinted reading glasses make her look aloof. At a rally one evening in Chicago?s Union Station, wearing a low-cut white blouse and a black suit, she projected?while Kerry spoke?the languor of a maja. On other occasions, she took slugs from a water bottle, frowned, slumped, scribbled a note, fiddled with her rings and hair, or whispered to someone on the dais.
Heinz Kerry brightens visibly, however, when her husband sounds his call for ending America?s moral, economic, and diplomatic ?isolation.? Kati Marton, the author of ?Hidden Power,? a study of modern Presidential couples (her husband, Richard Holbrooke, advises Kerry on foreign policy), believes that, whatever her liabilities as a candidate?s wife, ?Teresa would be an enormous asset? as the country?s second foreign-born First Lady. (Her only predecessor would be Mrs. John Quincy Adams, n?e Louisa Catherine Johnson, and in some senses she shouldn?t count. Adams?s mother was English, but her father was an American living in London, who became the United States consul there after the Revolution.) ?At a time in American history when we have alienated so much of the world, Teresa, with her languages and her cultivation, could perform a real service as an envoy in a way that Jackie Kennedy or Hillary did,? Marton says.
An envoy is a stand-in, however, and Heinz Kerry seems to prefer her own ground. She defines her role in the campaign, or the one she feels best equipped to play, as ?helping people to connect the dots?that?s what I like to do,? she says. ?For instance, during the Iowa primaries, I was talking with small farmers and environmentalists about pesticides, aquifers, the big Ag subsidies, and what they are doing. And it so happened that the W.T.O. was meeting, and I read that the Zimbabweans had walked out, because they could no longer afford to sell their corn and compete with the American farmers subsidized by the big Ags. So I talked about it, and they got very excited to learn that what was an inequity to them was an inequity to poor people elsewhere. That is what a globalized world really does. And then I talked about aids and sars, and aspects of trade or foreign policy, and I tied it up to terrorism and how you fight it?by having the best intelligence, and investing in our firefighters, our police, our C.D.C., and epidemiology. And maybe also in a new special force at home, but, most important, in teaching languages, knowing the countries, and forging real friendships with the world, so we can get the information ahead of trouble. You know, Americans are smart, but they only know what they see and hear. How many read op-ed pages?? She would like to make a weekly broadcast, ?perhaps on c-span, talking and listening and feeling part of making people?s lives better.?
In her eagerness to connect the dots for people, Heinz Kerry sometimes fails to appreciate that, beyond the Beltway, many voters have no idea what she means by ?Kyoto,? ?the big Ag subsidies,? ?the W.T.O.,? and ?the C.D.C.,? or by ?Socratic dialogue? and ?thinking in silos??two of her catchphrases. The students at Bethune-Cookman College, in Daytona Beach, half of them male and most of them under twenty-one, listened politely but with glazed expressions to a digression about hormonereplacement therapy for the symptoms of menopause.
A few days before Heinz Kerry acquired a Secret Service detail, in April, she was mixing a grog for an ailing journalist (she is full of remedies and medical advice, some of it holistic or homeopathic) and lamenting the imminent end of her life ?in the normal world.? Despite her belief that her wealth doesn?t or shouldn?t define her, many Americans find it difficult to imagine that a woman as rich as Heinz Kerry lives in the normal world. They expect a grande dame in the mode of Mrs. Astor, with white gloves, if not of Alexis Carrington, with scarlet claws, and when they meet her in person, at a rally or on a rope line, they are often disarmed by her lack of affectation. ?She talks too long,? Jane Bell, who does market research in Des Moines, said to me after a campaign event, ?and in that sense she?s worse than he is. But she comes across as genuine and very bright and deeply compassionate. It?s not her fault that she has all that money. I like it that she hasn?t started baking cookies. And that African childhood is a terrific asset.?
Maria Teresa Thierstein Sim?es-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Louren?o Marques on October 5, 1938. She describes herself as ?the dull one? of three siblings, ?the easy middle one. My mom used to say I never gave them one day of worry.? Her sister and brother ?were supremely intelligent, particularly my sister,? she says. ?On the other hand, I got better grades than they did, because I applied myself.? Her brother, the oldest child, earned a degree from Cambridge, and her sister?so incongruously fair in a dark family that she was nicknamed beb? ingl?s?died in a car crash at nineteen.
The Sim?es-Ferreira family produced some of Lisbon?s most distinguished lawyers and judges (and also a poet, Heinz Kerry recalled, who was ?crazy as a loon,? and a friend of Sartre?s), so her father?s choice of a career in medicine was, from his parents? point of view, mildly heretical. He emigrated to Mozambique about the time Salazar seized power, and, having married a young woman from Louren?o Marques?s cliquish British colony, set up a practice in Manjacaze, northeast of the capital?an inland village that was a center of cashew-nut cultivation.
Andre Heinz describes his maternal grandmother, Irene Thierstein, as a Mediterranean matriarch of the old school. ?She was sweetness incarnate,? Heinz Kerry?s friend Wren Wirth says, ?and very firm about her faith.? Thierstein was born in Mozambique to a couple who had immigrated from South Africa at the time of the Boer War. Her father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living on Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War.
When Heinz Kerry?s mother was pregnant with her first child, she contracted a kidney ailment in Manjacaze and nearly died. The family returned to Europe for a few years so that she could regain her health and her husband could study a second specialty?radiology. Thereafter, they gave up the notion of living dangerously and settled in the capital, where Sim?es-Ferreira opened an oncology clinic. His children had a modern urban childhood that included movies, pop music, and dating. ?My life was idyllic,? Heinz Kerry says, ?but more modern than Isak Dinesen?s.?
On weekends and holidays, the family stayed at a cottage overlooking the Uembje lagoon, in Bilene, a hundred miles north of the capital. There were masses of flamingos in the saline pools near the shore, and a landscape of verdant brush and white dunes. Though Heinz Kerry describes the region as ?bush? (her memories of underdevelopment have a colonial flavor), it was already becoming a beach resort. But at five o?clock on Saturday mornings her father went to work in an informal clinic under the pergola in their garden. Teresa helped him make rounds?an experience that she recounts regularly to voters. The patients were desperately poor peasants living in wattle huts who had no other access to medical care. Infant mortality was then about thirty per cent, though it often took the mothers two years, she says, to overcome their fears and bring their children for treatment. Because so few rural Africans spoke Portuguese, it was difficult to communicate. Teresa?s father compiled a hand-written dictionary of Ronga, a local language, that she inherited and keeps by her bedside.
Heinz Kerry insists that even though she possesses a great fortune and its attendant perquisites, including the private jet in which she campaigns?a Gulfstream II?she could be ?perfectly happy? living under a thatched roof. She also likes to say that ?my Africa preserved the innocence of children.? But the insouciant egotism of privilege is its own form of innocence. Though the stamp on her Portuguese identity card categorized her, she tells voters, as ?a second-class citizen,? her parentage entitled her to a first-class life. ?There was a natural apartheid in Mozambique,? she says, one that was economic and social, not legalized. ?There were not that many Africans going to high school yet, or who would go to a movie, or who would do some of the things that we did, but my little school did have some mulatto girls.?
When she was fourteen, Teresa was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Durban, where she was one of three foreigners and barely understood a word. Her English was still elementary, but, by working with her habitual application, she ?got the hang of it.? She won prizes for French and music, but she missed her own piano. ?I wanted to become a concert pianist,? she told me, but the music teacher crushed her hopes for a career, pointing out that her hands would always be too small to make an octave. ?I felt so gypped,? she said. ?I never had another piano lesson.?
After graduating at the top of her class, Teresa enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg?the ?Oxford of South Africa??at a moment of heady, though not yet revolutionary, intellectual and social ferment that would shortly be suppressed. She majored in Romance languages, and she says that she especially loved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history and French theatre. She took classes in political science, which helped shape her rosy first impressions of America. Those textbook outlines of democracy were colored in by the Hollywood movies of the period. ?I really admired a country that produced the Bill of Rights and ?Some Like It Hot,?? she often says.
In April of 1959, despite her mother?s disapproval, Teresa joined her classmates and professors in an unprecedented, prominently reported demonstration of unity (the protesters wore academic robes) against a law that would extend apartheid to the few institutions of higher education that were still integrated?including their own. The legislation passed that June, nine months before the Sharpeville massacre. Some of her friends eventually went to jail, Heinz Kerry says, but the protests of 1959 were peaceful by the standards of what was to come. She left for Europe after she graduated, and enrolled at the Interpreters? School at the University of Geneva. John Heinz?the heir to the eponymous condiment fortune?was taking a year off from the Harvard Business School to work at a Swiss bank, and they met on a tennis court.
Heinz, the only child of divorced parents, had been sent to boarding school at a tender age. His old friend David Garth (who was a media strategist for Heinz?s five successful runs for Congress?two for the House and three for the Senate) suggests that he suffered in his relations with an overbearing father. The Heinz patrimony traditionally helped underwrite the cultural life of Pittsburgh, where the company has its corporate headquarters in a high-rise on one side of the Allegheny River and its old factory?an industrial landmark of sooty brick, crowned by a smokestack and an enormous neon ketchup bottle?on the other. The Steelers play at Heinz Field, and a walking tour of the city?s cultural district, once a combat zone of peep shows, adult book shops, and flophouses, gives one a sense both of the family?s munificence and of its mystique. According to Janet Sarbaugh, who directs the arts and culture programs at the Heinz Endowments, the formidable father-in-law of ?Mrs. Heinz,? as she is still known to her staff, bought up many of the derelict properties and ?spearheaded their transformation.? Among the benefactions that Pittsburgh owes, wholly or in part, to the dynasty of which Heinz Kerry is now what Wren Wirth calls ?the Regent? are Heinz Hall, a Jazz Age movie palace restored to its period opulence; the even larger Benedum Center, home of the Pittsburgh Ballet and the Pittsburgh Opera; a modern sculpture garden with works by Dan Kiley and Louise Bourgeois; a public theatre designed by Michael Graves; the handsomely landscaped riverfront; and numerous buildings at the university, including the Heinz Memorial Chapel.
?I felt sympathy for this girl from Louren?o Marques,? David Garth said. He was referring to the daunting prospect of entering Pittsburgh society?a clannish oligarchy of banking and steel magnates?like the common-born upstart from a distant tropic who captivates an heir to the realm. Garth met Teresa Sim?es-Ferreira in New York in 1964, and was smitten with her. ?John and I were a couple of bachelor jerks,? he said. ?And I had never heard him serious about anybody else.? Garth had also never met a woman as unawed by the manly virtues and material comforts that made Heinz ?one of the ultra catches in the country,? as he put it. ?Teresa was not a rollover, and I liked that about her. She was very independent. When you met the two of them early on, she was the one who struck you as the natural politician. She was always concerned with issues?as a Senate wife, she took up the plight of Soviet Jewry, among other things?and she follows through. You don?t make an idle remark to her and think it will be lost. She has always been?I hate the word?genuine. She doesn?t watch what she says, but I?ve been involved with politics at what I consider a fairly high level for most of my life, and I?ve never seen anybody worth a damn who didn?t have her attitude.?
Heinz Kerry describes herself as an immigrant and makes common cause with other naturalized citizens striving toward the American dream. She spent her first year in this country living in a town-house apartment on East Eighty-first Street, near the Metropolitan Museum, deciding whether or not she could adjust to American life. Her future with Heinz hinged on the decision. The relentless pace and rudeness of New York overwhelmed her. But she had landed a job at the United Nations. She worked for the Trusteeship Council, ?which doesn?t exist anymore,? she noted, translating and analyzing information on colonial economic activities, and tracking the progress of decolonialization. The job brought her into occasional contact with her countryman Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of frelimo. He worked at the Secretariat when he wasn?t leading the nascent revolution in Mozambique. Mondlane encouraged her research, and they reminisced about home. She was moved to hear him say that her father had made an impression on him as a boy in Manjacaze, where he was born.
Heinz Kerry?s stint at the United Nations gave her her first taste of political disillusionment. ?I remember sitting in the Security Council with Mondlane, a few years before he was assassinated??he was killed in 1969??and they were fighting and carrying on about colonies,? she recalled. He listened to the empty Cold War rhetoric for a while, then said to her, in a weary voice, ?It?s like watching a soccer match.? She realized that ?the truth was irrelevant,? and ?all my hard work?the facts I was searching for?meant nothing.? Her experience at the U.N., she told a Brazilian journalist in Fort Lauderdale, was a ?banho??a bath, or, perhaps more fittingly, a baptismal immersion??de realpolitik.?
Heinz was an Episcopalian, but Catholicism, Heinz Kerry says, ?is part of me, you know?part of who I am.? Even in the late fifties, her piety impressed her contemporaries as anachronistic. A Heinz family member describes Teresa as ?straitlaced? and uses the word ?romanticism? to characterize her feelings for the Church: ?When she was a young woman, her ideas were mystical and half-baked, but they?ve gotten much clearer.? From the perspective of an orthodox Catholic like her mother, however, Heinz Kerry?s position on reproductive rights qualifies as sinful. In her early twenties, she ended an otherwise congenial romance when her suitor admitted that if he ever had to choose between saving her life and that of an unborn child he would, without hesitation, follow Church doctrine and let her die. She also had the courage?or impertinence, depending on one?s point of view?to tell Bishop Wright of Pittsburgh, in a pastoral interview that took place shortly before he presided at her wedding, that she ?wanted lots of children? but that she didn?t believe in the Church?s views on contraception. ?You wouldn?t talk about abortion in those days?you didn?t think about it,? she said to me. But, years later, after the birth of her three sons, she was prepared to abort a pregnancy severely compromised by high doses of a steroid medication. A miscarriage spared her from a choice that, despite her ambivalence on the subject?abortion, she says, is a ?terrible thing,? and anyone who treats it lightly is heartless?she feels all women should be free to make.
The wedding of John Heinz and Teresa Sim?es-Ferreira took place in February of 1966, at the Heinz Memorial Chapel. A blizzard had dumped five feet of snow on the city, and the bride ?cried every week? thereafter through the first year of her new life. Her husband was commuting from long hours at the family company to their farmhouse on ninety acres in the fashionable suburb of Fox Chapel, and she was homesick and lonely. ?But then,? she told me, ?you have a baby, and things start becoming a unit, and you grow up. I grew up with a guy. Who I was in love with. Who made me a woman, you know? Mother of his children. And an American.?
Happy marriages seem to be as rare in contemporary politics as they are in modern fiction, though the Heinzes, according to their friends, had one. ?Their closeness was something you don?t see if you?ve done as many campaigns as I have, and seen as many disenchanted couples,? Garth said. The Heinz family member noted, however, that John Heinz could be difficult and dogmatic, and that, while Teresa was always ?feisty,? and their tugs-of-war had a ?flirtatious? tension, she lived in the shadow of his authority. ?He was very tough, and he ran the show. He had the money and she didn?t,? a friend in Washington said. His son Chris describes him simply as ?the boss.?
Chris is dark, muscular, and good-natured, with his father?s chiselled features. He graduated from business school three years ago and worked briefly in private banking before quitting his job to campaign for Kerry, whose steadiness, he said, supplies ballast to an ?emotional family.? His oldest brother, John, sanctions no intrusions into his privacy. He began working with inner-city children while he was at Boston College, and became a Buddhist. At an alternative Buddhist school that he co-founded, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he teaches troubled adolescents and reproduces medieval tools and armor on a blacksmith?s forge. His wife is a doctor, and their daughter is Heinz Kerry?s only grandchild.
Andre?a polyglot like his mother?is a consultant to businesses interested in sustainable development. He jokes that his first name destined him to be the European in the family. His coloring is Iberian, and an excellent tailor and beautiful manners that are reserved without being stiff contribute to his patrician air. When I met him at a gala in New York in April, he seemed unnerved to have been swept into his mother and stepfather?s court of bodyguards, staffers, volunteers, and press. ?It was all a bit surreal,? he said. ?We are kind of a private family.? He calls Kerry his mother?s ?kindred spirit,? though he adds that, while ?John has a lot going on upstairs?he is thinking all the time, parallel processing?Mom is very intuitive. At the end of the day, she listens to her gut, and that?s why she is such a conundrum.?
Heinz Kerry described herself to the students in Daytona Beach as a ?strict, bossy, witchy mother.? Her sons were forbidden to eat junk food and were restricted to thirty minutes or, at most, an hour of television a week, after which they had to write a brief report explaining why they liked the program they had chosen. ?So we spent our time figuring out how to watch TV and eat junk food,? Andre said. ?Mom could be terrifying,? he added, affectionately. ?She was like concentrated juice: strong-willed, outspoken?a tour de force.?
The principal reason that Heinz Kerry balked at releasing her tax returns, she says, was to protect her sons? privacy (they have complex joint trusts). John was apparently the least willing to condone the exposure. She says she initially believed that the political uproar about her taxes was just ?noise from the right,? but when the noise became a general uproar she grudgingly produced a summary of her 2003 income?$5.1 million?and the effective tax she paid on it, about eleven per cent.
On April 4, 1991, John Heinz and six others, including two children, died in a collision of his chartered plane with a helicopter over a schoolyard in suburban Philadelphia. Shortly before he was killed, he and his wife had been discussing ways to find financial support for an interdisciplinary research center at the Environmental Defense Fund, of which Heinz Kerry was a vice-chairman. ?I was in despair about it,? she told me. ?And he said, ?Don?t worry, you are a very wise person, it will be O.K.? Those were his last words, and they helped me later on. Because it wasn?t something he?d ever told me?that I was wise.? For a long time, she was devastated by his death, to the point of paralysis.
In addition to around half a billion dollars?which, by the most recent estimates, has since doubled?Heinz left his widow their farm, Rosemont; a brick town house in Georgetown; a fifteenth-century barn reconstructed beside a river in Sun Valley, Idaho; a beach compound on Nantucket; and one of the finest collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art in private hands. David Garth and others, including Arlen Specter, the senior senator from Pennsylvania and, like Heinz, a Republican who was willing, on occasion, to cross the aisle, urged her to run for her husband?s seat, which is now filled by Rick Santorum?an outspokenly conservative politician whom Heinz Kerry once called ?a Forrest Gump with attitude.? Heinz Kerry was a registered Republican of the Rockefeller school until 2002, and she hasn?t altered her views in any essential way. When she changed her affiliation, it wasn?t for Kerry?s sake, she says, but because she felt alienated by the increasingly strident, divisive rhetoric of the Republican Party. She found the tactics that the Republicans used to defeat Max Cleland, the Democratic senator from Georgia, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, ?unscrupulous and disgusting.? Cleland was accused of being ?soft? on homeland security, and the conservative commentator Ann Coulter claimed that he had caused his own mutilations by mishandling a grenade. ?What does the Republican Party need?? Heinz Kerry asked in a CBS television interview. ?A fourth limb to make a person a hero??
Having survived the abrupt and violent losses of both her husband and her sister?two ?comets,? as Heinz Kerry put it, whose brilliance had always eclipsed her?she felt that she had, in middle age, been given a belated chance to test her mettle and achieve her own prominence. She chose to do so in philanthropy rather than in politics. Grant Oliphant, John Heinz?s former press secretary, who is now the associate director of the Endowments, gave me a tour of Heinz Kerry?s offices. They are laid out like a village street in some imaginary Southwestern town, and decorated with Early American folk art and artifacts, including a tattered flag with thirteen stars; a cigar-store Indian; and a statue of Uncle Sam from Coney Island. The exotic trees that supplied the wood came from sustainable plantations. In Heinz Kerry?s opulently spacious private aerie, a wall of glass opens onto a terrace with sweeping views of the Pittsburgh riverfront that she has helped revitalize. What was once one of America?s most polluted cities is now, according to Heinz Kerry, one of its cleanest, in part because of her environmental leadership. Like the new convention center several blocks away, for which she sponsored a design contest, the offices are so scrupulously ?green? that one can, in theory, eat the carpets.
The Endowments? assets?about $1.3 billion?generate between sixty and seventy million dollars a year, which, Oliphant says, ?is distributed to an array of progressive, mostly environmental causes, but also to programs that are faith-based and conservative, such as charter and Catholic schools in the inner city, and organizations that teach parenting skills.? Still, he says, ?the Endowments have been under attack for months by right-wing groups attempting to cast Teresa?s philanthropy as extremist and left-wing.? The attacks? which have been discredited as baseless smears by political fact-checkers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center?include assertions that Heinz Kerry helped to ?launder? charitable contributions and that she gave money to a foundation with links to Hamas. (The editor whom Heinz Kerry told to ?shove it? on the eve of her Convention speech works for the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which aired some of the accusations uncritically.) The donations in question were a decade?s worth of support for the Tides Center and Foundation, and were earmarked for specific environmental projects in Pennsylvania and for youth and economic-opportunity programs. Tides also funds antiwar, civil-rights, and pro-choice organizations, but demonstrably not with any Heinz money. ?It?s crazy,? Oliphant says, ?because she isn?t an ideologue?she?s a pragmatist, and she thinks from the middle.?
Heinz Kerry broadened the Endowments? scope and changed their philanthropic style. They still provide funding for the arts, but they also support a range of experimental initiatives in toxic-waste cleanup; community mental health; early-childhood development; preventive medicine; pensions for homemakers; prescription drugs for seniors; and education. ?It?s the difference between old-fashioned patronage and investment,? Janet Sarbaugh said. The Endowments? strategically targeted grants are accompanied by tight fiscal oversight, and recipients lose their support, as the Pittsburgh public-school system did, if they don?t meet high expectations of performance. ?Rather than set ourselves up as white knights whose generosity and intercessions will save the world,? Heinz Kerry wrote in the Fall 2002 issue of H, the Endowments? quarterly, ?we need to think of ourselves as partners in the rough-and-tumble enterprise of social change.?
John Kerry, like his wife, can be prickly about her immense wealth and its influence. ?Yes, she has money,? he told me, ?but the money is irrelevant to who she is and how she defines herself.? (He tends to take questions like an aggressive steeplechase rider on a testy stallion: forward in the saddle and wary of the hidden trap.) Kerry doesn?t see any impropriety in a First Lady funding and directing her own ?policy lab.? ?That?s the world she loves,? he said, though he claims that she will also find time ?to do what First Ladies have done historically,? which is to adopt a cause. When a reporter in Baltimore asked her what that cause might be, she answered coolly, ?I don?t think of my work as causes?I think of it as work.?
Though Heinz Kerry likes to attribute what critics see as impolitic behavior to her experience of tyranny, she lived with an ambitious politician of lordly ways longer than she ever lived under a dictatorship. At the surprise party that Heinz organized for her fiftieth birthday, she, in turn, surprised the guests by telling them that she had ?paid my dues and I wasn?t going to put up with any more stuff I don?t want to. Finito. It was the most liberating thing in the world.? Heinz was considering a Presidential bid at the time of his death, and his wife hated the idea. She told him that he would have to run ?over my dead body.? I asked her why she had changed her mind this time. Two years ago, she replied, she began to have ?a feeling of urgency about what?s going on in the world, and at my age it seemed a little selfish? to stand in Kerry?s way. She thought the matter over on a long hike, and decided that ?I shouldn?t stop him. I should help him. And so I did.?
Teresa Heinz met John Kerry in Washington, D.C., on Earth Day, 1990. He was speaking at a rally on the Mall, and she had come with her first husband, who was also scheduled to address the crowd. Both senators sat on the banking committee, and they were collegial acquaintances. While they were waiting to speak, Heinz introduced his wife to the gentleman from Massachusetts. By the time Kerry met Teresa Heinz again?in Brazil in 1992?she had been widowed. They were both delegates to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Kerry was impressed when she took over from a Brazilian interpreter she thought was subverting the meaning of a speech. They went to Mass at the cathedral, and chatted in French. (When two Americans lapse into French, it is usually for the purpose of flirting.) He had been divorced from his first wife, Julia Thorne, for four years, but they had lived separately for a decade. Their daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, were students of eighteen and fifteen.
The adjectives that Kerry used in describing his second wife to me??grounded, no-nonsense, down to earth, straightforward??may not jibe with Andre?s image of her as a conundrum; or with Chris?s volatile, exacting Latin mother; or with the charming and ?cozy? woman who, her friend in Washington says, has a tendency toward ?narcissism? in times of stress. But they suggest Heinz Kerry?s allure to a rootless and aloof man with a much buffeted personal life. At forty-eight, Kerry had been enjoying?or, at least from the frequency with which his name was linked with beautiful women, seeming to enjoy?the sexual prime of a powerful bachelor, but the gossip annoyed him. He just wanted ?to fall in love,? he told the Boston Globe, which had been tracking his dates, and he didn?t want girlfriends attributed to him ?until I?m committed and want that relationship known.? Kerry?s finances were unsettled, too. (His most recent disclosure lists personal assets in the range of half a million to two million dollars.) Thorne had a private income, but Kerry paid child support for his daughters. He owned a small town house in Washington with a big mortgage, and in Boston he camped out with family and friends. He struck Heinz Kerry as a ?gypsy? and ?a pet wolf? in need of domestication, and nesting was her forte.
Heinz and Kerry met for the third time at a dinner party in the capital, and he offered to see her home. On the way, he took her to the Vietnam Memorial. A few months later, she invited a close friend, the photojournalist Diana Walker, to lunch at her house in Georgetown. As Walker unlatched the back gate and walked through the high-walled garden, where brick paths define islands of roses, she was startled by a sound that presaged the announcement of a sea change in the widow?s life: ?Teresa whistling in the kitchen.?
After a brief courtship, a short period of cohabitation, and the signing of a prenuptial agreement, the Kerrys were married in a civil ceremony on Nantucket in 1995. Heinz Kerry wore the girlish dress of a first-time bride, with a ruffled neckline and puffed sleeves, and she settled into what was, in many respects, a familiar life as the consort of a public man. Her second husband, perhaps even more than her first, needed her buoyance. ?I think marriage is difficult,? she reflected. ?When you?re older, you bring a lot to the table, so it is harder work in some ways.? Kerry brought two teen-age daughters to the table. She believes, in retrospect, that she went about being their stepmother without enough discretion. ?Because I thought, I love kids, kids love me, I?ll be fine. Baloney.? She says that a friend gave her some useful advice: ?You have to treat stepchildren like pets. You?re nice to them, but you don?t get too close, or they chew you up. Well, I did it the other way.? When I asked Kerry if remarriage in middle age to a woman with a history to which she still seems deeply attached was a difficult proposition, he replied, in his staccato fashion, ?Not in the least. Why would it be hard for me? Look, she fell in love and decided to marry me.?
?John makes very close friends, but few,? a woman who knows him well says. ?His New England austerity is compounded by his reserve, his shyness, his politesse. He?s not a glad-hander?he was trained not to be.? As the son of a diplomat, who moved from school to school, ?he had to be a loner to survive. What I love about John is that he?s immensely curious and he never condescends. He also doesn?t manipulate. But as a politician that makes him unseductive. He leads with his head.? Kerry?s seductiveness may not be obvious, but the attraction of a consummately cerebral man to an irrepressibly visceral woman is. Perhaps one of the most eloquent messages that Heinz Kerry delivers to voters on her husband?s behalf is that he was fearless enough to take her on.
Late in August, while the Republicans convened in New York, the Kerrys vacationed on Nantucket. They resumed campaigning on Labor Day weekend, and Heinz Kerry spent the holiday in her home state, marching with thousands of citizens in a Pittsburgh parade and speaking at a sparsely attended union picnic and rally in Philadelphia. It took place on a pier near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, across the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey. The audience of steamfitters, longshoremen, and janitors had come with their children and wore the T-shirts of their locals.
Heinz Kerry?s hair was windblown and her cheeks rosy. Her acid-green suit was the color of an immense tanker, the Chemical Pioneer, slowly steaming up the river behind the stage. ?No war is worth fighting if the people in our country aren?t defended by good schools, jobs, and health care,? she told the audience. It was a new speech: lean of detail, punchy, brief, and delivered with the ease of a seasoned candidate. The shy whisper and distracting tics were gone. At one point, she leaned over to joke with an elderly black woman sitting on a folding chair in the front row who said that she was ninety and had plenty of opinions. There was laughter and applause. ?I?m a woman of a certain age and I deserve my opinions,? Heinz Kerry said to the audience. ?I?ve earned them the old-fashioned way.?
A week later, when Heinz Kerry was on her way to Pittsburgh with Wren Wirth (her close women friends take turns keeping her company on the road), I asked her what she thought about the increasingly vicious campaign, and the cheap caricatures of her personal eccentricities. ?It?s sad that in America people have to put up with that kind of thing,? she said. ?It?s sadder still that people like it.? Her voice on the phone sounded serene?neither embattled nor tinny with false optimism. Her syntax was baroque and elegiac, perhaps with fatigue, and her sentences were curiously wonkish and poetic at the same time. ?I am grateful that, being as old as I am??she mentioned her age twice in the course of a five-minute conversation??I have developed an interesting way to deal with it that I didn?t know I had in me, which is contextualizing what is said, not reading either the puffy things which would give me an oversized head or the things which would give me a shrivelled heart.? She spoke of Bush?s promise to reduce health-care costs, pointing out that he had just raised Medicare premiums for the elderly by seventeen per cent. ?I never thought there would be so many lies,? she said. ?It?s been quite amazing. But I don?t dwell there, I dwell in a better house, a house of hope.?
by JUDITH THURMAN
Teresa Heinz Kerry is an uncharted element on the road to the White House.
Issue of 2004-09-27
Posted 2004-09-20
or read from the New Yorker Here
The child of nature was a creature invented by the Romantics, whose cult of authenticity informed the literature of the next two hundred years. His direct descendant is the protagonist of countless modern films and novels: the prisoner of a false self revolting against the artifice of conventional narrative. On the face of it, Teresa Heinz Kerry makes an unlikely rebel. She is a sixty-five-year-old Catholic billionaire, born into the colonial society of Mozambique, whose tastes, pieties, and hobbies?cultivating roses and collecting still-lifes?are those of a traditional, if not Victorian, lady. But when she calls herself ?a child of Africa? one can hear an echo of Rousseau, and it reverberates in the impulsive salvos (playful, caustic, or profane) for which she has been ridiculed as ?bonkers? and ?a loose cannon.? The natural woman refuses to suppress her ?lan or subordinate her character to a role. ?I don?t want to lose myself,? she said to me recently, ?because if I do then I think my husband loses something, too.?
Three years ago, when John Kerry was discussing a potential Presidential race with a small circle of advisers, his wife ?blessed his decision and accepted it as a partner,? a member of the group recalled. ?She said she knew what was involved, but, to be fair, no one does, and any thinking human being would have qualms. She certainly made it clear that she would be her own person, and we wondered if she was going to be perceived as a breath of fresh air or as a threat; if her straight speaking would motivate voters?women in particular?or if we were going to spend the campaign watching our back, tensed for a blowup. We called it the Teresa factor.?
The role of First Lady is, in many respects, as archaically courtly as the title, and history suggests that a woman who plays it may be forgiven for weaknesses perceived as feminine?Betty Ford?s depression, Jackie Kennedy?s extravagance, Pat Nixon?s fragility, Nancy Reagan?s faith in astrology?but not for strengths perceived as manly. In a deeply pious country founded by Puritans, the spouse of a President is also, to some extent, the minister?s wife. She commands sympathy and reverence only so long as her conduct is irreproachable or her husband?s isn?t. Though she is not ritually invested with the sins, evils, or ill luck of the tribe, she is nevertheless a scapegoat of sorts?a propitiatory figure saddled with the culture?s burdensome ideals of wifely and maternal virtue.
Heinz Kerry has made a feminist issue of her entitlement to express herself, and if she were a man, she says, no one would denigrate her as ?opinionated.? She lectures knowledgeably on the inequities that confront women in the workplace and champions the excluded and discounted women of the Third World. One of the lucky charms that she wears on a necklace (another is a four-leaf clover that Kerry gave her one Valentine?s Day) is a religious medal that her dying mother received from her confessor. He got it from Mother Teresa, who embodies the vocation for which Heinz Kerry would best like to be known?tireless caregiving. Her father, a Portuguese-born oncologist, had hoped that she would become a doctor, ?and she kind of wanted to,? a close friend, Wren Wirth, the wife of Tim Wirth, a former Democratic senator from Colorado, says, ?though she wanted to get married and have children even more.? At the height of the women?s movement, in the nineteen-seventies, she was the stay-at-home mother of three little boys for whom, she says, she washed cloth diapers. She calls herself ?a spokesman for women?s ability to be at the center of the family.?
But Heinz Kerry intends to be the first spouse of a President employed outside the White House (Hillary Clinton gave up her legal career when her husband was elected), and though she performs her share of the expected campaign chores?reading to toddlers and laying wreaths?some of her speeches and seminars on the hustings would not be out of place at Davos. They have focussed less on John Kerry?s legislative achievements, human qualities, or political agenda than on her own eventful biography and the work of the Heinz Endowments, a charitable enterprise seeded by the family fortune of her first husband, H. John Heinz III, a Republican senator from Pennsylvania.
Many of the voters who come out to meet Heinz Kerry are middle-aged working women, chafing at constraints they have outgrown, and they applaud her defiance in breaking the mold of First Lady-like self-effacement. (Breaking molds is otherwise known as iconoclasm.) Kerry himself admires his wife?s intellect and independence, he told me, and he seems to accept stoically, if not with relish, that she is ?saucy.? Even if he doesn?t, ?he wasn?t blind,? she says. ?He knew what I would be like, what he was getting.?
Nevertheless, recent approval ratings for the infallibly sunny and conventional Laura Bush, who is her husband?s greatest booster, are vastly superior to Heinz Kerry?s (seventy-two per cent, according to a poll taken by the Los Angeles Times, to thirty-five per cent). Even many Democrats admire Mrs. Bush. Americans in large numbers, regardless of their party, tell pollsters that they don?t vote for a First Lady and that their opinions of Laura or Teresa won?t influence their decision on Election Day, but the two wives have a significant influence on voters? perceptions of the candidates. Kerry?s image is still sorely deficient in the warmth and human definition that Heinz Kerry herself possesses and might lend him. The adviser involved in Kerry?s early strategy meetings told me that he is surprised by her reluctance ?to trim the sails? of what he and others describe as a ?self-referential? presentation that has often dwelled, at inopportune moments, on her memories of Heinz and on his legacy. ?She made some stirring and lovely speeches, particularly during the primaries, when you thought, Goddam right, Teresa!? he said. But her habit of running on private rails rather than on the main line has dissipated some steam from the campaign. ?It isn?t as if there have been no specific conversations with Teresa about the necessity to fill in the picture,? the adviser said. ?John had a few himself, but he would ask others to convey the message.? Perhaps, he reflected, she tends to reject criticism imperiously ?because she?s used to tremendous deference. When you have so much money, and give so much away, everyone, from governors on down, courts your approval. I think she sometimes has problems with a secondary role.?
On the campaign trail with Heinz Kerry, I occasionally closed my eyes and concentrated on her diction and accent. She pronounces folksy locutions with upper-class British vowels, sultry Portuguese s?s, and pizzicato t?s. Her repartee is quick, with a Gallic tartness. Backstage at a fund-raiser in New York, she bantered with her son Andre, who recently moved to Pittsburgh from Stockholm, in perfect French and the convincing Swedish of a Bergman spoof. The Hispanic press in South Florida was disappointed, last spring, that she declined to be interviewed in Spanish, which she speaks fluently, though with the occasional Italian verb. She explained that it would take three weeks to get her vocabulary up to speed for a serious policy discussion, but that she would be happy to oblige the reporters with a little ?chitchat.?
Despite her linguistic prowess and her worldliness, Heinz Kerry has, at times, a deaf ear for the nuances of slang, code, condescension, and vulgarity in English?for the emotion of the language. ?There are these bizarre moments that make you shudder,? the Kerry adviser said. ?Like calling herself African-American to black audiences.? She dismissed voters skeptical of her husband?s health-care proposals as ?idiots,? and, in a television interview with a Pittsburgh anchorwoman, employed the word ?scumbags? to describe some of her detractors. I doubt that she knows the literal meaning of ?scumbag,? but perhaps, after forty years in America, nearly thirty of them as a political wife, observing how the flaws and contradictions of a personality as complex as hers are melted down for ammunition by the other side, she should have learned it. Close friends attribute her lapses of discretion to ?na?vet?.? Heinz Kerry says that they are a form of resistance to enforced conformity. ?I don?t like to be told, for told?s sake,? how to behave, she says, ?because I lived in a dictatorship for too long.?
During Heinz Kerry?s childhood, Mozambique?a colony of Portugal for some four hundred years?was ruled by the Fascist government of Ant?nio Salazar. She hasn?t been back to Mozambique since April of 1974, when she was thirty-five, and married to John Heinz. It has changed too drastically, she says, and she is afraid the experience would be distressing. On that visit, she took her three sons to see their grandparents. Christopher, the baby, was a year old, and his brothers, Andre and John, were four and seven. The family was scheduled to return to the United States on April 25th, but the borders were closed and the airport shut down. That day, Salazar?s heir, Marcelo Caetano, had been ousted in a bloodless military coup. Its leaders were a cadre of young Army officers, many of whom had fought in their country?s African wars and returned home?like some of their American contemporaries in Vietnam?radicalized by the destruction they had helped wreak. They pledged free elections, the restoration of civil liberties, and an end to colonialism.
When the news from Lisbon reached Louren?o Marques, the capital of Mozambique, stunned and ecstatic people took to the streets. Teresa Heinz and her father attended the first open meeting of frelimo (Frente da Liberta??o de Mo?ambique), which had been waging a guerrilla war of liberation for more than ten years, and they joined the vast throng of celebrants marching through the ?cement town.? (The expression, which refers to the European enclaves in Mozambique?s urban centers, alludes to their solidity rather than to their ugliness. Most Africans lived in wretched shanties on the outskirts, which were known as ?cane towns.?) The parade took her up and down familiar, still well-kept avenues lined with jacaranda trees dripping pale blossoms, past the Museum of Natural History, next door to which her grandmother had lived, and past the colonial villa on the cliffs overlooking the Indian Ocean where she and her siblings grew up.
In the early months of Kerry?s campaign, Heinz Kerry rarely gave a speech or an interview that wasn?t redolent with nostalgia for the sensations of her childhood (the steamy vibrance of New Orleans reminded her of home, she said, as did the palm trees and tile roofs of Florida and the earthiness of Pittsburgh), and she continues to invoke what she sees as Africa?s lessons about nature, race, freedom, dependence, and survival. When she urges Americans to exercise their right to vote, she likes to observe that her father was seventy-one when he cast his ballot in a free election for the first time.
Heinz Kerry?s father moved back to Portugal with his wife after the Socialist regime of Samora Machel came to power in Mozambique, in 1975, and the country became independent. Machel nationalized private property. ?My father wanted to die there,? she told me with bitterness. ?He didn?t come to make money to take back to Portugal. He had nothing in Portugal.? But, as crime rose and the economy crumbled, white nationalists who had supported frelimo felt, she said, increasingly embattled and marginalized. ?The Portuguese colonials were not bad people compared to the crooks who took over,? she told a reporter in Fort Lauderdale last March, and added that she could empathize with the Cuban exile community in South Florida because her parents had also ?lost everything to the Communists.?
Heinz Kerry was in Fort Lauderdale to address a group of women supporters at a luxurious faux hacienda on the intercoastal waterway. It was a hot morning, and on the opposite bank workmen building a new mansion had taken their shirts off, and were gawking and gesturing, none too politely, at the ladies milling on the terrace and in the garden. Some members of the construction crew had evidently gone to the trouble of lowering a scaffold from which to spray a graffito, about ten feet high, in red paint, on the side of the bulkhead: ?Liberals Ruin U.S.A.?
The guest of honor arrived late, as she tends to. Her staff tries to keep her to a tight schedule, but she says that she?s ?too old to be bossed around.? As a speaker, she often gives more of herself than she is asked for, lingering in reception lines and becoming absorbed in an anecdote or the answer to a question. She speaks in an intent, unhurried fashion, and without notes. Her facts are hard and her command of them impressive, though her tone is whispery and caressing. Heinz Kerry describes herself as shy, and in the early months of the campaign she often hid in the corner of a stage, blushed at an introduction, covered her face, or did an awkward little pirouette of embarrassment before grabbing a mike with both hands and ad-libbing for an hour. Part of her reserve seems to be a reluctance to perform or emote on command. ?My back goes up,? she says. It also rises when she is asked questions that she considers demeaning, hostile, or intrusive, and she is, apparently, unaware that her provocative rebuffs encourage reporters to keep asking them. A friend in Washington who has known her well for decades sees her displays of intemperance as a function of anxiety. ?When Teresa is calm and relaxed, in a small group, among supporters, or one on one, she is an utterly delightful human being: loving, funny, and kindhearted. Her friends adore her, and she?s devoid of malice. But she?s very spoiled, and it?s not clear to her that in politics the attention?which she likes?comes with heat.?
Heinz Kerry has an unlined complexion, elegant gestures that punctuate her speech, and the well-tended simmer of a retired Latin film star. Her dark eyes are widely set and, like her temper, have an emphatic flash. She dresses with expensive understatement, however. A consultant versed in the semiotics of campaign style may have suggested the bright-red ensemble that she wore to the Democratic Convention (red is said to telegraph sentimental warmth to women voters), but throughout the spring she travelled in the same three or four black, taupe, or beige designer suits. She accessorized her outfits with a misshapen straw hat; prescription sunglasses; a cardigan; Chanel boots; a large diamond ring; a Herm?s satchel; a rhinestone campaign pin and a polyester scarf with a print of Kerry?s initials that she helped design; and her necklace of charms. In the name of truth-telling, but also because she enjoys the incredulity of younger people when they hear that she is sixty-five, she makes a point of mentioning her age and the fact that she is married to a man five years her junior. She says that she would like to be a model for older women who feel sexually disenfranchised, and to ?liberate them from the feeling that they die as women? when their youth is gone.
It should be said that Heinz Kerry is routinely cornier and more cordial than she is high-handed or inflammatory. (One of her favorite adages is ?Put your arms around the problem, and it begins to get solved.?) But she sometimes seems bored when others speak. On camera, her tinted reading glasses make her look aloof. At a rally one evening in Chicago?s Union Station, wearing a low-cut white blouse and a black suit, she projected?while Kerry spoke?the languor of a maja. On other occasions, she took slugs from a water bottle, frowned, slumped, scribbled a note, fiddled with her rings and hair, or whispered to someone on the dais.
Heinz Kerry brightens visibly, however, when her husband sounds his call for ending America?s moral, economic, and diplomatic ?isolation.? Kati Marton, the author of ?Hidden Power,? a study of modern Presidential couples (her husband, Richard Holbrooke, advises Kerry on foreign policy), believes that, whatever her liabilities as a candidate?s wife, ?Teresa would be an enormous asset? as the country?s second foreign-born First Lady. (Her only predecessor would be Mrs. John Quincy Adams, n?e Louisa Catherine Johnson, and in some senses she shouldn?t count. Adams?s mother was English, but her father was an American living in London, who became the United States consul there after the Revolution.) ?At a time in American history when we have alienated so much of the world, Teresa, with her languages and her cultivation, could perform a real service as an envoy in a way that Jackie Kennedy or Hillary did,? Marton says.
An envoy is a stand-in, however, and Heinz Kerry seems to prefer her own ground. She defines her role in the campaign, or the one she feels best equipped to play, as ?helping people to connect the dots?that?s what I like to do,? she says. ?For instance, during the Iowa primaries, I was talking with small farmers and environmentalists about pesticides, aquifers, the big Ag subsidies, and what they are doing. And it so happened that the W.T.O. was meeting, and I read that the Zimbabweans had walked out, because they could no longer afford to sell their corn and compete with the American farmers subsidized by the big Ags. So I talked about it, and they got very excited to learn that what was an inequity to them was an inequity to poor people elsewhere. That is what a globalized world really does. And then I talked about aids and sars, and aspects of trade or foreign policy, and I tied it up to terrorism and how you fight it?by having the best intelligence, and investing in our firefighters, our police, our C.D.C., and epidemiology. And maybe also in a new special force at home, but, most important, in teaching languages, knowing the countries, and forging real friendships with the world, so we can get the information ahead of trouble. You know, Americans are smart, but they only know what they see and hear. How many read op-ed pages?? She would like to make a weekly broadcast, ?perhaps on c-span, talking and listening and feeling part of making people?s lives better.?
In her eagerness to connect the dots for people, Heinz Kerry sometimes fails to appreciate that, beyond the Beltway, many voters have no idea what she means by ?Kyoto,? ?the big Ag subsidies,? ?the W.T.O.,? and ?the C.D.C.,? or by ?Socratic dialogue? and ?thinking in silos??two of her catchphrases. The students at Bethune-Cookman College, in Daytona Beach, half of them male and most of them under twenty-one, listened politely but with glazed expressions to a digression about hormonereplacement therapy for the symptoms of menopause.
A few days before Heinz Kerry acquired a Secret Service detail, in April, she was mixing a grog for an ailing journalist (she is full of remedies and medical advice, some of it holistic or homeopathic) and lamenting the imminent end of her life ?in the normal world.? Despite her belief that her wealth doesn?t or shouldn?t define her, many Americans find it difficult to imagine that a woman as rich as Heinz Kerry lives in the normal world. They expect a grande dame in the mode of Mrs. Astor, with white gloves, if not of Alexis Carrington, with scarlet claws, and when they meet her in person, at a rally or on a rope line, they are often disarmed by her lack of affectation. ?She talks too long,? Jane Bell, who does market research in Des Moines, said to me after a campaign event, ?and in that sense she?s worse than he is. But she comes across as genuine and very bright and deeply compassionate. It?s not her fault that she has all that money. I like it that she hasn?t started baking cookies. And that African childhood is a terrific asset.?
Maria Teresa Thierstein Sim?es-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Louren?o Marques on October 5, 1938. She describes herself as ?the dull one? of three siblings, ?the easy middle one. My mom used to say I never gave them one day of worry.? Her sister and brother ?were supremely intelligent, particularly my sister,? she says. ?On the other hand, I got better grades than they did, because I applied myself.? Her brother, the oldest child, earned a degree from Cambridge, and her sister?so incongruously fair in a dark family that she was nicknamed beb? ingl?s?died in a car crash at nineteen.
The Sim?es-Ferreira family produced some of Lisbon?s most distinguished lawyers and judges (and also a poet, Heinz Kerry recalled, who was ?crazy as a loon,? and a friend of Sartre?s), so her father?s choice of a career in medicine was, from his parents? point of view, mildly heretical. He emigrated to Mozambique about the time Salazar seized power, and, having married a young woman from Louren?o Marques?s cliquish British colony, set up a practice in Manjacaze, northeast of the capital?an inland village that was a center of cashew-nut cultivation.
Andre Heinz describes his maternal grandmother, Irene Thierstein, as a Mediterranean matriarch of the old school. ?She was sweetness incarnate,? Heinz Kerry?s friend Wren Wirth says, ?and very firm about her faith.? Thierstein was born in Mozambique to a couple who had immigrated from South Africa at the time of the Boer War. Her father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living on Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War.
When Heinz Kerry?s mother was pregnant with her first child, she contracted a kidney ailment in Manjacaze and nearly died. The family returned to Europe for a few years so that she could regain her health and her husband could study a second specialty?radiology. Thereafter, they gave up the notion of living dangerously and settled in the capital, where Sim?es-Ferreira opened an oncology clinic. His children had a modern urban childhood that included movies, pop music, and dating. ?My life was idyllic,? Heinz Kerry says, ?but more modern than Isak Dinesen?s.?
On weekends and holidays, the family stayed at a cottage overlooking the Uembje lagoon, in Bilene, a hundred miles north of the capital. There were masses of flamingos in the saline pools near the shore, and a landscape of verdant brush and white dunes. Though Heinz Kerry describes the region as ?bush? (her memories of underdevelopment have a colonial flavor), it was already becoming a beach resort. But at five o?clock on Saturday mornings her father went to work in an informal clinic under the pergola in their garden. Teresa helped him make rounds?an experience that she recounts regularly to voters. The patients were desperately poor peasants living in wattle huts who had no other access to medical care. Infant mortality was then about thirty per cent, though it often took the mothers two years, she says, to overcome their fears and bring their children for treatment. Because so few rural Africans spoke Portuguese, it was difficult to communicate. Teresa?s father compiled a hand-written dictionary of Ronga, a local language, that she inherited and keeps by her bedside.
Heinz Kerry insists that even though she possesses a great fortune and its attendant perquisites, including the private jet in which she campaigns?a Gulfstream II?she could be ?perfectly happy? living under a thatched roof. She also likes to say that ?my Africa preserved the innocence of children.? But the insouciant egotism of privilege is its own form of innocence. Though the stamp on her Portuguese identity card categorized her, she tells voters, as ?a second-class citizen,? her parentage entitled her to a first-class life. ?There was a natural apartheid in Mozambique,? she says, one that was economic and social, not legalized. ?There were not that many Africans going to high school yet, or who would go to a movie, or who would do some of the things that we did, but my little school did have some mulatto girls.?
When she was fourteen, Teresa was sent to a Catholic boarding school in Durban, where she was one of three foreigners and barely understood a word. Her English was still elementary, but, by working with her habitual application, she ?got the hang of it.? She won prizes for French and music, but she missed her own piano. ?I wanted to become a concert pianist,? she told me, but the music teacher crushed her hopes for a career, pointing out that her hands would always be too small to make an octave. ?I felt so gypped,? she said. ?I never had another piano lesson.?
After graduating at the top of her class, Teresa enrolled at the University of the Witwatersrand, in Johannesburg?the ?Oxford of South Africa??at a moment of heady, though not yet revolutionary, intellectual and social ferment that would shortly be suppressed. She majored in Romance languages, and she says that she especially loved seventeenth- and eighteenth-century history and French theatre. She took classes in political science, which helped shape her rosy first impressions of America. Those textbook outlines of democracy were colored in by the Hollywood movies of the period. ?I really admired a country that produced the Bill of Rights and ?Some Like It Hot,?? she often says.
In April of 1959, despite her mother?s disapproval, Teresa joined her classmates and professors in an unprecedented, prominently reported demonstration of unity (the protesters wore academic robes) against a law that would extend apartheid to the few institutions of higher education that were still integrated?including their own. The legislation passed that June, nine months before the Sharpeville massacre. Some of her friends eventually went to jail, Heinz Kerry says, but the protests of 1959 were peaceful by the standards of what was to come. She left for Europe after she graduated, and enrolled at the Interpreters? School at the University of Geneva. John Heinz?the heir to the eponymous condiment fortune?was taking a year off from the Harvard Business School to work at a Swiss bank, and they met on a tennis court.
Heinz, the only child of divorced parents, had been sent to boarding school at a tender age. His old friend David Garth (who was a media strategist for Heinz?s five successful runs for Congress?two for the House and three for the Senate) suggests that he suffered in his relations with an overbearing father. The Heinz patrimony traditionally helped underwrite the cultural life of Pittsburgh, where the company has its corporate headquarters in a high-rise on one side of the Allegheny River and its old factory?an industrial landmark of sooty brick, crowned by a smokestack and an enormous neon ketchup bottle?on the other. The Steelers play at Heinz Field, and a walking tour of the city?s cultural district, once a combat zone of peep shows, adult book shops, and flophouses, gives one a sense both of the family?s munificence and of its mystique. According to Janet Sarbaugh, who directs the arts and culture programs at the Heinz Endowments, the formidable father-in-law of ?Mrs. Heinz,? as she is still known to her staff, bought up many of the derelict properties and ?spearheaded their transformation.? Among the benefactions that Pittsburgh owes, wholly or in part, to the dynasty of which Heinz Kerry is now what Wren Wirth calls ?the Regent? are Heinz Hall, a Jazz Age movie palace restored to its period opulence; the even larger Benedum Center, home of the Pittsburgh Ballet and the Pittsburgh Opera; a modern sculpture garden with works by Dan Kiley and Louise Bourgeois; a public theatre designed by Michael Graves; the handsomely landscaped riverfront; and numerous buildings at the university, including the Heinz Memorial Chapel.
?I felt sympathy for this girl from Louren?o Marques,? David Garth said. He was referring to the daunting prospect of entering Pittsburgh society?a clannish oligarchy of banking and steel magnates?like the common-born upstart from a distant tropic who captivates an heir to the realm. Garth met Teresa Sim?es-Ferreira in New York in 1964, and was smitten with her. ?John and I were a couple of bachelor jerks,? he said. ?And I had never heard him serious about anybody else.? Garth had also never met a woman as unawed by the manly virtues and material comforts that made Heinz ?one of the ultra catches in the country,? as he put it. ?Teresa was not a rollover, and I liked that about her. She was very independent. When you met the two of them early on, she was the one who struck you as the natural politician. She was always concerned with issues?as a Senate wife, she took up the plight of Soviet Jewry, among other things?and she follows through. You don?t make an idle remark to her and think it will be lost. She has always been?I hate the word?genuine. She doesn?t watch what she says, but I?ve been involved with politics at what I consider a fairly high level for most of my life, and I?ve never seen anybody worth a damn who didn?t have her attitude.?
Heinz Kerry describes herself as an immigrant and makes common cause with other naturalized citizens striving toward the American dream. She spent her first year in this country living in a town-house apartment on East Eighty-first Street, near the Metropolitan Museum, deciding whether or not she could adjust to American life. Her future with Heinz hinged on the decision. The relentless pace and rudeness of New York overwhelmed her. But she had landed a job at the United Nations. She worked for the Trusteeship Council, ?which doesn?t exist anymore,? she noted, translating and analyzing information on colonial economic activities, and tracking the progress of decolonialization. The job brought her into occasional contact with her countryman Eduardo Mondlane, the founder of frelimo. He worked at the Secretariat when he wasn?t leading the nascent revolution in Mozambique. Mondlane encouraged her research, and they reminisced about home. She was moved to hear him say that her father had made an impression on him as a boy in Manjacaze, where he was born.
Heinz Kerry?s stint at the United Nations gave her her first taste of political disillusionment. ?I remember sitting in the Security Council with Mondlane, a few years before he was assassinated??he was killed in 1969??and they were fighting and carrying on about colonies,? she recalled. He listened to the empty Cold War rhetoric for a while, then said to her, in a weary voice, ?It?s like watching a soccer match.? She realized that ?the truth was irrelevant,? and ?all my hard work?the facts I was searching for?meant nothing.? Her experience at the U.N., she told a Brazilian journalist in Fort Lauderdale, was a ?banho??a bath, or, perhaps more fittingly, a baptismal immersion??de realpolitik.?
Heinz was an Episcopalian, but Catholicism, Heinz Kerry says, ?is part of me, you know?part of who I am.? Even in the late fifties, her piety impressed her contemporaries as anachronistic. A Heinz family member describes Teresa as ?straitlaced? and uses the word ?romanticism? to characterize her feelings for the Church: ?When she was a young woman, her ideas were mystical and half-baked, but they?ve gotten much clearer.? From the perspective of an orthodox Catholic like her mother, however, Heinz Kerry?s position on reproductive rights qualifies as sinful. In her early twenties, she ended an otherwise congenial romance when her suitor admitted that if he ever had to choose between saving her life and that of an unborn child he would, without hesitation, follow Church doctrine and let her die. She also had the courage?or impertinence, depending on one?s point of view?to tell Bishop Wright of Pittsburgh, in a pastoral interview that took place shortly before he presided at her wedding, that she ?wanted lots of children? but that she didn?t believe in the Church?s views on contraception. ?You wouldn?t talk about abortion in those days?you didn?t think about it,? she said to me. But, years later, after the birth of her three sons, she was prepared to abort a pregnancy severely compromised by high doses of a steroid medication. A miscarriage spared her from a choice that, despite her ambivalence on the subject?abortion, she says, is a ?terrible thing,? and anyone who treats it lightly is heartless?she feels all women should be free to make.
The wedding of John Heinz and Teresa Sim?es-Ferreira took place in February of 1966, at the Heinz Memorial Chapel. A blizzard had dumped five feet of snow on the city, and the bride ?cried every week? thereafter through the first year of her new life. Her husband was commuting from long hours at the family company to their farmhouse on ninety acres in the fashionable suburb of Fox Chapel, and she was homesick and lonely. ?But then,? she told me, ?you have a baby, and things start becoming a unit, and you grow up. I grew up with a guy. Who I was in love with. Who made me a woman, you know? Mother of his children. And an American.?
Happy marriages seem to be as rare in contemporary politics as they are in modern fiction, though the Heinzes, according to their friends, had one. ?Their closeness was something you don?t see if you?ve done as many campaigns as I have, and seen as many disenchanted couples,? Garth said. The Heinz family member noted, however, that John Heinz could be difficult and dogmatic, and that, while Teresa was always ?feisty,? and their tugs-of-war had a ?flirtatious? tension, she lived in the shadow of his authority. ?He was very tough, and he ran the show. He had the money and she didn?t,? a friend in Washington said. His son Chris describes him simply as ?the boss.?
Chris is dark, muscular, and good-natured, with his father?s chiselled features. He graduated from business school three years ago and worked briefly in private banking before quitting his job to campaign for Kerry, whose steadiness, he said, supplies ballast to an ?emotional family.? His oldest brother, John, sanctions no intrusions into his privacy. He began working with inner-city children while he was at Boston College, and became a Buddhist. At an alternative Buddhist school that he co-founded, in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, he teaches troubled adolescents and reproduces medieval tools and armor on a blacksmith?s forge. His wife is a doctor, and their daughter is Heinz Kerry?s only grandchild.
Andre?a polyglot like his mother?is a consultant to businesses interested in sustainable development. He jokes that his first name destined him to be the European in the family. His coloring is Iberian, and an excellent tailor and beautiful manners that are reserved without being stiff contribute to his patrician air. When I met him at a gala in New York in April, he seemed unnerved to have been swept into his mother and stepfather?s court of bodyguards, staffers, volunteers, and press. ?It was all a bit surreal,? he said. ?We are kind of a private family.? He calls Kerry his mother?s ?kindred spirit,? though he adds that, while ?John has a lot going on upstairs?he is thinking all the time, parallel processing?Mom is very intuitive. At the end of the day, she listens to her gut, and that?s why she is such a conundrum.?
Heinz Kerry described herself to the students in Daytona Beach as a ?strict, bossy, witchy mother.? Her sons were forbidden to eat junk food and were restricted to thirty minutes or, at most, an hour of television a week, after which they had to write a brief report explaining why they liked the program they had chosen. ?So we spent our time figuring out how to watch TV and eat junk food,? Andre said. ?Mom could be terrifying,? he added, affectionately. ?She was like concentrated juice: strong-willed, outspoken?a tour de force.?
The principal reason that Heinz Kerry balked at releasing her tax returns, she says, was to protect her sons? privacy (they have complex joint trusts). John was apparently the least willing to condone the exposure. She says she initially believed that the political uproar about her taxes was just ?noise from the right,? but when the noise became a general uproar she grudgingly produced a summary of her 2003 income?$5.1 million?and the effective tax she paid on it, about eleven per cent.
On April 4, 1991, John Heinz and six others, including two children, died in a collision of his chartered plane with a helicopter over a schoolyard in suburban Philadelphia. Shortly before he was killed, he and his wife had been discussing ways to find financial support for an interdisciplinary research center at the Environmental Defense Fund, of which Heinz Kerry was a vice-chairman. ?I was in despair about it,? she told me. ?And he said, ?Don?t worry, you are a very wise person, it will be O.K.? Those were his last words, and they helped me later on. Because it wasn?t something he?d ever told me?that I was wise.? For a long time, she was devastated by his death, to the point of paralysis.
In addition to around half a billion dollars?which, by the most recent estimates, has since doubled?Heinz left his widow their farm, Rosemont; a brick town house in Georgetown; a fifteenth-century barn reconstructed beside a river in Sun Valley, Idaho; a beach compound on Nantucket; and one of the finest collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish art in private hands. David Garth and others, including Arlen Specter, the senior senator from Pennsylvania and, like Heinz, a Republican who was willing, on occasion, to cross the aisle, urged her to run for her husband?s seat, which is now filled by Rick Santorum?an outspokenly conservative politician whom Heinz Kerry once called ?a Forrest Gump with attitude.? Heinz Kerry was a registered Republican of the Rockefeller school until 2002, and she hasn?t altered her views in any essential way. When she changed her affiliation, it wasn?t for Kerry?s sake, she says, but because she felt alienated by the increasingly strident, divisive rhetoric of the Republican Party. She found the tactics that the Republicans used to defeat Max Cleland, the Democratic senator from Georgia, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, ?unscrupulous and disgusting.? Cleland was accused of being ?soft? on homeland security, and the conservative commentator Ann Coulter claimed that he had caused his own mutilations by mishandling a grenade. ?What does the Republican Party need?? Heinz Kerry asked in a CBS television interview. ?A fourth limb to make a person a hero??
Having survived the abrupt and violent losses of both her husband and her sister?two ?comets,? as Heinz Kerry put it, whose brilliance had always eclipsed her?she felt that she had, in middle age, been given a belated chance to test her mettle and achieve her own prominence. She chose to do so in philanthropy rather than in politics. Grant Oliphant, John Heinz?s former press secretary, who is now the associate director of the Endowments, gave me a tour of Heinz Kerry?s offices. They are laid out like a village street in some imaginary Southwestern town, and decorated with Early American folk art and artifacts, including a tattered flag with thirteen stars; a cigar-store Indian; and a statue of Uncle Sam from Coney Island. The exotic trees that supplied the wood came from sustainable plantations. In Heinz Kerry?s opulently spacious private aerie, a wall of glass opens onto a terrace with sweeping views of the Pittsburgh riverfront that she has helped revitalize. What was once one of America?s most polluted cities is now, according to Heinz Kerry, one of its cleanest, in part because of her environmental leadership. Like the new convention center several blocks away, for which she sponsored a design contest, the offices are so scrupulously ?green? that one can, in theory, eat the carpets.
The Endowments? assets?about $1.3 billion?generate between sixty and seventy million dollars a year, which, Oliphant says, ?is distributed to an array of progressive, mostly environmental causes, but also to programs that are faith-based and conservative, such as charter and Catholic schools in the inner city, and organizations that teach parenting skills.? Still, he says, ?the Endowments have been under attack for months by right-wing groups attempting to cast Teresa?s philanthropy as extremist and left-wing.? The attacks? which have been discredited as baseless smears by political fact-checkers at the Annenberg Public Policy Center?include assertions that Heinz Kerry helped to ?launder? charitable contributions and that she gave money to a foundation with links to Hamas. (The editor whom Heinz Kerry told to ?shove it? on the eve of her Convention speech works for the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which aired some of the accusations uncritically.) The donations in question were a decade?s worth of support for the Tides Center and Foundation, and were earmarked for specific environmental projects in Pennsylvania and for youth and economic-opportunity programs. Tides also funds antiwar, civil-rights, and pro-choice organizations, but demonstrably not with any Heinz money. ?It?s crazy,? Oliphant says, ?because she isn?t an ideologue?she?s a pragmatist, and she thinks from the middle.?
Heinz Kerry broadened the Endowments? scope and changed their philanthropic style. They still provide funding for the arts, but they also support a range of experimental initiatives in toxic-waste cleanup; community mental health; early-childhood development; preventive medicine; pensions for homemakers; prescription drugs for seniors; and education. ?It?s the difference between old-fashioned patronage and investment,? Janet Sarbaugh said. The Endowments? strategically targeted grants are accompanied by tight fiscal oversight, and recipients lose their support, as the Pittsburgh public-school system did, if they don?t meet high expectations of performance. ?Rather than set ourselves up as white knights whose generosity and intercessions will save the world,? Heinz Kerry wrote in the Fall 2002 issue of H, the Endowments? quarterly, ?we need to think of ourselves as partners in the rough-and-tumble enterprise of social change.?
John Kerry, like his wife, can be prickly about her immense wealth and its influence. ?Yes, she has money,? he told me, ?but the money is irrelevant to who she is and how she defines herself.? (He tends to take questions like an aggressive steeplechase rider on a testy stallion: forward in the saddle and wary of the hidden trap.) Kerry doesn?t see any impropriety in a First Lady funding and directing her own ?policy lab.? ?That?s the world she loves,? he said, though he claims that she will also find time ?to do what First Ladies have done historically,? which is to adopt a cause. When a reporter in Baltimore asked her what that cause might be, she answered coolly, ?I don?t think of my work as causes?I think of it as work.?
Though Heinz Kerry likes to attribute what critics see as impolitic behavior to her experience of tyranny, she lived with an ambitious politician of lordly ways longer than she ever lived under a dictatorship. At the surprise party that Heinz organized for her fiftieth birthday, she, in turn, surprised the guests by telling them that she had ?paid my dues and I wasn?t going to put up with any more stuff I don?t want to. Finito. It was the most liberating thing in the world.? Heinz was considering a Presidential bid at the time of his death, and his wife hated the idea. She told him that he would have to run ?over my dead body.? I asked her why she had changed her mind this time. Two years ago, she replied, she began to have ?a feeling of urgency about what?s going on in the world, and at my age it seemed a little selfish? to stand in Kerry?s way. She thought the matter over on a long hike, and decided that ?I shouldn?t stop him. I should help him. And so I did.?
Teresa Heinz met John Kerry in Washington, D.C., on Earth Day, 1990. He was speaking at a rally on the Mall, and she had come with her first husband, who was also scheduled to address the crowd. Both senators sat on the banking committee, and they were collegial acquaintances. While they were waiting to speak, Heinz introduced his wife to the gentleman from Massachusetts. By the time Kerry met Teresa Heinz again?in Brazil in 1992?she had been widowed. They were both delegates to the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. Kerry was impressed when she took over from a Brazilian interpreter she thought was subverting the meaning of a speech. They went to Mass at the cathedral, and chatted in French. (When two Americans lapse into French, it is usually for the purpose of flirting.) He had been divorced from his first wife, Julia Thorne, for four years, but they had lived separately for a decade. Their daughters, Alexandra and Vanessa, were students of eighteen and fifteen.
The adjectives that Kerry used in describing his second wife to me??grounded, no-nonsense, down to earth, straightforward??may not jibe with Andre?s image of her as a conundrum; or with Chris?s volatile, exacting Latin mother; or with the charming and ?cozy? woman who, her friend in Washington says, has a tendency toward ?narcissism? in times of stress. But they suggest Heinz Kerry?s allure to a rootless and aloof man with a much buffeted personal life. At forty-eight, Kerry had been enjoying?or, at least from the frequency with which his name was linked with beautiful women, seeming to enjoy?the sexual prime of a powerful bachelor, but the gossip annoyed him. He just wanted ?to fall in love,? he told the Boston Globe, which had been tracking his dates, and he didn?t want girlfriends attributed to him ?until I?m committed and want that relationship known.? Kerry?s finances were unsettled, too. (His most recent disclosure lists personal assets in the range of half a million to two million dollars.) Thorne had a private income, but Kerry paid child support for his daughters. He owned a small town house in Washington with a big mortgage, and in Boston he camped out with family and friends. He struck Heinz Kerry as a ?gypsy? and ?a pet wolf? in need of domestication, and nesting was her forte.
Heinz and Kerry met for the third time at a dinner party in the capital, and he offered to see her home. On the way, he took her to the Vietnam Memorial. A few months later, she invited a close friend, the photojournalist Diana Walker, to lunch at her house in Georgetown. As Walker unlatched the back gate and walked through the high-walled garden, where brick paths define islands of roses, she was startled by a sound that presaged the announcement of a sea change in the widow?s life: ?Teresa whistling in the kitchen.?
After a brief courtship, a short period of cohabitation, and the signing of a prenuptial agreement, the Kerrys were married in a civil ceremony on Nantucket in 1995. Heinz Kerry wore the girlish dress of a first-time bride, with a ruffled neckline and puffed sleeves, and she settled into what was, in many respects, a familiar life as the consort of a public man. Her second husband, perhaps even more than her first, needed her buoyance. ?I think marriage is difficult,? she reflected. ?When you?re older, you bring a lot to the table, so it is harder work in some ways.? Kerry brought two teen-age daughters to the table. She believes, in retrospect, that she went about being their stepmother without enough discretion. ?Because I thought, I love kids, kids love me, I?ll be fine. Baloney.? She says that a friend gave her some useful advice: ?You have to treat stepchildren like pets. You?re nice to them, but you don?t get too close, or they chew you up. Well, I did it the other way.? When I asked Kerry if remarriage in middle age to a woman with a history to which she still seems deeply attached was a difficult proposition, he replied, in his staccato fashion, ?Not in the least. Why would it be hard for me? Look, she fell in love and decided to marry me.?
?John makes very close friends, but few,? a woman who knows him well says. ?His New England austerity is compounded by his reserve, his shyness, his politesse. He?s not a glad-hander?he was trained not to be.? As the son of a diplomat, who moved from school to school, ?he had to be a loner to survive. What I love about John is that he?s immensely curious and he never condescends. He also doesn?t manipulate. But as a politician that makes him unseductive. He leads with his head.? Kerry?s seductiveness may not be obvious, but the attraction of a consummately cerebral man to an irrepressibly visceral woman is. Perhaps one of the most eloquent messages that Heinz Kerry delivers to voters on her husband?s behalf is that he was fearless enough to take her on.
Late in August, while the Republicans convened in New York, the Kerrys vacationed on Nantucket. They resumed campaigning on Labor Day weekend, and Heinz Kerry spent the holiday in her home state, marching with thousands of citizens in a Pittsburgh parade and speaking at a sparsely attended union picnic and rally in Philadelphia. It took place on a pier near the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, across the Delaware River from Camden, New Jersey. The audience of steamfitters, longshoremen, and janitors had come with their children and wore the T-shirts of their locals.
Heinz Kerry?s hair was windblown and her cheeks rosy. Her acid-green suit was the color of an immense tanker, the Chemical Pioneer, slowly steaming up the river behind the stage. ?No war is worth fighting if the people in our country aren?t defended by good schools, jobs, and health care,? she told the audience. It was a new speech: lean of detail, punchy, brief, and delivered with the ease of a seasoned candidate. The shy whisper and distracting tics were gone. At one point, she leaned over to joke with an elderly black woman sitting on a folding chair in the front row who said that she was ninety and had plenty of opinions. There was laughter and applause. ?I?m a woman of a certain age and I deserve my opinions,? Heinz Kerry said to the audience. ?I?ve earned them the old-fashioned way.?
A week later, when Heinz Kerry was on her way to Pittsburgh with Wren Wirth (her close women friends take turns keeping her company on the road), I asked her what she thought about the increasingly vicious campaign, and the cheap caricatures of her personal eccentricities. ?It?s sad that in America people have to put up with that kind of thing,? she said. ?It?s sadder still that people like it.? Her voice on the phone sounded serene?neither embattled nor tinny with false optimism. Her syntax was baroque and elegiac, perhaps with fatigue, and her sentences were curiously wonkish and poetic at the same time. ?I am grateful that, being as old as I am??she mentioned her age twice in the course of a five-minute conversation??I have developed an interesting way to deal with it that I didn?t know I had in me, which is contextualizing what is said, not reading either the puffy things which would give me an oversized head or the things which would give me a shrivelled heart.? She spoke of Bush?s promise to reduce health-care costs, pointing out that he had just raised Medicare premiums for the elderly by seventeen per cent. ?I never thought there would be so many lies,? she said. ?It?s been quite amazing. But I don?t dwell there, I dwell in a better house, a house of hope.?
