Posted on 01/09/2005 7:27:08 AM PST by Lukasz
WASHINGTON -- When she was growing up in Chicago, an all-American girl who liked school, dancing and boys, they called her Kathy. These days she is known as Kateryna Chumachenko Yushchenko, and if election tallies are certified, she will be the first lady of Ukraine.
During the election campaign of her husband, Viktor Yushchenko, critics tried to make an issue of her American citizenship, implying that the CIA was trying to manipulate the election results.
But those who knew Kathy Chumachenko when she was a public liaison official in Ronald Reagan's White House remember a fervent anti-communist who was passionate about bringing democracy to her parents' homeland -- a consummate cold warrior.
''She was extraordinarily dedicated and energetic,`` said Rep. Christopher Cox, R-Calif., who served with her in the Reagan White House. Hired by Rebecca Range, now Cox's wife, Chumachenko served as liaison to American voters with roots in Eastern Europe.
''For President Reagan, democracy in the captive nations was very important,`` Rebecca Cox recalled. When Soviet leader Mikhail S. Gorbachev visited, Chumachenko reassured Americans worried that he would retreat on human rights. ''I was struck by her passion for freedom,`` Rebecca Cox said. Katherine Chumachenko graduated from Georgetown University and became, her friend Bruce Bartlett said, one of the few nonprofit-management majors at the University of Chicago School of Business, known for its commitment to freewheeling capitalism. Bartlett, a fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a think tank in Texas, said Chumachenko's feeling for Ukrainian democracy was ''the zeal of the recently converted. I remember her complaining that (her sister's) children didn't even speak Ukrainian.``
Chumachenko was close to her father, Mikhailo, an electrician who had been forced to work in Nazi labor camps during World War II. He ''really spoiled her,`` said Lydia Moll, Chumachenko's older sister, who lives in Woodstock, Ga. ''She was on his lap all the time, learning the history of Ukraine.``
Mikhailo Chumachenko died in 1998 and was buried in Kiev, next to his wife's parents. ''My husband was very much like her, she looks like him,`` said Sophia Chumachenko, Katherine's mother, who lives in Spring Hill, Fla. ''He told her everything about the kind of life we had; we had a very bad life because of the communists.``
Shortly before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Katherine Chumachenko and her parents visited Ukraine, reuniting with relatives her parents had not seen in 50 years. A month later, after Ukraine declared its independence, Katherine Chumachenko called her father.
''I was jumping around the room screaming, `Tato, we're free!' That is how I remember Aug. 24, my father and I over the telephone, both weeping. It was truly joyful,`` she said in an interview with the Ukrainian Weekly.
Eager to contribute in her parents' homeland, she left her Washington job for Kiev. In 1993 she became country manager for KPMG, a consulting firm that provided training and technical advice for Ukraine's financial managers. One of them was Viktor Yushchenko, then governor of Ukraine's central bank.
The two married and now have three children: Sophia, Christina and Taras.
''She is smart, charming and capable,`` said Rudolph G. Penner, Katherine Chumachenko's boss at KPMG and now a fellow at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. ''Viktor was something of a hero to most Western bankers. When he was governor of the central bank, he controlled inflation. It was enormously courageous.``
It was also courageous, Penner said, for Katherine to marry a Ukrainian politician. ''You're in trouble all the time,`` he said.
Doctors in Vienna, Austria, recently determined that Yushchenko, 50, was poisoned with dioxin last fall. Katherine Yushchenko, 43, has said that she tasted something strange on his lips when she kissed him on the night he fell ill.
The poison disfigured her husband's face, but she predicts that it will heal once the poison leaves his body, much as the country will recover from communism.
''He's had to pay a price, but over a thousand years, Ukrainians have had to pay a price for their freedom,`` she said on ABC's ''Good Morning America`` this month.
ping!
Bravo and Godspeed to the Ukraine, Yuschenko, and esp to his Lady.
Great story! I didn't know any of this.
No sorry, exacly otherwise! "Putino-philes"
Yuschenko's American Wife
Holds High Hopes for Ukraine
Please let me know if you want ON or OFF my Yushchenko vs. Yanukovych/Ukraine election ping list!. . .don't be shy.
Oh, that's her? Thanks for posting. :^D
I prefer "Putanas".
Yep, sounds like a leftist all right.
Putanas Putinovicius ?
But look for this problem from other perspective. Probably half of the Americans thinks that Michael Moore is OK. Then saying that half of the Americans is “anti-American” just loosing sense IMHO.
A Very Brave LAdy.
She and her children had to hide porior to the election due to constant death threats and there were more h\than one attempt on her husbands life.
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