Does Teresa Heinz Trust John Kerry? If not, why should we?

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?

Teresa Heinz Kerry, the wife of Senator John Kerry from Massachusetts, is the chairman of The Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. The New York Times has called her “one of the nation’s leading philanthropists”. Named by Utne magazine as one of 100 American visionaries (“people who could change your life”), she is recognized as one of our premier environmental leaders. And she has been a long-time and tireless educator and advocate on behalf of women’s health and economic security.

Teresa Simoes-Ferreira was born and raised in Mozambique in east Africa. Fluent in five languages, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in romance languages and literature from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, South Africa. After graduating from the Interpreters School of the University of Geneva, she worked for the United Nations in New York. In 1966 she married John Heinz, who subsequently became a congressman and U.S. senator from Pennsylvania; he died in a plane crash in 1991. In 1995, she married Senator John Kerry. She has three sons, two stepdaughters, and one grand child, of whom she is inordinately (but understandably) proud.

After the tragic death of Senator Heinz, she was urged to run for his Senate seat but chose instead to assume direction of the family's extensive philanthropic activities. She immediately undertook a major reorganization designed to sharpen the foundations' strategic focus. Only two years later The Chronicle of Philanthropy noted that under her leadership The Heinz Endowments were already “poised to become a much more influential force in the philanthropic world”.

Today, the foundations she oversees are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education, enhance the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity and promote the arts.

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a little more on her at a school visit

Earlier, in an address to about 50 students at Merrimack Valley High School, Heinz Kerry had espoused her husband's plan to provide free tuition to anyone who pledges two years of service to the country, be it military or community-based. But mostly, the noted philanthropist, environmentalist, women's advocate and ketchup heiress discussed personal philosophy and geopolitics, not the primary.

Sen. John Kerry's name didn't even surface until after she had woven a mix of life lessons and biography for the students. Then, in a brief stump speech, she focused on her husband's integrity and global appreciation. (If he didn't understand "what it means to be an American and a world citizen . . . I don't think I could've married him," she said.)

Associate Principal Jim Gorman had introduced Heinz Kerry as the senator's "better half." It would be "worth having him as president if we could have you as first lady," he said, before giving way to the school's first political speaker of the season.

Talking about her upbringing in Mozambique, Heinz Kerry said she learned several early lessons. "If you swam at dawn or dusk, you got eaten by crocodiles or sharks. If you went into still water you got malaria," she said. Though she was free to frolic in the wild, she remained healthy, citing an early appreciation for the relationships between cause and effect and between man and nature. Her father was a doctor, and observing his visits to the East African bush was a formative experience. Heinz Kerry spoke of global compassion as well as the importance of preventative medicine. "If you don't prevent, most of the world can't afford the cure even if it exists, and so you die," she said.

Growing up in a dictatorship - Mozambique was then under Portuguese colonial rule - she saw America from afar through the eyes of the disenfranchised. To her, it was less a country than a concept, an "organic system with a can-do attitude, with an optimistic eye, with an idea of the possible." Now look at America, she said. "Where are we today?"

In college in South Africa, Heinz Kerry (born Teresa Simoes-Ferreira) marched against segregation in Johannesburg. After graduate school in Geneva, Switzerland, she went to work for the United Nations as an interpreter, albeit with an ulterior motive. "I wanted to help my country become independent," she said. Though she "wasn't doing anything wrong or bad or loud," just gathering information, the secret police warned the undersecretary who hired her that she was being watched.

Having lived where "people (would) die to be able to have the right to vote, literally," low voter turnouts in the United States make her angry. She told students that apathy is unacceptable. "Your inaction is an invitation to trouble. Your action is an invitation to hope," she said.

Her 25-year marriage to Sen. John Heinz of Pennsylvania ended when the senator was killed in a plane crash in 1991. The following year, she served as a delegate to the U.N. conference in Brazil that established the Kyoto Protocol, an international accord addressing emissions and global warming. Kerry was also a delegate; they married in 1995.

She brought up Kyoto not to talk about her life but to share her disgust for the Bush administration. The president, even before his inauguration, called the 166-nation agreement "dead on arrival."

"Now, a president should never say an international accord is dead anywhere, especially before he has really studied it," she said. In turn, she said, when Bush was stonewalled as he sought global support for a war in Iraq, "The world community basically said, 'You're dead on arrival. Treat us this way, and we'll treat you the same way.' "

Heinz Kerry told students to see "global problems" as "global opportunities," to remember that environmentalism and commerce need not be mutually exclusive and to eschew cynicism, "the greatest threat to democracy."

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