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With Teresa, expect an unconventional campaign By Jill Lawrence, USA TODAY
PITTSBURGH — In her small voice, her words tinged with her native Portuguese, Teresa Heinz Kerry talks about personal things.
How eerie it is to be back with the Secret Service and a motorcade just blocks from where she had her babies, married John Heinz and memorialized him after his death. And — "this is a hard thing to say" — how her late husband introduced her to her second husband on Earth Day 1990. How proud she is to "share with you my family" — two of her three sons and husband John Kerry, the Democratic presidential candidate. (Audio photo gallery: In her own words) At that, 10,000 college students bathed in spring sunshine at the University of Pittsburgh erupt into cheers and applause. Heinz Kerry is doing this campaign her way, and that means addressing 10,000 people at a rally as intimately as if they were 10 girlfriends hanging out in her kitchen. It's one of the many ways she's unique as a campaigner and a potential first lady. How different is she? She grew up in a strict Catholic household in Mozambique when it was ruled by Portugal. She protested apartheid at college in Johannesburg. She speaks five languages and pronounces her first name Tuh-RAY-zuh. She swathes herself in scarves and shawls and lets her curly hair fall in her eyes and face.
Heinz Kerry often mentions her age, 65, five years older than her husband. She runs a huge philanthropic operation and has no plans to give it up, win or lose. She's a full participant in the campaign despite ambivalence about politics. She can be bracingly frank. She can also be caustic. "She doesn't seem to mind if people take her to task for saying what she thinks," says Elsie Hillman, a prominent Pennsylvania Republican who has known Heinz Kerry for decades. "She's comfortable that way. Much more comfortable than trying to pretend she's something she isn't." Political analysts say it's impossible to tell how this unconventional campaigner will fare. "Candid and blunt can be a blessing in an era when voters are tired of doublespeak and language they don't understand," says G. Terry Madonna, director of the Keystone Poll at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa. But Heinz Kerry also is eccentric and unpredictable, he says, with the potential to "cross the line and become controversial and become the subject of the campaign." Grew up in Mozambique The first and often only thing people know about Teresa Heinz Kerry is that she is rich. And it's the first thing she mentions when asked what's the biggest misconception people have about her. "I think people tend to see anybody with money as a dollar sign, not just me. And people tend to think about power through dollars," she says in an interview. Americans, she says, are preoccupied with numbers. Then comes a remark you can't imagine from anyone else in public life: "It's like if you don't have a size 48 bust you're not sexy; if you're not 24 you're not attractive. It's so limiting and uninteresting." Heinz Kerry's father was the first oncologist in Mozambique, in East Africa. So she grew up comfortably in a poor country. Later, studying interpreting in Geneva, she met John Heinz III, the condiment company heir and future Republican senator from Pennsylvania. Jack, as she calls him, was raised by his mother in San Francisco — "he didn't grow up as a spoiled brat." His father preferred him to marry "some fancy aristocrat," she says. "But he wanted a real person, and he got one." On Kerry's announcement tour last September, Heinz Kerry offered home-baked brownies to the media. Her friends and family say she's a good listener and so knowledgeable about medicine that they routinely consult her for advice. "Her nickname is Dr. T," her husband says. The campaign is trying mightily to reinforce the Everywoman image. One night at an event in Maquoketa, Iowa, says Jeffrey Lewis, her chief of staff at the Heinz Endowments, a woman told him: "I thought she'd be wearing a $3,000 suit. But she walks in here like a regular person. In fact, I've got the same scarf in my drawer." Still, it's hard to forget the circles Heinz Kerry moves in when she travels by private jet, circulates among five homes and tosses off remarks to Elle magazine about Botox (she's a fan), plastic surgery (she'd like some on her nose) and prenuptial agreements ("Everybody has a prenup. You have to have a prenup"). The family has talked about how to use its money and how to avoid being defined by it, says Christopher Heinz, 31, Teresa's youngest son. He says it's easy but wrong for people to tag his mother as a "detached, rich woman. My mom's loudest actions are in her charitable giving, her sharing. Our family understands that it's been blessed and we'd better figure out a way to spread the wealth." When Jack Heinz died in an air crash in 1991, Teresa Heinz felt tugs in three directions: to run for his Senate seat, take over his family charities or devote her time to helping her college-age sons adjust to their loss. After much thought, friends say, she decided to keep Jack's memory and ideas alive through philanthropy. Heinz Kerry has turned the $1.3 billion Heinz Endowments into an engine to solve national problems through Pittsburgh-area projects. She treats grants as venture capital and rates applicants by business standards. The results include better management of the symphony and schools. Before taking over, Heinz Kerry had helped found a school in Pittsburgh and develop Project '88 — a bipartisan drive to reduce pollution through economic incentives. The first President Bush embraced the concept and signed it into law in the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. "It was a very influential idea, and Teresa was very much involved in sparking it," says Fred Krupp, president of the Environmental Defense Fund in New York. Other examples of impact: • In Massachusetts, she proposed a prescription-drug assistance program based on a project she funded; it is now law. • Her office in Pittsburgh was the city's first "green" office, designed and built to environmental standards. She convened meetings 11 years ago to talk about ecology and the city. One concrete result in Pittsburgh, split by three rivers, is a convention center cooled by water flowing over its roof. Though she's clearly an environmentalist, Heinz Kerry own three gas-guzzling sport-utility vehicles. Krupp, whose group has received $2.7 million from the Heinz Endowments in the last 17 years (0.5% of its budget), says he's never asked her why.
Heinz Kerry's answer is "safety first." Four close relatives were killed in car crashes. She says she needs the SUVs to drive safely in snow and sand at her various homes. Furthermore, she says, she's angry that U.S. car manufacturers have taken so long to build a fuel-efficient four-wheel drive vehicle. "Now they finally did, and I'm getting one," she says, referring to the Ford Escape, a gas-electric hybrid due late this summer. Heinz Kerry insists her professional life won't change if her husband wins. He sounds as if he's on a slightly different page. Like other first ladies, "She'll work on the things she thinks are important," he says in an interview. Through the Heinz Endowments? "Some of it ... She'll do what she thinks she needs to do to make it work, but I guarantee you she'll be focused on being first lady." Heinz Kerry says she won't "sit in Pittsburgh" but she'll still run the charities. Conflict-of-interest questions have arisen, but she says legal experts tell her she'll be fine. "I don't want to give up my work," she says. "It's important to me." Conflicted about campaign When Heinz Kerry chose philanthropy over the Senate, she made her distaste for politics clear. Yet she chose to marry another senator with presidential dreams. "I tried not to," she says. "But we had too many interests in common, too much of the same passion in common, you know? It's kind of a completion of the trip I started with Jack." Her friends were not surprised by the match. Kerry "has a lot in common with John Heinz," says one of them, Wren Wirth. "He's very high energy. Very athletic. Very strong. They're both enthusiastic about life." Heinz Kerry says she never wanted either of her husbands to run for president. A race, she knew, would mean little time to cook, garden, see her grandchild, sit on her boards, run her philanthropies. But with the country "in such bad shape," she decided her husband had to run. She is still conflicted about campaigns, which she once called "the birthplace of empty promises," but Heinz Kerry is engaged in this one. She travels constantly. She talks to her husband several times a day, to campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill several times a week. "She's got a telltale gut. She can tell what's real and what isn't," Kerry says of his wife. He laughs. "Will she tell me that I'm full of it when she thinks I am? Sure." Sample observation: "You weren't as direct as you could have been." Heinz Kerry is the queen of direct. She often tells interviewers that in 1973 she miscarried the night before she planned to have an abortion advised by two doctors (they said the baby would be severely damaged). She told Pennsylvania Republicans in 1994 that their conservative Senate nominee, Rick Santorum, was "an unfortunate example" of politicians who "rule by fear and ridicule." She still hasn't forgiven Santorum, who had suggested John Heinz was not conservative enough. Some Republicans haven't forgiven her. "Her record warns us that she'll be more of a character than she will display character," Republican columnist Ruth Ann Dailey wrote Feb. 16 in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. "Her lack of graciousness in local politics is particularly startling." The official Team Kerry line is that voters will love Teresa because she is genuine. Cahill says she also plays an important strategic role. She kept the campaign visible in New Hampshire after Kerry decided he had to stay in Iowa to win its leadoff caucuses in January. She has been "a very acute gauge" of voter reaction, Cahill says. In Heinz Kerry's own appearances, it's not surprising to find her veering from health policy to Some Like It Hot, from long-winded to pithy to emotional. She talks of life in a colonial dictatorship and seeing her father vote for the first time at age 71. She talks about the contrast of America, where political debate is robust, people are friends across party lines and there's no fear about speaking your mind. "People say I'm blunt," she told donors at a reception in Philadelphia. "I say, 'No, just honest.' Enjoy it. And you don't go to jail for it." |
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