From 
Del.icio.us
Digg
Reddit
Facebook
StumbleUponNo Stump Speeches
It just doesn't happen. Not in politics, and certainly not in an election year. Yet there she is, seated casually on a sofa, answering every question, expressing every thought, practically laying bare her soul. Doesn't she remember her husband is running for President?To a journalist, Teresa Heinz Kerry is too good to be true. So good that, finally, you can't resist asking: What happens when the campaign handlers try to muzzle you?
Dumb question. "I would not take that," Teresa says. "If they wanted to fill me with canned speeches, I couldn't do it. I cannot have -- what do you call those -- stump speeches."
Get ready, everyone, for the world according to Teresa. For a woman, perhaps our next First Lady, who holds almost nothing back. In an interview with Elle magazine, she talked about her Botox treatments ("I need another one, soon"), her fervent belief in prenuptial agreements ("You could be as generous or as sensitive as you want, but you have to have a prenup"), even her hard line on infidelity (she doesn't believe in killing a husband who cheats, just maiming him). She's such a strange species in Washington -- a truth-teller in the city of spin -- that every political junkie is wondering the same thing: Will she come across to the public as a bit flaky or as a breath of fresh air?
Easily lost in all the quotable copy is a core truth: Heinz Kerry is a very serious person. She may express her passions with astounding candor, but she has the wealth and influence to translate pet causes into action. A doting 65-year-old grandmother, she is also an astute businesswoman who oversees a $1.3 billion family trust -- and dispenses tens of millions each year to environmental, educational and cultural causes. She has served on the board of the Carnegie Foundation, on the trustees' council for the National Gallery of Art, as a trustee at the Brookings Institution, and has represented her country at a United Nations environmental conference. She can talk fluidly and fluently about early-childhood education and retirement security for women.
Yet put her in front of a microphone, and here's what you'll likely see: a woman looking shy or uneasy, her eyes cast down, as she quietly talks about, well, whatever springs to mind.
The one certain impression she'll make on voters is that she would be an unusually exotic First Lady. Her accent alone ensures that.
Born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, she grew up in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique (where her father was an oncologist), and to this day her English has a soft Portuguese accent. The activist in her emerged early: Her university studies were in neighboring South Africa, where she took part in anti-apartheid protests. While doing graduate work in Switzerland, she met her first husband, John Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune and future U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania. They were married for 25 years and raised three boys, but their life together ended in tragedy. Heinz died in a plane crash in 1991.
"After my dad's death, all of our worlds kind of shrank," says Teresa's youngest son, Chris, who worked at an equity firm before joining his stepfather's campaign. "We turned in, and not in a happy way."
Teresa poured a good bit of her energy into managing -- deftly, by all accounts -- the Heinz family trusts. When President George Bush, the current President's father, asked her to be a delegate at the 1992 UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, she agreed right away. And that's where she first spent time with another ardent environmentalist, Massachusetts Senator John Kerry. The two soon started dating, and in May 1995, they married. For both, it was an act of healing.
Friends felt that Kerry, divorced and lonely, needed to feel rooted again. As for Teresa, her life "became more open, more of an experience again," according to Chris. "It's one of the reasons I am campaigning for John, because I owe him a huge debt of gratitude for that."
The irony of marrying another bigwig on Capitol Hill is hardly lost on Heinz Kerry: "People say, 'You must be so political to have married two Senators.' No, I married a guy I fell in love with in college, and then I married another one in spite of his being a Senator. I didn't really want to marry another Senator. At the time, I never thought we'd be doing this [campaigning for President]. That's what has scared me."
Advertisement 
Your Comments
See all
...