Campaign With Heinz Sight; Democrat John Kerry hopes to put George W

Sunday Herald, The, Mar 7, 2004 by Trevor Royle

Driving back into Washington shortly after the 1992 presidential election, Bill Clinton noticed that his car had a puncture and pulled into a wayside garage to get it fixed. The hour was late and, as it would never do for a newly-elected president to be dealing with a flat tyre, Hillary said that she would handle the business. A little later she got back in the car and told Bill that the guy who fixed the tyre had taken her to the high school prom all those years ago. "Hey," said Bill, "you could have been the wife of a motor mechanic." Hillary's answer was withering: "Nope, he would have been the husband of the first woman president."

Ever since Eleanor Roosevelt entranced the American people with her mixture of graciousness and commitment, the role of the First Lady has been central to the presidency. It's a tough old part to play. Laura Bush, the current incumbent, is damned as a kind of retro 1950s homemaker who has never outgrown her west Texas roots. She had to follow Hillary Clinton, who came to the White House with her own agenda and behind them stretched a succession of First Ladies who are remembered either for what they were or what they failed to be. Nancy Reagan was too pushy and too gutsy a political operator, Jackie Kennedy introduced glamour, Maimie Eisenhower embraced dowdiness, Pat Nixon looked as if she was in the White House on sufferance and Rosalynn Carter managed to remain faintly anonymous throughout husband Jimmy's stint in office.

Now that John Kerry has won the Democrats' nomination, his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, finds herself in the limelight and already her claims as a new First Lady are being noised up by commentators who seriously believe that she will soon be gracing the East Wing of the White House. Unlike Dr Judith Steinberg, wife of the hapless loser Howard Dean, who announced that she would be keeping to herself, Heinz Kerry has made no attempt to dive for cover or even to adopt a low profile. This has not led her into whooping and cheering with the crowds; she avoids campaign buttons as if they were stigmata and sometimes fails to laugh at her husband's jokes (a cardinal sin), but Teresa Heinz Kerry is clearly a canny operator who could go a long way to improving her husband's chances at the hustings later this year.

Not that she comes across as a natural in-your-face campaigner. In her hinterland is the Heinz fortune, estimated at $550 million, which came to her courtesy of her first husband John, a ketchup heir who died in a plane crash in 1991. Her family background in colonial Africa leads her to make awkward assumptions about race and poverty and although she makes the absurd claim that she is an "African American" who immigrated in 1966, she remains the product of a privileged childhood in Portuguese-controlled Mozambique. She speaks her mind too and is uncompromising about her adopted country's refusal to remain friends with the rest of the globe, especially with the countries of the old world. In short, with her European background, her fluency in five languages, her interest in environmental matters and even her maiden name, Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes-Ferreira, she could be a liability. The White House certainly hopes so: the latest attack goes along the lines that there is something distinctly un-American about the Kerrys' interests which seem to be too liberal, too European, too Catholic and too darned spritzer-ish for the flyover people who live in the midwest and whose votes will, in all probability, determine the next president.

There is something in the conceit. John Kerry's wife is no patsy when it comes to working rooms, but she can appear aloof, sometimes dangerously so, and she has a quick tongue. Questions about her first husband's fortune or her second husband's pre-nuptial agreement are met with a summer lightning storm in her eyes and she makes no secret of the fact that she will not be a demure little First Lady. She promises that she will keep up her charitable work, using the Heinz fortune in the demanding fields of health care, the environment and education for the disadvantaged.

In her private life she wears expensive designer clothes, she is a slave to cashmere and has her own private jet, endearingly called The Flying Squirrel, but those privileges have only deepened her sense of responsibility. Those close to Heinz Kerry say that her philanthropy is no badge of honour which is taken off at night, but an important clue to her character. She actually lives what she preaches, a trait that can be disconcerting in a country that uses "liberal" as a mild insult.

How that will play in the US is something of a mystery and, given her husband's chances, her role might never be put to the test. Considered an exotic outsider in Washington or a preachy New Englander by those on the other side of the Beltway, Heinz Kerry is her own woman who has let it be known that she will not be manipulated by the Democrats' party machine. Sure, she will stand by her man and pull out every stop to make certain that the next president is the senator from Massachussetts, but she leaves the impression that being First Lady will come a poor second to her good works.