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At 64, one of the richest women in the country, Heinz Kerry is not your standard-issue political spouse. She has called campaigns ''the graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises'' and once described the prospect of being first lady as ''worse than going to a Carmelite convent.''

(she has her own chief of staff)

''I have to figure out and [campaign staffers] have to tell me initially what it is they feel comfortable with,'' Heinz Kerry says of her role in the campaign. ''And if I think it is too handicapping of being myself, I'd rather not go certain places or talk about certain things because then I'll be phony, and I can't be phony. The last thing I want is someone to say, `You blew it for John.' ''

Born Maria Teresa Thierstein Simoes Ferreira in the former Portuguese colony of Mozambique, Heinz Kerry is ebullient where her husband is stiff, dramatic where he is reserved. The mother of three adult sons, she coos over her first granddaughter, nurtures yellow and white orchids in her plush Beacon Hill living room, distributes herbal treatments to staffers and friends alike.

''She is not a conventional person,'' explains Frank Gannon, Heinz Kerry's speechwriter and a former speechwriter for Richard Nixon. ''She is not so much a loose cannon as she is mobile heavy artillery. She is very deliberate in what she says.''

Five years older than Kerry, she is a smallish rounded figure whom one Boston writer describes as ''the sexiest 60-year-old I've ever seen.'' She hikes in Sun Valley, exercises regularly at Pilates studios in Washington, D.C., and Boston, and speaks a melodic English heavily flavored by her native Portuguese. She favors Hermes and Chanel, yet has been known to wear the same jacket two days in a row. She wears just a hint of makeup on her freckled skin.

She does not live small.

There are five residences: the Heinz family farm in Pittsburgh, homes in Nantucket, Georgetown, and Beacon Hill, and a ski retreat in Idaho -- a 15th-century barn that she and Heinz had imported from England and then reassembled. There is a combined domestic staff of more than half a dozen people and a private 10-seat Gulfstream jet.

There is also a Heinz ''family office'' in Pittsburgh and Washington that manages her personal philanthropic work and the properties and personal matters for Heinz Kerry and her sons, Christopher, Andre, and John IV. (They declined to be interviewed for this story; so did Vanessa and Alex Kerry, John Kerry's daughters from a previous marriage.) The offices have about 23 people, two of whom do nothing but pay bills. Roughly half of them worked for Heinz, one of the most popular politicians in Pennsylvania, and they seem almost as devoted to his widow as she was to him.

Although she works largely from her Georgetown home, she is closely involved in the development of many of the undertakings spawned by her mini-empire and can talk in arcane detail and often does. She is an ardent environmentalist as well as a keen supporter of the arts, both interests she shared with John the First. She is generally credited with revamping the endowments to make them more results-oriented and takes a personal interest in the recipients of the annual Heinz Awards -- five $250,000 grants, given to leaders in their fields, that she created in her late husband's memory.

And when she shows up in the lemon-colored corridors of her Washington office or at the Pittsburgh headquarters, gold-rimmed glasses perched on her nose, she invariably has a lot of questions.

''I think my greatest virtue is that . . . I ask a lot of questions,'' declares Heinz Kerry. ''Questions I don't have answers for sometimes. And I think one of the biggest missing things in our society today is a value of questioning, a Socratic discussion of the roundtable. I do that for people. Nobody has to tell me I am good or bad at it. I know I do that. Because when I speak, they shut up. It is dead quiet. Then it is questions, questions, questions.''

It is a trait that was not particularly in vogue in 1950s Mozambique, where the dictatorship silenced virtually all public political discussion. The daughter of a prominent Portuguese doctor, Heinz Kerry was raised a proper girl in prosperous colonial surroundings, the second of three children.

Although she sometimes accompanied her father on his rounds, she was largely isolated from the native population, not to mention the turbulent events of the time. At 13 she traveled to Durban, South Africa, to attend boarding school and recalls with a giggle ''these wonderful African guys, big guys, you know. Our guys weren't so black and so big. In the south of Mozambique there was a different tribe. I thought all this was like some of the films I had seen.''

Four years later she married John Heinz and took up residence on the Heinz's 90-acre Pittsburgh farm, a lavish estate with luxurious gardens and walls heavy with artwork of the masters. Despite its beauty, the house was an isolated place for a young pregnant wife in a new country.

Teresa Heinz, according to Martz, campaigned well for her husband and won people over quickly. But even then, her outspokenness generated smoke. In an interview with The Washington Post, just days after Heinz was elected to his first term in Congress in 1971, Teresa Heinz declared, ''Ted Kennedy I don't trust, like I don't trust Nixon, although I think Nixon's done a helluva lot better than I thought he would.'' The remark did not sit well with the White House, and John Heinz, according to some political veterans, suffered the consequences.

Today, Heinz Kerry says Nixon was ''one of our greatest presidents,'' although she personally did not trust him. As for her remark about Kennedy, Heinz Kerry says it was in reference to what she felt was his poor treatment of his former wife, Joan, who is her friend. Heinz Kerry says she ''felt badly for [Joan]. And so I spoke my heart about that and not my knowledge of him back then. I regret I said that, because I was talking about [personal] feelings.''

When Heinz considered running for the White House, she declared he would do so ''over my dead body.'' When Kerry started talking about it last year, she said the same thing and a little more.

She strategizes with Kerry daily. She has switched party registration, declaring that Republicans have grown too intolerant. Heinz Kerry, who when marrying Kerry was adamant that she would not change her name, has even started using Kerry's name, although she does not intend to legally change hers. But for a woman who has lived close to the political fires for three decades, and who has seen many of them go out, it is still just another race.

''Washington,'' she says, ''is not quite the bellybutton of the world.''

“The United States must . . . bring itself to understand that the policy of intervention”—against Communism—“that was right for Western Europe does not and cannot find the same application to the rest of the world.”

Kerry went on:

In most emerging nations, the spectre of imperialist capitalism stirs as much fear and hatred as that of communism. To compound the problem, we continue to push forward our will only as we see it and in a fashion that only leads to more mistakes and deeper commitment. Where we should have instructed, it seems we did not; where we should have been patient, it seems we were not; where we should have stayed clear, it seems we would not. . . . Never in the last twenty years has the government of the United States been as isolated as it is today.

There is, nonetheless, something slightly off-putting about the speech. The portentous quality, the hijacking of Kennedyesque tics and switchbacks (“Where we should have instructed . . .”), the absence of irony, the absence of any sort of joy—all these rankle, and in a familiar way. This has been the knock against John Kerry for the past thirty years, ever since he captured the nation’s attention as the spokesman for Vietnam Veterans Against the War, a group whose members staged a dramatic protest in Washington in April of 1971, camping out on the Mall and tossing their medals and combat ribbons onto the Capitol steps.

He seemed the world’s oldest twenty-seven-year-old that week, even though he was dressed in scruffy combat fatigues, his extravagant thatch of black hair gleaming, flopping over his ears and eyebrows—he looked a bit like the pre-hallucinogenic George Harrison. Kerry spoke to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in much the same style as he’d spoken at Yale.

Even as Kerry delivered his Senate testimony, he distorted his natural speech to sound more like that earlier J.F.K.; for example, he occasionally “ahsked” questions. (Kerry had befriended Robert F. Kennedy’s speechwriter Adam Walinsky and consulted him about the speech, bouncing phrases and ideas off the old master.)

This sort of thing had been a source of merriment for his classmates ever since prep school, where the joke was that his initials really stood for “Just For Kerry.” He had volunteered to work on Edward Kennedy’s 1962 Senate campaign, had dated Janet Auchincloss, who was Jacqueline Kennedy’s half sister, had hung out at Hammersmith Farm, the Auchincloss family’s estate in Newport, and had gone sailing with the President.

William Bulger, a state senator from South Boston and the dean of that city’s clever politicians, nicknamed Kerry Live Shot, for his homing instinct when it came to television cameras. Indeed, Kerry’s every move—the fact that he tossed his combat ribbons, not his medals, onto the Capitol steps; the fact that he had corrective jaw surgery (to fix a clicking sound, which had been compounded by a hockey injury);

Martin Nolan, a recently retired member of the Boston Globe’s mostly Irish and extremely raucous stable of political writers, says. “He was an empty suit, he was Live Shot, he never passed a mirror without saying hello.”

There isn’t an excessive use of the pronoun ‘I.’ says Bob Kerrey.

That Kerry is a Massachusetts liberal does not recommend him highly, either: the last three such candidates were Ted Kennedy, Paul Tsongas, and Michael Dukakis, and the latter’s campaign has become shorthand for the disastrously effete, National Public Radio tendencies of the Democratic Party. Kerry has consistently voted for gun control, for abortion rights, and for environmental protection, and has opposed the death penalty; he has voted with Kennedy about ninety-six per cent of the time.