She's a loose cannon no longer

Sunday, November 30, 2003

By Maeve Reston, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

MANCHESTER, N.H. -- Earlier this year, Sen. John F. Kerry's presidential campaign was hit with the same question again and again. Would his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, become the campaign's greatest asset or its greatest liability?

	Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette Teresa Heinz Kerry speaks to her husband's supporters after the Democrats' presidential debate in Detroit last month.

The accounts that hit newspapers and magazines was the stuff that makes image-conscious campaign staff cringe. Heinz Kerry was quoted talking about her Botox treatments, the healing powers of green tea, and the love of her late husband, Sen. John Heinz III, whom she still referred to as "my husband."

In joint interviews, Kerry was often described as fidgeting uncomfortably as his wife talked and as being unsuccessful in steering her away from controversial topics.

But now it's almost December, Heinz Kerry has logged long miles and hours on the campaign trail, and the verdict, at least from many New Hampshire voters, is that she is a natural and that she's even a better campaigner than her husband. They like the unscripted and passionate way she talks, they say her candor is refreshing and her knowledge on a wide range of issues -- impressive.

"Kerry stands for a lot of worthwhile things and his wife is no drawback at all," said Frances A. Stone, a 75-year old retired teacher from West Lebanon, N.H., who attended a Heinz Kerry talk at an art gallery in Lebanon, N.H., earlier this month. "If anything she'll help him a tremendous amount. I like people who tell it the way it is, I'm outspoken myself. I like Hillary [Clinton]. I just like people who really have something to offer."

On a recent New Hampshire visit, Heinz Kerry chose to tour Latino businesses in Manchester. The daughter of a Portuguese physician, she grew up in colonial Mozambique learning to speak many languages.

She was bubbling with questions in Spanish for her tour guide, Hector Velez, a Latino community activist and the owner of a local music and gifts store. At a corner market, she stopped to smell and marvel at a wall hung with packages of chilies. She joked with the owner behind the counter in Spanish and befriended two small boys who proceeded to follow her for the rest of her tour, laughing as she repeatedly called one of them "Mr. Mayor."

In her high-heeled Chanel loafers, she swept into a Latino barbershop down the street, ignoring the tufts of hair covering the floor, and visited each chair, moving fluidly from Spanish to English to French.

There are no plastic smiles for the camera. She often speaks so softly to the people she meets that her entourage has to strain to hear her. At several recent events she was dressed in head-to-toe Chanel, but not in a way that was flashy -- her palette is all browns, creams and greens, colors that blend in. She doesn't wear campaign buttons and rarely introduces herself as a presidential candidate's wife. After a while, the comparisons to Hillary Clinton start to seem silly.

"Who was that?" asked Victor T. Mbuyi, a barbershop patron originally from the Congo, after speaking to Heinz Kerry in French about their African upbringings. When told that her husband was running for president, his eyes widened.

"Wow," he said. She didn't mention that, he said, but "her French was very good."

Voters say that part of what draws them to Heinz Kerry is that she leads a life independent from her husband -- a life quite apart from politics -- and has credibility when she puts on her "hat as a world citizen."

As steward of the billion-dollar Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies, she speaks with knowledge about the environment, education and health issues.

When she talks about the frustration of trying to stop the spread of AIDS and malaria in Africa, she relates her own experiences as a little girl helping her father treat his patients in the bush of Mozambique and how it took him two years to persuade his first patient to be treated with medicine from "the white man."

When she talks about race and the importance of free expression, she talks about her education in Johannesburg in the last years before schools were separated through the Higher Education Apartheid Act, and how she infuriated her mother, who feared for her safety when she marched in anti-apartheid protests in 1957, 1958 and 1959.

She speaks about what she considers to be the demise of America's reputation from the perspective of someone who admired America from Africa as a child. "I understand why so many of our friends [around the world] are so mad at us," Heinz Kerry told voters at a recent event. "We have let them down. In a democracy, the one thing that cannot be done is to destroy its trust, its hope, its idealism. This administration is the most cynical, the most venal, the most Machiavellian administration in my 32 years in Washington."

Heinz Kerry also tries to temper her anger about what she sees as the conservative direction of the Republican Party and the administration of President Bush, by talking about her own Republican roots and her affection for Bush's father, President George H.W. Bush. Having just changed her party registration from Republican to Democrat in January, she often contrasts the current administration with the Republicans she has known in Washington over the years when Heinz, a centrist Republican, served six terms in the House and Senate.

"Let me just say having been married to a Republican, wonderful man, who was the old kind of Republican that we used to have once upon a time," she said at the Lebanon event, "the Republicanism of this administration is neither Republican nor conservative. There are good people in both parties.

"These people," she said referring to the new crop in Washington, "are not Republicans."

In an interview at Kerry's Manchester headquarters last week, Heinz Kerry said wearily that interest in her philanthropic work shifted to interest in her personality when she began spending more time in Boston after marrying Kerry in 1995; she claims she had never had a bad interview before then.

She credits Pittsburgh for having something to do with her frankness, describing it as a welcoming place with "very real people" that allowed her to "grow up as an American, picking up the best values of Americans but still allowing me to be myself."

But she also scoffs at the critics who say she is too "opinionated" and tries to shoot down the notion that she would be an untraditional first lady.

While Hillary Clinton ran into some trouble with her comment that she didn't want to be the kind of mother who stayed home and baked cookies, Heinz Kerry speaks with reverence about having tea time with her three sons in the afternoons and dropping everything to be with them when they got off the school bus.

"I wouldn't have missed that for anything," she says.

Though her philanthropic work consumes much of her time now, she points out that she never intended to have a full time job. She says she planned to go to college for only a year, but curiosity about the world led her to continue and to go to graduate school in Geneva, where she was a classmate of Kofi Annan at the University of Geneva's School of Interpreters.

She began working as an interpreter for the United Nations in New York in the mid-1960s and married Heinz in 1966.

"I had no ambition," she said. "I thought of myself as being married and having children which is what all the ladies did."

Heinz Kerry, who is 65, also says she did not expect to be devoting her time to a presidential campaign. When Heinz's name was floated as a presidential candidate during their 25-year marriage, her response was, "Over my dead body." It was only last year that she says she changed her mind and told Kerry she would support his decision to run.

"There are so many thorny and complex issues," she says, ticking off AIDS, the Kyoto protocol, pollution and America's reputation around the world. "I think John understands those well, and I thought it was very selfish of me to stand in his way if he wanted to do this, because I thought he could do a good job."

Outsiders say Heinz Kerry has helped Kerry loosen up on the campaign trail, and she speaks warmly to voters about their shared curiosity about the world and their shared passion for improving the environment. It was through her work on the environment, at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, after all that she first got to know Kerry. Though she laments about how little time they get to spend with one another now, she says she believes in what he is doing.

When asked about her "handlers" from the campaign and whether Kerry has asked her to change her approach to campaigning or the things she says to voters, she leans forward with a steely gaze.

"I was married to a wonderful guy who loved me the way I was, never told me what to say or not to say, ever once, in all those campaigns. He trusted me," Heinz Kerry said, referring to Heinz. "And I am married now to another guy who trusts me. So I can't be all that bad."

Maeve Reston can be reached at mreston@post-gazette.com.

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