NEW YORK, 30 July 2004 — The nation got its first comprehensive look Tuesday night at Teresa Heinz Kerry when she spoke at the Democratic National Convention, and the delegates there showered her with applause and shouts of “You go, girl!”.
But just who is Teresa Heinz Kerry? To begin with, she’s already well-known for her candor: A Democrat for just 18 months, Heinz Kerry told a reporter she tacked on “Kerry” for political reasons and that “I don’t give a heck what name people use.”
On Sunday, while speaking to Pennsylvania delegates, an editor from the conservative Pittsburgh Tribune-Review questioned her over a phrase she repeatedly denied using: “You said something I didn’t say,” she said. “Now shove it.”
She jokes that since politicking began last year, she’s added 12 pounds to her figure, saying: “I have Iowa on one hip and New Hampshire on the other.”
And she didn’t hesitate to address this year’s annual convention of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee.
Never afraid to speak her mind, some journalists speculate that Teresa, pronounced Turr-AU-sah, has been asked to tone down her opinions during the campaign. Whereas before she spoke about her use of Botox and her prenuptial agreement, and even about her emotional attachment to Husband No. 1, whom she’s referred to as “the love of my life.” She now focuses squarely on Husband No.2 and his abilities to lead the country.
Many Americans admire her frankness and outspokenness. “She grew up in a dictatorship. Freedom of speech is very important to her,” a delegate observed. And journalists have said “it is difficult to argue that Heinz Kerry is not smart, well-informed and a straight shooter.”
She has the perspective of a foreigner, and 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 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 middle class America.
She remains feisty. Just after Kerry announced Sen. John Edwards, D-North Carolina, as his running mate, Heinz Kerry said on “60 Minutes,” that she and Elizabeth Edwards intended to keep their husbands “honest,” should the Democrats win the White House in November.
“The meaning was clear — each wife would be a corrective foil for the self-interested sycophants who surround most men in power — but in the political context, the word choice seemed a bit off,” noted New York Newsday.
The daughter of a Portuguese doctor and a homemaker, Teresa Simoes-Ferreira was born in 1938 in the then-Portuguese colony of Mozambique, in East Africa.
She has referred to herself as an “African-American” and “a daughter of Africa,” as well as “Latin.”
One of three children, Heinz Kerry was born into the family of a well-to-do Catholic oncologist.
She often went out on visits with her father in the still-impoverished Mozambique and aspired to become a doctor — until reality made it clear that there were few female physicians in her early days.
In Mozambique, Heinz-Kerry attended school run by British nuns, then studied romance languages and graduated from the University of Witwaterswand in South Africa, where she marched against apartheid.
Fluent in English, Portuguese, Spanish, French and Italian, she traveled to Switzerland to attend the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva, where she was a classmate with Kofi Annan, now the Secretary General of the United Nations.
While at school in Switzerland she met John Heinz, but she graduated and went to New York to become an interpreter at the United Nations before marrying Heinz in 1966. At the age of 31, she became a naturalized US citizen.
Heinz, a Republican from Pennsylvania, was elected to Congress in 1971 and then was elected to the Senate. It was Heinz, a moderate Republican, who introduced his wife to Kerry in 1990 when the two senators spoke on the steps of the US Capitol for Earth Day. Then, in 1991 Heinz died in a plane crash.
Personally inheriting more than $500 million, Teresa also became the chair of the Heinz family’s $1.2 billion philanthropic foundations (her husband was an only child), she has used her position to develop policies in environmental protection, women’s health care and prescription drug sales reform. She also controls 10 family trusts.
The New York Times named Teresa Heinz Kerry as “one of the nation’s leading philanthropists” and by Utne Magazine as one of 100 American visionaries: “People Who Would Change Your Life.”
The Los Angeles Times newspaper has reported that Heinz Kerry, who remains a legal resident of Pennsylvania and who owns five homes — including a 23-room Georgetown town house in Washington DC — controls a family fortune worth about $1billion. In 2003, she earned $5.1 million.
Although she met John Kerry in 1990, they renewed their acquaintance at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, where she had been sent as a delegate by then-President George Bush Sr. Kerry impressed Heinz Kerry by, among other things, speaking to her in French and by taking her to church, where he sang hymns in Portuguese.
After living together for several months, they married in 1995, he is five years her junior
Kerry has described his prospective First Lady as ‘nurturing and incredibly loving, and fun, zany, witty ... definitely sexy.’
If Kerry goes on to win the White House, she will make a First Lady quite unlike any America has seen before, and will become the nation’s second foreign-born first lady. The first was Louisa Adams, born in London and the wife of John Quincy Adams.
