Posted on 01/25/2004 2:26:29 PM PST by Hon
If Teresa Heinz won't trust presidential candidate John Kerry with her money, why should American voters trust Kerry with their country?
Teresa Heinz and Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., were married in 1995. Kerry's assets at the time were a few million dollars. (Click here for Kerry's Senate financial disclosure form for 1995.) Heinz's assets at the time were reportedly around half a billion dollars, which she'd inherited from her late husband, Sen. John Heinz, R-Pa., heir to the ketchup fortune. Unlike many other married couples, Heinz and Kerry kept their premarital assets separate. Much of Teresa Heinz's inheritance was no doubt tied up in trusts, but a substantial sum must have been unencumbered, because she had Sen. Kerry sign a prenuptial agreement...
By all accounts, Teresa Heinz had no interest in becoming first lady during her 25-year marriage to John Heinz (who died in a 1991 plane crash). "Over my dead body," she told John. Apparently she spent the first seven years of her marriage to John Kerry telling him the same thing...
Heinz Kerry told Benjamin Weiser and Todd S. Purdum of the New York Times that she'd consider making independent expenditures on his behalf if she felt his opponents were attacking him unfairly. "I think that is a First Amendment right in America for me," she told them. "I have that right. But that's a serious thing to do. It has to be really legitimate."
An independent expenditure campaign, though, would almost certainly violate federal campaign law. "Under the Federal Election Commission's rules, you cannot have access to the candidate's strategies and plans," Trevor Potter, former chairman of the Federal Election Commission and chairman of the nonprofit Campaign Legal Center...
The only way Heinz Kerry could now give substantial money to Kerry's campaign would be to tear up her prenup and kill herself.
This leads us to the inevitable question of whether these circumstances could have been foreseen by Teresa Heinz Kerry—if not when she married John Kerry, then anytime prior to his entry into the 2004 presidential race. Back then, she could have transferred assets for him to tap in his campaign. At the very least, she could have established a pattern of making substantial monetary "gifts of a personal nature" so that she could legally continue this practice after he became a candidate. But she didn't. Even the prenup seems less than entirely necessary when you consider Heinz Kerry's age—she's 65—and the near-certainty that her children's future prosperity is well protected by trust funds set up long before John Heinz's death...
Heinz Kerry must have had some inkling that the day might come when her second husband would need her money. And knowing that, she didn't make it available. That doesn't make her a bad wife. But it does raise a disconcerting question for voters. If Teresa Heinz Kerry won't give John Kerry the keys to the car, why should we?
(Excerpt) Read more at slate.msn.com ...
She's lucky she didn't marry a clinton.
i think she wants to be left the hell alone, and I have no problem with that!
Tia
She should be thankful she's not married to Bill Clinton.
They are in the living room of their Georgetown home, where Heinz has lived ever since her late first husband, John Heinz, came to Washington in 1971 as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. In the front entrance, the first things a visitor sees are two framed photos of Teresa Heinz cuddled with tall, smiling men with big heads of brown hair: In one is John Kerry, in the other John Heinz.
and this:
She still calls John Heinz "my husband" and doesn't always correct herself -- "my late husband" -- even when Kerry is around. She still wears the blue sapphire engagement ring that Heinz gave her.
There's something Clintonianly creepy about these two that screams 'marriage of convenience', or more likely, 'arranged marriage'.
How true is that statement for second marriages, especially when one has very sizable assets that are brought to the marriage? I would expect that the rich partner might want to protect those from exploitation for whatever reason by his/her new spouse.
Also, isn't it true that Kerry just took a 6 million dollar loan on the mansion? If money paid on the mortgage was mostly hers, but both names were on the mortgage, that would be one way to get some campaign funds from her. However, after that I don't know.
Just a suggestion.
5.56mm
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