Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

Teresa on the Stump, Teresa Heinz Kerry, from Mozambique, PRO-ABORTION Catholic, UN Enmployee, etc.
Time ^ | 02.01.04

Posted on 02/01/2004 5:54:01 PM PST by Coleus

CORBIS BETTMAN
CANDID CONSORT: Teresa with Kerry


Teresa on the Stump
Mrs. Kerry is worth a fortune, but her real value to the campaign is her bluntness

Posted Sunday, February 1, 2004
Santa Fe, N.M., has its share of hangouts for the megarich. The Guadalajara Grill, a strip-mall café decorated with balloons in the shape of beer bottles, isn't one of them. But places like that are part of the territory if your husband is running for President. That is how Teresa Heinz Kerry, conservatively estimated to be worth $500 million or so, happened to find herself there last Friday afternoon, inhaling the heavy aroma of frying tortillas and trying to persuade a mixed group of 30 Democrats, including some undecideds and former Deanites, to vote for her husband. Nearly two hours into it, she had just about wrapped up when a latecomer arrived. Not wanting to miss a single potential supporter, Teresa took Francesca Lobato aside and started all over again, spending an additional half an hour answering her questions about education, taxes and health care. By the time Teresa was finished, she had converted even restaurant owner Pedro Solis, who was waiting tables and running the cash register.

Although Teresa has made countless campaign stops like this—having twice been married to lanky, blue-blooded, Yale-educated Senators named John—very little about her fits the stereotype of the political wife. Not even Hillary Clinton strayed so far from the dutiful, adoring Stepford spouse as Teresa. She has the independence that comes with a personal fortune and one of the nation's biggest philanthropies, a life story that sounds like a screenplay and a bluntness that could never be scripted.

As dogged and earnest as she is when she is campaigning for Kerry on her own, Teresa (pronounced Tuh-ray-za), 65, does not function nearly so well as a prop. Onstage beside her husband during yet another recitation of his stump speech, she stands with her wavy hair falling over her eyes, looking preoccupied or, worse, bored. Only recently did she begin using Kerry's last name, switch her party registration from Republican and quit referring to the late Senator Heinz in the present tense as "my husband." She still has a tendency to volunteer what another political spouse might lie about—her Botox shots, her prenuptial agreement, what she would do if she ever caught her husband cheating and the fact that Kerry was in the bathroom when he found out he had won the Iowa caucuses and the New Hampshire primary.

All of which is why voters don't quite know what to make of her. To some, she brings a badly needed dose of authenticity and passion to a candidate who struggles to convey both. "I don't understand Kerry, but I'm nuts about her, because she talks about health care and children's issues," says Eileen Waterman, 57, a nurse in Albuquerque, N.M. To others, she embodies everything that doesn't work about Kerry. Baer Woodrum, who runs a Shoney's in Aiken, S.C., says he can't imagine Kerry doing well in this Tuesday's primary, in part because "his wife, I hear she's really ..."—he pauses to find a polite word—"Northeastern."

Actually, she hails from just about as far south as you can go: the southeastern edge of Africa. Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira grew up in the capital of Mozambique, a city now called Maputo but then known as Lourenco Marques. The daughter of a Portuguese doctor, she was part of a pampered colonial class, playing tennis on the grass lawns of private clubs and spending her days sipping tea and coffee with her friends. One of the country's best-known painters, Malangatana Valente, recalls serving "Terezinha" when he worked as a waiter in a coffee shop. "She was always smiling and talking to everyone nicely," says Malangatana. "She was always a happy girl."

But when she went on calls with her father into the bush, where people would gather before sunrise to await them, Teresa saw what were the grim realities of life for most people in the country. To swim at dawn or dusk was to risk malaria; the slightest malady, left untreated, could become a death sentence. And she knew the menacing side of even a privileged existence under a dictatorship. Her father wouldn't let his criticisms of the government's repressive economic and racial policies go beyond the family dinner table. She went away to college in South Africa, where a classmate from the University of Witwatersrand recalls her as a devout Catholic who attended early-morning Mass at the university chapel on most days. She also marched with the nascent antiapartheid movement, giving her worried mother "a fit," Teresa says.

It's her outsider's view of America that captivates the crowds in places like the Ruby Elephant Coffee Shop in Kalona, Iowa. "People die around the world wanting to have freedom of speech and the right to vote," she told them. "The idea of America—more than geography or more than a flag, even—when you are far away, is an idea of possibility. It's an idea of hope. It's an idea of trust. It's an idea of trying and succeeding if you want to." She is a halting, sincere speaker, and even when she has a microphone, you have to strain to hear her. But those very qualities are what draw listeners in.

Teresa came by her fortune with her marriage to Heinz, the heir to the Pittsburgh, Pa., ketchup-and-pickle conglomerate, whom she met when she was studying at the University of Geneva to be an interpreter. (She's fluent in five languages.) Heinz told her his family made soup back in the States. She still calls him "the love of my life." When Heinz died in a 1991 plane crash, she turned down a chance to run for his Senate seat and poured her energy instead into refocusing how the Heinz family's philanthropic network deploys its $2 billion in assets. One of her primary causes is the environment. When she was serving as a delegate to the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, she struck up a friendship with one of the other delegates, to whom her husband had once introduced her on the Senate steps—and three years later, she and John Kerry were married at her house on Nantucket.

As Kerry rails about "George Bush and his economy of privilege," his wife flies across the country in a ketchup-red-and-white jet sporting "57" as part of its tail number. But there is also an earthiness to Teresa. During a flight with a TIME correspondent a few years ago, she had eggs from her Pennsylvania farm carted aboard and scrambled them herself in the cramped galley of the plane, whistling Give My Regards to Broadway and making bawdy jokes about her chickens. "I think she'd be quite extraordinary as First Lady," Kerry says.

It took a while for him to convince her of that—or that it was worth it to try. She went for long walks in the summer of 2002 near her place in Sun Valley to turn over the possibility in her mind. "I actually told him on the phone that I was coming to a place where I accepted it," she told TIME. "Then, as you get involved in the campaigning, you get excited about the idea of really helping people. Before, it was just theoretical. Now, my bones get sore, but my mind is stoked."

—With reporting by Cathy Booth Thomas/Santa Fe, Douglas Waller with Kerry, Simon Robinson/Johannesburg and Emmanuel Camillo/Maputo

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1130650,00.html

Kerry's gold

Portuguese by birth, she was raised in Africa and educated in Switzerland. Spontaneous and independent of mind; candid and direct to the point of being impolitic, she is like her husband, a pro-choice Roman Catholic. And she is independently wealthy, to the tune of $550 million, from her first marriage to the late senator John Heinz, heir to the ketchup fortune. She remains a power in her own right as head of the Howard Heinz Endowment and Heinz Family Philanthropies, a charity with a billion-dollar endowment that gives away millions each year to environmental, educational and health causes.

It is a shared passion for the environment that brought John Kerry and Teresa Heinz together. They met at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, where she had been sent as delegate by the first President Bush. That was 12 months after John Heinz, a potential presidential candidate himself, died in a plane crash. She and Kerry subsequently bonded after he recited a prayer - in Latin - at a Mass they both attended.

The daughter of a prominent Portuguese doctor, Heinz Kerry, née Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, grew up in Mozambique. She attended a school run by British nuns, and later studied Romance languages at senior school in South Africa, where she became involved in the nascent anti-apartheid movement of the late 1950s. At university in Geneva, she was a classmate of Kofi Annan at the city's School of Interpreters. Now fluent in five languages, she graduated and went to New York to become an interpreter at the United Nations, before marrying Heinz in 1966. 'I had no ambition,' she once said. 'I thought of myself as being married and having children, which is what all the ladies did.'

That's no longer the case, if it ever was. When the results in New Hampshire come in on Tuesday night, Mrs Heinz Kerry may become a singularly important figure. 'It's not an easy choice to do this, and she feels it is important,' says spokeswoman Christine Anderson. 'But she doesn't want to be involved in policy per se or hold an official job. She would rather keep working on the issues she cares about. She wants to keep her job to run the Heinz Endowments, and she would keep doing that if she were First Lady.'

Those who know her well say she is generous to a fault and, for someone who could easily have everything done for her, is well able to look after herself. 'She's a powerhouse in her own right, not just a plus-one,' says her god-daughter and Vogue magazine writer Jill Kargman. 'She has her own causes and, instead of just standing beside him, she can get up and captivate an audience as well as any politician. She doesn't have an agenda, or secret political aspirations of her own; she just truly wants to make the world a better place.'

In doing so, Mrs Heinz Kerry is not afraid to speak her mind. With the perspective of an admiring foreigner, she often speaks of the demise of America's reputation abroad. 'I understand why so many of our friends around the world are so mad at us,' she said 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.'

At the start of John Kerry's campaign, Democratic strategists were not sure if Teresa Heinz Kerry would be an asset or a liability. Some predicted she would help soften the stiff and awkward public image her husband had acquired; others feared she would prove too contemporary and sophisticated, her Chanel heels too high to appeal to the stay-at-home wives of the Mid-West.

And there were incidents that alarmed her husband's handlers. Asked if he still had nightmares of combat, Kerry, a decorated Vietnam veteran, said he hadn't. His wife said otherwise, and mimicked him having a flashback. 'Down, down, down!' she screamed. And there were minor breaches of Beltway etiquette. In an Elle magazine profile, she enthused about her Botox treatments, the benefits of green tea and her late husband, John Heinz III, to whom she was still referring as 'my husband'.

She was reported as fidgeting while Senator Kerry made speeches, of interrupting him, of failing to gaze at him adoringly in the accepted manner. On the subject of marital fidelity, she said: 'I used to say to my husband, my late husband, "If you ever get something, I'll maim you. I won't kill you. I'll maim you".' And asked whether she would take her husband's name, she shot back: 'Politically, it's going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don't give a shit, you know? There are other things to worry about.' And she added: 'Swearing is a good way to relieve tension'.

The joke in Republican circles goes that every time the couple, who are sometimes known as 'Cash and Kerry', retire to bed, Kerry is fundraising. In fact, under campaign finance law, individual donations are capped at $2,000. When the Kerry campaign was floundering last autumn. it was Kerry who mortgaged his Boston townhouse to raise money and has said he won't spend any Heinz money on a campaign - and she says she won't offer it - unless the Bush campaign engages in 'character assassination'.

Democratic strategists say they would not want to turn her into a robotic Stepford Wife even if they could. Consultant Hank Sheinkopf believes Heinz Kerry could help close the gender gap in US politics and get out the female vote - indeed, the size of Kerry's win in Iowa last week was predicated on women voting for him. In so far as Heinz Kerry helped in that win, it bodes well for gaining support in key swing states that Democrats must win to carry the election - Pennsylvania, Iowa, Michigan, Missouri and Ohio. 'We're not living in 1955 anymore and she can typify and force the turn-out of women on the issues women are interested in, like healthcare, education and the environment.'

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, grew up in Mozambique. She attended a school run by British nuns, and later studied Romance languages at senior school in South Africa, where she became involved in the nascent anti-apartheid movement of the late 1950s. At university in Geneva, she was a classmate of Kofi Annan at the city's School of Interpreters. Now fluent in five languages, she graduated and went to New York to become an interpreter at the United Nations, before marrying Heinz in 1966. 'I had no ambition,' she once said. 'I thought of myself as being married and having children, which is what all the ladies did.'

Teresa Heinz Kerry
DoB: 5 October 1938 (Mozambique)
Education: BA, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa
Family: Two stepdaughters, three sons from her marriage to John Heinz
Jobs: Interpreter, United Nations; chair, the Howard Heinz Endowment

Together, the Kerry's have five children; his two daughters and her three sons.
Was he widowed too, divorced??  Annulment??? 



TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Culture/Society; Extended News; Foreign Affairs; Government; Political Humor/Cartoons; Politics/Elections; US: Massachusetts; US: New Jersey; United Kingdom
KEYWORDS: 2004; abortion; abortionlist; catholic; catholiclist; catholicpoliticians; enviralists; geopolitics; heinz; kerry; ketchup; kofiannan; mozambique; prochoice; prolife; teresaheinz; teresaheinzkerry; un; unitednations; unlist
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-62 next last
To: Coleus
He must be divorced; otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to remarry.

Well, IIRC it didn't happen quickly or easily - to fill in with more detail I would have to go back over a number of threads here on FR ...

21 posted on 02/01/2004 6:35:32 PM PST by _Jim ( <--- Ann speaks on gutless Liberals (RealAudio files))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: Servant of the 9
I am surprised that in South Carolina he isn't claiming she is "African/American" to get the black vote.>>>

Don't be surprised, I bet they will give it a try.
22 posted on 02/01/2004 6:37:27 PM PST by Coleus (STOPP Planned Parenthood http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/892053/posts)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 14 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Kerry was divorced before he met Mrs. Heinz. She insisted that he had to get annulment. What grounds Lord only knows. Married in the Church. Both pro-abortion. In my book you cannot be pro-abortion and a Catholic in good standing. But, then in the state of Mass. Catholics seem to have their own rules. These people really disturb me.
23 posted on 02/01/2004 6:41:14 PM PST by mom-7
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: CzarNicky
LOL! Yes this is true.

More bizarre is that neither is Irish. Neither were born to the fortune they both enjoy, but both married into more money -John Kerry twice. Yet both had privileged upbringings.

24 posted on 02/01/2004 7:18:36 PM PST by WOSG (I don't want the GOP to become a circular firing squad and the Socialist Democrats a majority.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: WOSG
You're right! They both married for money! What a pair. I call them Cash and Kerry.
25 posted on 02/01/2004 7:44:46 PM PST by fhayek
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 24 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
I was just wondering if and /or when she became an American Citizen...Wondering minds want to know?????
26 posted on 02/01/2004 7:57:45 PM PST by DAVEY CROCKETT (Thank You GOD for Blessing America)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
**Portuguese by birth, she was raised in Africa and educated in Switzerland. Spontaneous and independent of mind; candid and direct to the point of being impolitic, she is like her husband, a pro-choice Roman Catholic.**

I was not aware that Thesa was also a Catholic. Hmmmm.
27 posted on 02/01/2004 8:00:16 PM PST by Salvation (†With God all things are possible.†)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Kerry divorced his first wife and at Theresa's direction pressed for an annulment to that marriage - I don't know if the annulment was granted.
28 posted on 02/01/2004 8:03:14 PM PST by Rummyfan
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
And here are a couple other threads:

The Deadly Dozen

Blood On Their Hands: Exposing Pro-abortion Catholic Politicians

Kerry [Catholic} says he'll filibuster Supreme Court nominees who do not support abortion rights

PETITION TO EX-COMMUNICATE PRO-ABORTION CATHOLIC ELECTED OFFICIALS

Catholics Kerry and Kennedy have a 100% Pro-homosexual Record with the Human Rights Campaign! Page 10,11

Kerry says he alone hasn't 'played games' on abortion

AS KERRY EMERGES, SO DOES CONCERN THAT AS PRESIDENT HE MAY BE DENIED COMMUNION

Archbishop [Raymond Burke] Would Refuse Communion To John Kerry

Kerry raps Pope: Senator fuming over gay marriage order

(re Kerry & Kennedy) Boston Bishop O'Malley Says "It Is Not Our Policy To Deny Communion"

29 posted on 02/01/2004 8:12:26 PM PST by Salvation (†With God all things are possible.†)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 10 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
PRO-ABORTION Catholic

That's an oxymoron. And, the morons who think it ain't are getting swift kicks from the bishops who have said enough is enough.

30 posted on 02/01/2004 8:16:18 PM PST by Barnacle ("It is as it was." JPII)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
"[S]he was part of a pampered colonial class, playing tennis on the grass lawns of private clubs and spending her days sipping tea and coffee with her friends. One of the country's best-known painters, Malangatana Valente, recalls serving "Terezinha" when he worked as a waiter in a coffee shop...."

Gosh darn it, I want this woman challenged on her colonialist past, the way a Republican would be. I want her questioned on the current situations in Africa, on Zimbabwe, on Muslims and Sharia there, I want to know what she thinks, or if she thinks, about modern day slavery on the continent of her birth. I want to know: what does she think the world should have done to respond to Rawanda.

I want to know these things so much, that if the opportunity presents I may go ask her myself, because sure as heck the media ain't gonna ask her.

Oh, and btw, in a race between Ter-eez-uh and Laura, Laura's a lock.
31 posted on 02/01/2004 8:51:49 PM PST by jocon307 (The dems don't get it, the American people do.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Thanks for the ping!
32 posted on 02/01/2004 9:27:00 PM PST by Alamo-Girl
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 2 | View Replies]

To: jocon307
Laura's a lock. >>

Yes, she is, she's a down-to-earth woman full of class. The press lambasted her during the campaign, I just hope they put T. under the microscope going back to her High School days.
33 posted on 02/01/2004 9:34:57 PM PST by Coleus (STOPP Planned Parenthood http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/892053/posts)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 31 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
I live in western Pennsylvania and about 10 years ago Ter-raze-uh got in hot water with black leaders by describing herself as African American.

She came up with some convulated explanation of how she was African American without a hyphen while blacks were properly entitled to a hyphenated African-American tag.

She won't want to open that can of worms again.
34 posted on 02/01/2004 11:54:22 PM PST by MadeInOhio
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 22 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Is she even a citizen?
35 posted on 02/02/2004 12:25:34 AM PST by KingNo155
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Enough to make a body sick.
36 posted on 02/02/2004 1:06:41 AM PST by farmfriend ( Isaiah 55:10,11)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
Although he was something of a Specter Republican, he was an honorable and decent man. So even if some of his issues were liberal, he was by no means a Democrat. His character just wouldn't permit it.
37 posted on 02/02/2004 7:45:23 AM PST by republicanwizard
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 18 | View Replies]

To: Coleus
I've been wondering too, what's with the shawl or whatever it is perpetually tossed over one shoulder?
38 posted on 02/02/2004 9:37:51 AM PST by GOPrincess
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: GOPrincess
I've been wondering too, what's with the shawl or whatever it is perpetually tossed over one shoulder? >>

I guess dressing up as an a American doesn't favor her well.

39 posted on 02/02/2004 11:28:21 AM PST by Coleus (STOPP Planned Parenthood http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/892053/posts)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 38 | View Replies]

To: KingNo155
Is she even a citizen?>>

I'm wondering that myself

40 posted on 02/02/2004 11:30:24 AM PST by Coleus (STOPP Planned Parenthood http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/892053/posts)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 35 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-62 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
News/Activism
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson