Posted on 08/15/2004 11:59:56 AM PDT by barker
Playing catch-up with Mrs. Heinz Kerry
Sometimes you have to spend a day on a train for 15 minutes with a candidate's wife
By LISA GUTIERREZ
The Kansas City Star
WHO KNOWS WHERE, Mo. — The invitation comes from John Kerry's folks.
Ride the Kerry-Edwards campaign train across Missouri and interview Teresa Heinz Kerry, arguably one of today's most enigmatic headline makers.
We jump at the offer. Here's a chance to find out so many things: more about her life in Mozambique; how she dealt with the crushing loss of her first husband, and then becoming stepmother to the children of her second husband; what kind of first lady does she hope to be? What issues will she champion?
I call my devout Democrat mom the night before. She's excited and even suggests more questions.
The whistle-stop trip is designed to evoke old-fashioned Harry Truman charm. The train will eventually pass through Truman's beloved Independence — ooh, the symbolism — later this night.
I have no inkling of what “later” will mean.
***
The stage at Union Station in St. Louis stands next to the tracks where the 15-car train is ready to roll. Truman himself traveled on one of these cars.
The crowd waiting for Kerry is diverse. Black, white, young, old. Parents with small children. Teens with tattooed necks. College kids, firefighters, union workers. There are 15,000 people here, the Secret Service estimates. Generously, I think. Men in black shouldn't do math.
Finally, the headliners arrive. It's 12:50. They're nearly a half-hour late. This is where the wheels start falling off the schedule track.
Teresa Heinz Kerry is the first person we glimpse on a navy-blue tour bus that rolls down a path purposefully kept clear to create this grand, man-of-the-people entrance. She sticks her face, surrounded by those now-famous tousled mahogany curls, out a window. She waves with one hand and holds a big straw hat in the other. She's grinning like a little girl on a family vacation. She is beautiful. The crowd roars.
Heinz (as she wants to be known) often looks uncomfortable on stage, fiddling with her sunglasses, stuffing her hands deep into her trouser pockets, crossing and uncrossing her arms. She seems distracted, as anyone would be, listening to the same speeches over and over. But no, she is listening. She nods her head in agreement at the right times and applauds on cue.
At the rally's end, Chuck Berry's “Johnny B. Goode” blares, and glittery confetti shoots out from somewhere near the stage in a patriotic blizzard. Heinz, caught up in the revelry, reaches up to plop her hat on her husband's head but catches herself before making full contact.
The music plays on as campaign workers hustle our small band of Missouri media onto the train. We take seats on a club car with cushy seats. Wow, this is high-class treatment, I think. This is going to be a great trip.
Wrong.
Soon, our minder for the day, a thin, grim-faced 20-something woman, arrives with news: We're in the wrong car.
Ms. Media Minder takes us on a hike through car after car after car, down aisles so narrow that I begin to wish that I had stuck with the Atkins diet. Campaign workers joke that they're black-and-blue from being banged into walls and doors.
We walk about a quarter-of-a-mile to the front of the train to the correct car, a regular passenger car with two seats on each side of the aisle, as far away as possible, I note, from the candidates and their families. By the end of the day I feel like I've walked a marathon on this darn train.
Ms. Media Minder informs me that my interview with Heinz will come somewhere between Jefferson City and Kansas City — I've been told I may get as much as an hour with her — so I steel myself to wait until early evening. I pray that I stay sharp and my makeup holds up.
The train rolls out of St. Louis at 2:30 p.m., and soon the Missouri River becomes our constant companion to the north. Our brown river charms Kerry, a Lewis and Clark buff, and he mentions it in a later speech.
The train blows its sonorous horn as it approaches railroad crossings and small towns. This becomes a Pied Piper's call. Hearing the horn, Kerry supporters wearing buttons and some with signs wave from the roadside, bridges and parks. On the train, there is journalism to do, but not for me. Yet.
I watch campaign staff members escort individual reporters to the back of the train to interview Kerry. Unbeknownst to me until later in the night, Heinz is also giving interviews, while her makeup is still fresh.
The first stop comes in Washington, 197 miles from Kansas City. A war of homemade signs has already been waged in the crowd: “John Kerry Please Save Us From Mr. Bush” versus “Abortion Kills Children” along with plenty of “Bush-Cheney” placards. We will see party-crashers at every stop, even at the next big rally on the statehouse grounds in Jefferson City.
Other journalists in the car point out that the Bush-Cheney campaign is restrictive about whom they let into their rallies. The Democrats invite everyone, which is how hecklers get in.
As we slice our way across the state's midsection without any helpful itinerary from the Kerry folks, we are left to guess our location.
Then, somewhere between Washington and Jefferson City, we discover a new town: “No Cell Service,” Mo. Yes, we have no cell phone service. This is bad, very bad news to a train full of professional communicators trying to communicate with newsrooms back home. And so it goes for the rest of the trip. No cell, we have cell, no cell, we have cell. Clackety-clack, clackety-clack.
We arrive in Jefferson City at close to 6:30 p.m. Some in the crowd have been waiting three hours. I have never seen Missouri's statehouse before, and I am not the only one awed.
Almost as soon as she steps onto the stage, Heinz begins studying the building and its architecture, her eyes following a Latin inscription on the façade. She notices things like this. She whispers to her husband, pointing up at it. Salus Populi Suprema Lex Esto. Of course a woman fluent in five languages knows what it means: The Welfare of the People Shall Be the Supreme Law.
Something on her left hand sends out a laser-light beam every time it catches the sunlight, and I make a mental note: Check it out when you meet her.
After all, it's almost time.
Back on the train, Ms. Media Minder tells me that my interview will come after the stop in Sedalia, more than an hour away. The Kerry folks think that I'm being an incredible good sport. I'm just praying that I can stay awake.
More than 1,500 people wait for us in Sedalia, where here, too, the crowd has been waiting for three hours. The train pulls in at 10:30 p.m. Heinz speaks, or tries to speak, to the crowd. Boisterous Bush backers are raising a ruckus, and Heinz tells them coolly: “If Laura Bush was here, I'd say ‘Hello' politely to her, too.”
A few seconds later: “This is a free country. We have opinions, and we respect other people's place. Enjoy your democracy.”
As 11 p.m. approaches and we pass Knob Noster, Ms. Media Minder reappears and hands me off to Ms. Heinz Handler, who escorts me toward the back of the train, through cars full of people, through a car set up for the national media, bedroom cars, a kitchen, through Mission Control — the Secret Service car lit up bright as noon with enough computer equipment to send a rocket into space.
As we approach the Edwards' private dining room, Ms. Heinz Handler tells me that what I'm about to see is “off the record.” So I can't tell you what John, Elizabeth and their family were enjoying that night for dinner. National security?
Ms. Heinz Handler sits me down at a shiny wooden table in the Kerrys' private dining room. Squished in the corner at a control board sits Soundman, whose job is to crank up Bruce Springsteen's “The Rising” every time the train slows or stops, per Kerry's request.
I'm ready. But Heinz isn't.
Ms. Heinz Handler kindly removes me from the room — “So I don't have to worry about you,” she says. She lets me interlope in the staff car, where exhausted workers and purses and computer bags litter the seats.
At this point, I'm really panicked. My editors will kill me if I come back with nothing, I'm thinking.
After we roll through Lee's Summit, Ms. Heinz Handler rushes me, once again, toward the back of the train. Nearing Independence, she assures me we have at least an hour before we get into Kansas City. No, I tell her, we don't.
As I wait, I chat up the two men sitting in this swank car with leather tufted chairs and a cushy carpet. Turns out one of them owns the car we are sitting in, Harry Truman's car. And it turns out I'm sitting in a chair Truman himself sat in.
We approach the Independence station. It's a Hollywood moment. A smallish group of people is standing on the train platform. It's 12:30 in the morning. As we slow up, the faces below, shining bright in the night, lit from overhead streetlamps, turn up to look into the train. Smiling faces. They believe the campaign slogan, Hope is on the way.
But the train doesn't stop.
Within seconds, Ms. Heinz Handler comes running into the car.
It's time.
She puts me back at the Kerry dining table. There's a gaggle of people moving through the car so I don't even notice when Teresa Heinz Kerry sneaks in, sliding into the chair next to mine. It's like we're friends at the kitchen table. Ms. Heinz Handler takes a watchful seat across from us.
The first thing you notice is the hair, sexily tousled. Then, her eyes, brown and round like a teddy bear's, the windows to the soul, she calls them. Once they lock on yours, they don't let go. Her voice, lyrical and soft, is perfect for reading romantic poetry or bedtime stories. Or, as we know, for telling reporters to “shove it.”
Her makeup? Long gone. Which is why no photographs are allowed during this interview.
I tell her that people I've talked to in the crowds today have taken well to her. Show-Me State people like people who speak their mind.
“I think that people close to their roots, close to the earth, pick up on the genuine qualities of people who aren't phony, and I think that the people pick this up when they see me or hear me speak or they talk to me,” she says.
“The one normal thing they will say is, ‘You speak from the heart.' It's called welcome home. When you speak from your heart you invite them into your space, and they invite you into theirs. That's something you can't buy. You either do it or you don't. And that's just the way that I am.”
We cruise quickly through some personal history — she has an older brother and lost a younger sister in a car crash — talk about her love of cooking, “not pastries and sweets as much.” And about when, years ago, people had started talking about her late husband, John Heinz, as a presidential contender, she told them: “Over my dead body.”
Seems some of the reluctance clings.
“I was not very eager,” she says about when similar talk started swirling around Kerry. “I thought the work that I was doing and the work that he did, was independence, was at my age more satisfying than having to do something for someone else. But we considered it for a while.
“And then … I realized that even though I really in my heart did not want it, that I had no right to stop him. That there are things in the world and things in our own country that really needed to be addressed differently, and I thought his perspective and his experience was worth listening to.”
After not quite 15 minutes, it's over. The train slows into Union Station.
Ms. Heinz Handler has been pointedly pointing at her watch for the last three minutes and I am out of time. But wait, I want to shout as Ms. Heinz Handler runs us back to her train car. I still have four pages of questions! What about the hand bling I noticed in Jefferson City? And I didn't even get to my mom's questions!
An hour later, as I'm showering away the sweat of the day and 10 counties, my floor seems to rock like a train — I'm still moving!
But I can't help but hope one thing.
Maybe Laura Bush will give me 16 minutes.
Star political reporter Steve Kraske contributed to this report.
To reach Lisa Gutierrez, features reporter, call (816) 234-4987 or send e-mail to lgutierrez@kcstar.com.
WITH MRS. HEINZ
LMAO, THAT IS A HILARIOUS PICTURE.
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