Major article on Kerry. Wife is still a Republican:
Today, Kerry himself possesses such a drawing room in a six-floor brownstone on Louisburg Square, one of the most exclusive streets on Beacon Hill in Boston. Kerry owns the building with his wife, Teresa Heinz, the beautiful, charming, slightly exotic widow of Sen. John Heinz III of Pennsylvania. Born in Mozambique, Teresa was educated at the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva and speaks five languages. Upon his death in a plane crash in 1991, John Heinz left her as the principal heir to the H.J. Heinz food fortune. Forbes once placed her personal wealth at $860 million; she also heads the billion-dollar Heinz family foundation.
When Kerry and Heinz married on Heinz's Nantucket estate in May 1995, it was a merger not only of power and money but of political parties. Heinz was and plans to remain a Republican. As Kerry likes to say, If you want b ipartisanship, this is quintessential bipartisanship. It's November, and Kerry and Heinz are sitting in their drawing room, remembering what brought them together. It was the environment, Kerry says. We always kept meeting around the environment, Heinz concurs, her speech colored by a faint East African accent. During the late 1980s, Heinz and Kerry were acquainted, since Kerry and John Heinz had been colleagues in the Senate, but the first meaningful meeting they had following Heinz's death occurred at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Kerry had gone as a member of the Senate delegation, Heinz as a delegate appointed by President Bush. Two years later, they met again at a Washington dinner and ended up taking a midnight stroll that took them by the Vietnam Memorial on the Washington Mall.
Soon Heinz discovered that, for Kerry, Vietnam is a subject that is never far away. Even in his sleep, Kerry is haunted by Vietnam in nightmares. The first nightmare I heard, I was actually not with him, Heinz says. Before we got married, I was sleeping with one of his daughters in this little shed, a little barn, it was. He was in this little room next door. Then, all of a sudden, I heard this tremendous banging on the wall. I said, 'Oh!' And Alex said, 'It's just Dad.' Kerry laughs an uneasy laugh. So I went back to bed, Heinz continues, and he hit the walls again, and I said, 'Holy mackerel!' The next morning, I said, 'What did you dream about?' He said, 'Why?' I said, 'Because you broke down the house, almost.' He said, 'Vietnam.'
One sharp distinction between Kerry and Bush is the way they chose to deal with military service during the Vietnam War. Bush would decide to avoid active service by allowing his father to pull strings to get him into the National Guard in Texas, while Kerry volunteered for the Navy and asked to be sent to Vietnam. So, in May 1966, with his degree in political science from Yale in hand, Kerry set off for a four-month stint at the Officers Candidate School in Newport, Rhode Island. In the winter of 1968, he went to Vietnam. On his first tour, his ship performed guard duty in the Gulf of Tonkin, which meant, Kerry says, we were chasing around with aircraft carriers, working with the John McCains who were flying the planes. Eventually, Kerry's ship returned to California. In San Diego, Kerry was trained to take command of a fifty-foot gunboat, and when he returned to Vietnam he went in country. During this tour, Lt. Kerry took his boat on raid expeditions. It was a very aggressive, very risky, take-the-pipe-to-the-enemy strategy, Kerry says about an operation named Sea Lords. In one raid, Kerry left his boat to go ashore and kill a Viet Cong who was about to fire a rocket at his crew. For this, Kerry was awarded the Silver Star. On another outing, to quote from a presidential citation he later received, Kerry discovered he had a man overboard [and] returned up the river to assist [where he] directed his gunners to provide suppressing fire, while from an exposed position on the bow, his arm bleeding and in pain, with disregard for his personal safety, he pulled the man aboard. This action earned Kerry a Bronze Star with Combat V. During the same tour, Kerry also earned three Purple Hearts and the Navy Unit Commendation.
At the time, however, Kerry also concluded that America was not trying to win the war or, even worse, that the war was not winnable. Eventually, he was reassigned to New York to work as an admiral's aide. By the end of 1969, even more disillusioned about the war, Kerry asked for early release. Soon he joined Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a loose-knit but influential group. I was angry, Kerry says. I came back with a knowledge of how wrong the war was, how screwed up I thought it was and how imperative it was for me to speak out. In 1970, Kerry married Julia Thorne, a writer, and in April 1971 he made national headlines as he, representing some 5,000 veterans who had assembled in Washington for a five-day protest, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to testify. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? he asked. How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? After Kerry's speech, Sen. Claiborne Pell of Rhode Island all but anointed Kerry as a pol itical talent. As the witness knows, he said, I have a very high personal regard for him and hope, before his life ends, he will be a colleague of ours in this body.
The next day was one of the most emotional, and controversial, days of Kerry's life and if Kerry's candidacy takes off, Republicans may use the incident against him ad nauseam. He joined a large throng of veterans assembled in front of the Capitol to return their medals, and other war-related belongings, to the government by throwing them over a fence onto a lawn. People threw their medals or berets or release papers or dog tags or ribbons over the fence into a pile, Kerry remembers. And I similarly did that. I threw my ribbons back, not my medals. Afterward, not immediately at the same time, I went up and threw back medals a couple of veterans had given me and asked me to throw a Bronze Star, specifically, and a Purple Heart. Years later, Kerry would be criticized for pretending to throw back his own medals when they belonged to other veterans. Complete fabrication, Kerry says. The bottom line is that I threw back my ribbons with everybody else and never thought twice about it. Several months later, Kerry left Vietnam Veterans Against the War when the organization became too radical for him, and helped to found the more mainstream Vietnam Veterans of America.
Then, in 1972, Kerry ran for the House of Representatives with the Kennedys campaigning by his side. He lost that race, in what was to be the only defeat of his career. Between the births of his two daughters (Alexandra, who was born in 1973, and Vanessa, born in 1976), Kerry attended Boston College Law School and then became an assistant district attorney in Middlesex County. In 1982, he ran for lieutenant governor on the same ballot with Michael Dukakis, and won. In 1984, Kerry tried for the Senate seat made available when Paul Tsongas retired and won with fifty-five percent of the vote. Six years later, following the dissolution of his marriage a protracted legal separation (during which Kerry dated a number of women) that ended in divorce
Kerry won his second term with fifty-seven percent of the vote. Between 1990 and 1992, Kerry made a name for himself by heading up a committee that broke the news of the scandal involving the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, inciting the wrath of his fellow Democrats in the process, since one of the key BCCI players was an adored Democratic stalwart, Clark Clifford. But Kerry ignored the threats of his party and brought down what he saw as a corrupt financial institution. In 1991, Kerry disregarded the advice of both his party and his staff and used the chairmanship of a special Senate subcommittee to address one of the most highly charged subjects Congress could have pursued at the time: the presumed existence in North Vietnam of American prisoners of war and men counted as missing in action. In 1993, following months of exhaustive, often gut-wrenching testimony, the committee released a groundbreaking report concluding that there is, at this time, no compelling evidence that proves that any American remains alive in captivity in Southeast Asia.
At the time these hearings began, says Sen. John McCain of Arizona, who served on the special committee with Kerry, we had a cover of Newsweek showing three men who were purported to be American POWs alive. Fact is, we found out later on, these pictures were manufactured. At the time, there was a widespread belief we had left many Americans alive and were still alive in Southeast Asia. Kerry's hearings were vital in getting all of the information out before the American people. The committee unanimously signed a report that said there was no compelling evidence and I use those words very carefully, 'compelling evidence' that Americans were alive in Southeast Asia. Those words were carefully crafted by John Kerry. In the end, we would not have had the normalization of relations with Vietnam [which occurred in 1994] and a free-trade agreement had it not been for the work that John Kerry did.
In 1996, in his Senate re-election bid against William Weld, a popular sitting governor, Kerry ended up in an old-fashioned dogfight. Kerry called Weld the ideological soul mate of Newt Gingrich; Weld supporters questioned the loyalty of Kerry's new wife Pittsburgher Teresa Heinz, a Republican to Massachusetts. Heinz was also suspect because she was rich, which Kerry addressed with humor. How do you like Massachusetts? Kerry jokingly asked Heinz at a St. Patrick's Day event staged for reporters. I love Massachusetts, Heinz responded. How much is it? Though the polls sometimes showed the race in a dead heat or with Kerry even trailing, Kerry eventually won by a seven-point margin, with fifty-two percent of the vote. On the night of the election, Kerry left his celebration early to have a quiet dinner in the dining room of his and Heinz's brownstone with six men who had been members of his crew on the boat he commanded in the Mekong Delta in 1969.
If Kerry does run, there's one charge that will be leveled against him: that his wife is trying to buy the election for him. While that may or may not even be possible, this much is true: Few people understand the campaign process as well as Teresa Heinz. Because of this, Kerry and Heinz have forged an almost unique political partnership that they maintain, when they're not together, by talking on the phone several times a day. It is not unusual for both Kerry and Heinz to speak at political outings. This is in character for Heinz, who could have been a senator herself. After her first husband died in 1991, she was pressured by the Republican Party to take her husband's Senate seat, but she refused to be appointed by the governor to fill out Heinz's unfinished term. Two years later, at a 1993 press conference, she declined to run in the regular election. The best ideas for change unfortunately no longer come from political campaigns, she said then. Today, political campaigns are the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises. A nice line and certainly a theme around which she could fashion stump speeches designed to promote John Kerry as a new type of political visionary.
Today, Heinz is a more willing player in her husband's ambitions. Would she like to be first lady? From a personal point of view, it's scary, she says. It's a great honor, obviously, and a great opportunity. Also, you get to a point in life when you don't have very much longer to go, potentially, and, yes, it's one way of serving. With her connections and her savvy, not to mention her vast fortune, Heinz could be Kerry's greatest asset should he run. Certainly, Teresa has been around the block, and she understands the political game as well as anybody, says political consultant Ed Rollins. Plus, she could also deliver a very important state: Pennsylvania.
It almost seems as if Kerry's life has been invented by Aaron Sorkin or some other Hollywood type. Character description: Well-born hero (with the initials JFK!) enjoys Ivy League education and dates half sister of wife of future president; volunteers for dangerous war duty he could have easily avoided, only to discover the bad faith of his country's military and political leadership; becomes a noted leader himself and steadily marches toward the nation's highest office. Romantic subplot: a troubled first marriage followed by true love with a wealthy, politically sophisticated wife, who wants to help her husband become president. But big Hollywood-style themes are only part of what makes a candidate viable. What most people agree on now is that the 2004 election will turn on the current president's popularity. If his sky-high approval ratings retain their loft, it won't matter how great a candidate John Kerry, or anyone else, appears on paper. So Kerry is clearly betting the farm on the fact that Bush's popularity is as artificially inflated as Enron stock was just months ago. And if you hang around long enough in the circles that Kerry travels in, you begin to pick up on some of the reasons he feels this way: that, maybe, the economy is in for a long hibernation; that there may be many other major American corporations whose assets are hyperinflated; that maybe the people making the decisions about the war in Afghanistan were too cautious and let the bad guys get away. You might even hear powerful people say in closed-door meetings that Bush fucked up Afghanistan. Of course, you hear a lot of things in Washington, but if you're John Kerry and you hear these things, you decide that you've actually got agood chance of winning.
-Paul Alexander is working on a biography of Sen. John McCain.
How Left-Wing Is Kerry, Really?
Is John Kerry just another Massachusetts liberal? On social issues, yes, but on fiscal and military issues he's a McCain-like hardass. His patchwork political philosophy makes him tough to pin down and less predictable than his opponents would prefer.
ABORTION
Vocally pro-choice; his first speech as a senator in 1985 was a defense of Roe vs. Wade.
THE MILITARY
An overall hawk, he favors significant increases in the military budget; he's also a strong supporter of veterans' issues.
CRIME
A former prosecutor, he offered the original legislation to put 100,000 cops on the street nationwide and introduced two strikes and you're out legislation to put sexual predators behind bars for life without parole.
DEATH PENALTY
He opposes it, saying in 1996, I know something about killing, and I don't think the state honors life by turning and taking a life.
EDUCATION
He breaks with his party by supporting teacher-tenure reform and public-school choice. TAXES He favors lowering payroll, alternative-minimum, estate and business taxes. He fought successfully for a reduction of the capital-gains tax for small businesses.
WOMEN'S ISSUES
An original sponsor of the Violence Against Women Act and the Women's Health Equity Act, he marched for the Equal Rights Amendment in New York in 1971.
GAY RIGHTS
He voted against the anti-gay Defense of Marriage Act and sponsored both the Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act.
ENVIRONMENT
As green as they come, he has threatened to filibuster any bill that permits drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and he called the Bush administration's efforts to use September 11th to help open up the refuge false patriotism.
P.A. |
