Posted on 03/17/2004 4:01:32 PM PST by Servant of the 9
Teresa Heinz Kerry: A Potential First Lady With Maltese Family Ties
- Vincent Camilleri
Friday, September 12, 2003
‘Of all the potential First Ladies in recent history, she is certainly the most accomplished.’
This is how Vogue Magazine described Teresa Heinz Kerry in its March 2003 edition. I had the honour to meet and have a very pleasant conversation with Ms Heinz Kerry in 1987. It happened in Vienna, where I was posted as head of the Maltese delegation to the CSCE Follow-Up meeting, during a diplomatic reception hosted by ambassador Warren Zimmermann, head of the US delegation to the conference.
I remember meeting my friend and colleague Sam Wise, also from the US delegation, in the elevator going up to ambassador Zimmermann’s apartment and him telling me that we could be meeting the next US first lady that evening. Ambassador Zimmermann had invited a visiting delegation of US Congressional Wives for Soviet Jewry who had come to Vienna to lobby their cause at the CSCE meeting. It was the year before the 1988 US presidential elections and if my memory serves me right, Ms Michael Dukakis and Ms Richard Gephardt, whose husbands were in the running, were with the group.
When I was introduced to Teresa Heinz, who at that time was married to Senator John Heinz, she told me that her maternal grandfather was Maltese and that she had relatives in Portugal with my surname. I was even more pleasantly surprised when Ms Heinz remembered and sang a few verses, in Maltese, of an old local folk song she learned in her childhood from her grandfather.
This happy memory was triggered when I was searching for news about next year’s US presidential elections and entered the website of Senator John F. Kerry from Massachusetts, a front-runner for the Democrat nomination for these elections. Here I found that Senator Kerry married Teresa Heinz after the tragic death of her first husband and Ms Heinz Kerry is now a potential US first lady. This prompted me to write a short letter to wish her well and to ask her for more details about her Maltese family connections.
Her reply which came through Chris Black, former CNN political journalist and now spokeswoman to Ms Heinz Kerry, confirmed most of what I remembered from our meeting of sixteen years ago and gave me more details.
Teresa Heinz Kerry’s maternal grandfather, Albert Thierstein, was born in Malta. He spoke five languages and upon finishing his schooling at the age of 21, left Malta to seek his fortune.
His parents had died when he was a small child and he was raised by his French grandmother. As a young man Albert was forced to figure out how to make his own way in the world. He put three names in a hat: Africa, America and Australia, and vowed to go to the place he picked out. He picked Africa and left for South Africa to work for a French company. When the Boer War broke out, Albert Thierstein was forced to leave because he was a British citizen. He went into exile in Mozambique where he met his wife Maria (Teresa's grandmother). They had three daughters. One was Teresa's mother. He fell in love with Mozambique and never returned to South Africa.
Ms Heinz Kerry , who is now 64, called her grandfather Pops, and he died when she was about 8 year old.
Teresa was born in Mozambique in east Africa. She often says the wildness and beauty of Africa made her an environmentalist because it taught her respect for the natural order. But her country had a dark side. Its people lived under the oppressive thumb of Portuguese dictators. There was no civic life and no one dared talk of politics outside the privacy of home. Her father, a highly regarded doctor, did not vote until he was 71 years old. This experience left her with a deep and abiding appreciation for democracy and freedom.
Ms Heinz Kerry recalls that her late mother visited a cousin in Malta, Maria German. Maria was one of many children of Ernest Thierstein and a countess. Another child was Roberto who was a young major in the British Army during World War II and fought in the African front .
Ms Heinz Kerry has never been to Malta. She left Mozambique for high school and college in South Africa and then went to graduate school in Geneva where she met her first husband, John Heinz. After a long courtship, she went to America and married him in 1966. He went on to serve in the US House of Representatives and later as US Senator from Pennsylvania. He died in a tragic plane crash in 1991.
She married John Kerry, the US Senator from Massachusetts, in 1995 on Nantucket Island. She has three grown sons from her first marriage to Senator Heinz: John, Andre (who lives in Sweden) and Christopher who is working full time on the John Kerry presidential campaign. She has one grandchild, the daughter of her eldest son, John.
Apart from being fully involved in the intense presidential campaign, Teresa Heinz Kerry still chairs the Howard Heinz Endowment and the Heinz Family Philanthropies. These charities are committed to improving the quality of life for the residents of Pittsburgh and south-western Pennsylvania and developing models for best practices and self-help. She supervised an extensive reorganization dedicated to increasing the effectiveness of the endowments, which awarded more than US$70 million (Lm28 million) in grants to non-profit groups in 2002, mostly in south-western Pennsylvania.
Today, the Heinz Foundations are widely known for developing innovative strategies to protect the environment, improve education and the lives of young children, broaden economic opportunity, and promote the arts. The endowments funded the first project demonstrating the value of focusing intense resources on the education of children until age eight. The success of this project led Senator Kerry to adopt it as a model for proposed national legislation in his presidential campaign.
When I met Teresa Heinz sixteen years ago, her late husband John Heinz was not in the presidential race. Her present husband John Kerry is. CNN/Time polls taken on 5 September put him at the top of the list of nine Democrat nominees with a 16% share, three points ahead of second runner, Senator Lieberman.
‘You might be shaking the hands of the future First Lady of the United States this evening’, I remember Sam Wise telling me in the lift to ambassador Zimmermann’s apartment.
If Senator John F. Kerry wins the 2004 US presidential elections, I might have done just that sixteen year ago with Teresa Heinz Kerry, a truly remarkable person with Maltese family ties.
Vincent Camilleri is a former Maltese ambassador to France, Spain and UNESCO.
I just noticed that.
Not true. I was off with my friends fighting another evil force!
What the "International Community" did to Moise Tshombe was disgusting. To think that Mobutu Tsese Seko was the "compromise" candidate indicated just how bad things in the (former Belgian) Congo were (and are).
Never knew about Thereeza’s Maltese connection
As a substitute for NATO, one Soviet front group publication that the CSCE become the embryo of a new security system for Europe, rather than existing Western structures such as NATO or the West European Union. An article in the June 1990 issue of Peace Courier, the publication of the Soviet-controlled World Peace Council, stated, "The CSCE is the body which should develop the new security structure in Europe, while the existing military alliances should be allowed to wither away." In another variant, two Soviet generals suggested, in the October 1990 issue of Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn, "a re-forming of NATO and the Warsaw Pact (while it still legally exists) from military-political blocs into a single Common European Security Alliance."
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