Posted on 02/21/2004 12:48:02 PM PST by Cathryn Crawford
Atlanta, Feb. 21 — In December 2002, when Teresa Heinz Kerry's husband, Senator John Kerry, came home from his physical boasting about his low cholesterol, she stared at his screening results for prostate cancer and saw trouble where he had not.
"He didn't know anything," she recalled. "He knew zero, zilch."
But Ms. Heinz Kerry, a physician's daughter who peruses medical journals and toxicology articles and is intrigued by alternative medicine and Eastern philosophy, knew enough to have her husband's blood retested for C-reactive protein, a little-known indicator of potentially cancerous inflammation. Two days before Christmas, his doctor told Mr. Kerry that his wife's fears were well placed; he was in the very early stages of prostate cancer.
Ms. Heinz Kerry may well have saved her husband's life. Yet the episode underscores how, politically, she may be both an asset and a liability for the senator. While she is known as a highly intelligent and devoted spouse who looks after her husband, Ms. Heinz Kerry has a reputation as being offbeat if not a little odd, and even some Democratic strategists say that could complicate the Kerry campaign's efforts to make the Kerrys appealing to voters.
On the campaign trail, she speaks in jarringly frank terms about dealing with grief and loss; she talks openly about distinctly un-Western modes of healing, which can leave her audiences as mystified as they are impressed.
In a move that was reminiscent of how Hillary Rodham Clinton became a lightning rod for her husband, the Republican National Committee on Friday sent journalists an e-mail message quoting Ms. Heinz Kerry comparing her husband to a "good wine," adding, "You know, it takes time to mature, and then it gets really good and you can sip it."
Paul Costello, who was the press secretary for Kitty Dukakis when her husband, Michael, was the Democratic nominee, warned that Republicans might continue to make an issue of Ms. Heinz Kerry.
The campaign, Mr. Costello said, "is going to have a volume of negativity that's already accelerated, so one has to be very, very careful."
"The one thing a spouse can't do on the campaign trail is to be a distraction," he said, "because it will be used against you. But within that you can still show that you have character and personality."
Today, a year after surgery, Mr. Kerry tells audiences that he is cancer-free because he could afford the best medical care and because senators enjoy excellent health insurance. He seldom adds that his wife caught what all that good care might have missed.
In fact, to hear it from Kerry campaign officials, Ms. Heinz Kerry, 65, has been the senator's secret weapon. Though his aides mainly play down her influence, she, in fact, helps shape his policies and campaign strategy in ways large and small, a role that stands in sharp contrast to what America learned about her when she first stepped into the political limelight a year ago.
At the time, there were juicy details about her Botox treatments and her prenuptial agreement, her Chanel shoes and her cashmere scarves. There was frequent mention of her inherited millions and the ketchup-red-and-white Gulfstream II — the most visible legacy of her 25-year marriage to Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, who was killed in a plane crash in 1991.
But there is a more unusual and, her admirers say, more authentic side to Ms. Heinz Kerry's public persona that stands in sharp contrast to that of her husband.
Where Mr. Kerry, 60, is guarded and cautious, she is uninhibited, cursing in one of her five languages or musing aloud in accented English about why her husband of nearly nine years is so often called aloof. Where he appears stiff, she is spontaneous, dispensing unsolicited romantic advice to campaign workers and reporters. Where he can appear calculating, she comes across as guileless, trashing a profile of her in a major newspaper as a "dumb piece" by "a dumb person who wrote it."
That is why, surprisingly, more than a year into the campaign that she initially opposed, some Democrats express concerns that Ms. Heinz Kerry's forthrightness and spontaneity could come back to haunt her husband as her remarks are put under the microscope of a general-election campaign. Ms. Heinz Kerry acknowledges the concerns, but — though friends describe her as being wounded by harsh coverage in the past — insists she can stand up to the scrutiny.
"If I get hit, so I get hit," she said.
What an America accustomed to a demure Laura Bush, and still divided over Mrs. Clinton, will think of Ms. Heinz Kerry's strongly held and freely shared views is an open question.
"Iowans perceived it more as honesty — not trying to always be the cautious spouse," said John Norris, who ran the campaign there and coached Ms. Heinz Kerry on the stump. But, he said, "getting her to meld into a role in the campaign is going to take some getting used to."
Ms. Heinz Kerry, a naturalized United States citizen who is half Portuguese, defies easy categorization. She told a largely Hispanic crowd in Phoenix that conservative radio shows were making fun of her accessories. "They don't like this shawl, because it looks ethnic," she said. "I have news for them: I am ethnic. I'm Latin."
And lately, she gives the impression that she is watching her words.
"You want to write that, or you want to know?" she said, bristling when a reporter asked whom Ms. Heinz Kerry, a Republican until a year ago, voted for in the 1972 Nixon-McGovern race. (McGovern, she said, after a moment's hesitation.)
"That's nobody's business," she said when asked how often she had had Botox injections.
Yet she still manages to go in interviews where many politicians —— including Mr. Kerry — would fear to tread. She looks back critically on Mrs. Clinton's failed effort to revise the nation's health care system as first lady. "The thing is, if it goes wrong, as it did, it's a twofer — both he and she lost, and the issue lost," Ms. Heinz Kerry said.
She pronounces herself ardently pro-choice, despite being a Roman Catholic, but in the next breath denounces the blunt language of some abortion rights advocates. "I'm old-fashioned," she said. "So I wouldn't use the phraseology of some people that say, `No, my body, I do what I want!' I find that kind of crude terminology, period."
And she fluidly describes her husband's stance on the buildup to war in Iraq — easily doing what he struggled with for months — while in the process depicting Mr. Kerry's role as having been suckered by the Bush administration.
"We had a president who was going to war, period," Ms. Heinz Kerry said. "What these people on Senate Foreign Relations were trying to do, and got bombed by it, was — and I was close to that — how can you put the brakes on this guy when he can do what he wants?"
But then Ms. Heinz Kerry, who was born in Mozambique to European parents, has also consistently leavened her harsher opinions with a sugary serenade to America — its democracy, its can-do spirit — that might be laughed away as cornball if it were not delivered by a self-described "daughter of Africa" who grew up in a dictatorship.
In a way, Ms. Heinz Kerry's paeans to her adopted homeland are a corollary to her husband's talk of his Vietnam War record; both stake claims to patriotic turf that Republicans would most likely try to seize otherwise, said Gary C. Jacobson, a political science professor at the University of California at San Diego.
Ms. Heinz Kerry's contributions to the campaign go well beyond her schedule of appearances, which on many days exceeds her husband's. She swung through Atlanta this week, having lunch with Democrats and picking up endorsements. She played a role in the ouster of Mr. Kerry's campaign manager, Jim Jordan, after making known her displeasure with his failure to go on the air with advertisements last summer as Howard Dean took off in the polls. When she speaks to her husband, it is often to convey her observations from the trail, or feedback about his television performances.
"She can be direct with him like probably nobody else can," Mr. Norris said.
But Ms. Heinz Kerry says she avoids the conference calls and formal processes of the campaign. She also says she has no designs on a formal role in the White House.
"I don't pretend at all to write policy, nor do I want to," she said.
Yet to leave it there is to understate the influence Ms. Heinz Kerry already has had, and doubtless would continue to exert on her husband and his platform, through her management of the $1.2 billion philanthropic operation left to her by Mr. Heinz.
Mr. Kerry's health and education plans for infants and children mirror his wife's extensive work on early childhood education. Her foundation's pilot prescription-drug plan for the elderly was written into law in Massachusetts. And it was their shared work on the environment, after all, that brought them together in 1992, at a conference on global warming in Rio de Janeiro. The two, who married in 1995, are touchy-feely on the trail. When they traveled together in New Hampshire, he routinely stood by watching admiringly as she rambled on in a near whisper, her flowing hair hiding her eyes. "Isn't she spectacular?" Mr. Kerry would say.
Oddly, Ms. Heinz Kerry seems not to return the favor: when he is speaking his wife often wears a pained, or even bored, expression. She says it is merely the look she gets when she is thinking deeply. Or she pleads shyness, saying Mr. Kerry's growing crowds at times have overwhelmed her.
The role she plays most avidly in the campaign, though, is that of nursemaid to the candidate. She gave his aides a recipe for a grog — hot water, lemon, fresh ginger, and honey, but no whisky — that Mr. Kerry downed nightly in Iowa. She pushes him to eat protein and skip the pasta.
"I love medicine," said Ms. Heinz Kerry. Her father wanted her to go to medical school, but "the only woman doctor I knew who had a child was divorced," she said. "I wanted to have children, be a mother, be a wife, and I felt there was no room to be a doctor." She has three grown sons from her marriage to Senator Heinz, and Mr. Kerry has two daughters from his previous marriage.
Her ideas about healing range far afield of Western science. She talks to bewildered audiences about tai chi, about "embracing the tiger" — a metaphor for dealing with loss or grief by confronting and accepting it. She quotes a "monk" — who turns out to be a meditation student she met at a spa — who urged her to "cry to Shiva, hold it, and then let it go."
But the way Ms. Heinz Kerry views herself and her husband may resonate with many people.
Asked why he is often called aloof, she asked, "Do you mean shy? Snobby? Distant? Cut off from people? Arrogant?" And she compared him to her own mother: both were sent to boarding schools at a young age.
"My mom never got over it," she continued, referring to the separation from family and friends. "I think John probably missed some of that. Because when you see him with Vietnam veterans, people who've been where he has, he's completely different. So I think it's just a cloak of protection.
"I think maybe, if John had been married to me earlier," she said, "he might've gotten over some of those needs and hurt."
Well thank goodness she had John Kerry seek that annullment... I'd hate to think of her being married outside the Catholic church. How would she hold her head up at her abortion rights events? By the way, I've never found any source saying the annulment was granted, though other posters have told me so. I've heard conflicting stories about it, and I'd really like to know the truth. And isn't it odd that in one paragraph she protests "crude language" and then in another, there is a reference to her own swearing. Wonder what she thought of Kerry's "f" word event? But I truly hope that both Kerrys, as supporters of partial birth abortion, at least have the decency to refrain from touting their Catholicism. Somehow I doubt it, though. I'm waiting to see if and how they will bring it up... either the Republicans are going to be "mean spirited" by "bashing" them for being Catholic or it will be yet another comparison to John F. Kennedy....
Come on! His doctors probably don't even speak French!
LOL. Actually the prostrate business is a cover story. Teresa found out about the "intern" problem and had John fixed. Cherchez la femme!
Big mistake
Or as Mark Steyn says,
"Kerry was a blueblood of relatively minor means who married a woman worth $300 million and then traded up to a woman worth $500 million. If I were Teresa Heinz Kerry I'd be worried, now Massachusetts is introducing gay marriage, that hubby may start giving the come-hither look to some of the state's elderly bachelor billionaires."
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