06/02/2002
The Washington Post

Copyright 2002, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved
Teresa Heinz is getting up a full head of rage while her husband, Sen.
John Kerry, fidgets.
They are in the living room of their Georgetown home, where Heinz has
lived ever since her late first husband, John Heinz, came to Washington
in 1971 as a Republican congressman from Pennsylvania. In the front
entrance, the first things a visitor sees are two framed photos of
Teresa Heinz cuddled with tall, smiling men with big heads of brown
hair: In one is John Kerry, in the other John Heinz.
She still calls John Heinz "my husband" and doesn't always correct
herself "my late husband" even when Kerry is around. She still
wears the blue sapphire engagement ring that Heinz gave her.
But John Heinz's enduring presence in Teresa's life is best revealed
when someone slights his memory. Which, at least indirectly, is why she
and Kerry are now in mid bicker.
"That guy does not deserve diplomacy," says Heinz. She is referring to
Sen. Rick Santorum, the Pennsylvania Republican who offended her in 1994
during his campaign for John Heinz's old Senate seat. She won't
elaborate on what Santorum said to earn her enmity, only that she won't
speak to him again.
"He's changed," Kerry mumbles, trying to keep this from becoming an
on the record spectacle. The Massachusetts Democrat tries to add that he
gets along with his colleague, but Heinz interrupts. "Sweetie, I know,"
Kerry says, talking over her, "I'm just saying . . ."
He exhales a long, loud sigh.
Just a few minutes earlier, Kerry, 58, was saying how much he admires
his wife's candor. And Heinz, 63, was saying that while she can be
opinionated, she can also be tactful. But sometimes she can't help
herself, especially when the matter involves John Heinz, who was killed
in a plane crash in 1991.
Every time Heinz raises her voice, Kerry tries to play down his wife's
agitation, which only inflames her more. A Yankee stoic, he gently
suggests that his wife and Santorum get together.
"No, I don't want to get together with him, John," she snaps. "I don't
have to do certain things."
"Well."
"Okay? I don't have to be that politic."
Heinz speaks in a high, breathy voice and sharply accented English
she grew up in colonial Mozambique, where her first language was
Portuguese.
In 1995 she married Kerry and today, they are perhaps America's most
compelling political couple not named Clinton or Bush.
Their story packs all the qualities that captivate Washington money,
romance and ambition with the bonus of mingling the big legacy of one
senator with the big plans of another. The Heinz Kerry marriage is a
delicate merging of public families, large profiles and political
missions. It is a story that belies the shorthand of so much Washington
narrative, a union of shared grief, hard work, frequent tensions and,
ultimately, of love that filled mutual voids during desolate patches of
their adulthoods.
Kerry officially says he is undecided on whether he'll run for president
in 2004. But he's acting like a candidate raising money, careening to
Jefferson Jackson dinners, attending picnics in Iowa. Friends and
colleagues say the once desperate edges of Kerry's ambition have been
smoothed by age, experience, stature and the settled domestic life that
had eluded him for much of his Senate career.
But there remains a base line reserve to Kerry that can leave him
difficult to embrace. He is dismissive on matters self analytic and has
a politician's bent for evading dicey matters or framing them in tidy
certainties.
Part of Heinz's charm is that she has no patience for this. When Kerry
is asked about the nightmares that haunted his sleep for years after he
returned from Vietnam, he shrugs. "I don't think I've had a nightmare in
a long time," he says. But then Heinz begins to mimic Kerry having a
Vietnam nightmare.
"Down! Down, down!" she yells, patting her hands down on her auburn
hair.
"I haven't gotten slapped yet," she says. "But there were times when I
thought I might get throttled."
Kerry quivers his right foot and steers the discussion to the counseling
programs he has supported for Vietnam veterans. Asked if he has been in
therapy himself, he non answers. "It doesn't bother me anymore, I just
go back to sleep."
Heinz presses him. "Not therapy for the dreams, therapy for the angst,"
she says, and looks quizzically at him, awaiting an answer. Kerry shakes
his head "No." This is not your father's political couple, though you
wonder, at this moment, if Kerry wishes it were.
"Barbara Walters time," Kerry says when he is asked about an observation
from Heinz that the "shells" around him have softened in recent years.
Nor does he relish the personal issues that a presidential run
highlights, "the kind of crap that's so light and trivial."
And yet, despite a nasty case of laryngitis, Kerry responds to every
question he is asked. It's a balance, he says, between keeping some
things private and helping people get to know him.
"I keep thinking of [Winslow] Homer watercolors," Heinz exclaims,
jumping in. She spins a notion of how politics is driven by fast
decisions, black and white perceptions and the "immediacy of pictures."
In fact, she says, political characters comprise the "nuance of a Homer
watercolor," better animated in a palette of grays and beiges than in
black and white.
Kerry checks his watch and dashes off to a Senate vote. He kisses his
wife on the forehead as he leaves, and she calls after him to take his
lozenges.
Path to Glory
Until recently, Kerry has been largely confined to a position of
Washington otherness the "other" senator from Massachusetts, the
"other" Senator Kerry (no second "e"). His highest profile triumphs have
come on complex, grueling investigations of the Bank of Credit and
Commerce (BCCI) and whether there were still POWs in Vietnam. Over his
18 year Senate career, Kerry has become an increasingly savvy legislator
and a go to Dem in such timely areas as the environment and
international terrorism the subject of a book he wrote in 1997.
Kerry is classically drawn as How a Senator Should Look: He is 6 feet 4
and slim with a helmet of brownish silver hair, high and knobby
cheekbones and a surgically enhanced chin not cosmetic surgery,
contrary to speculation. (The operation, says Kerry press secretary
David Wade, was to correct "a malocclusion," a bad bite that caused a
clicking in his jaw.)
The second of four children, John Forbes Kerry was born in Colorado, the
son of an Army pilot who later worked for the Foreign Service across
Europe. At St. Paul's School in New Hampshire, Kerry's classmates recall
a driven student who was thrilled even obsessed with the idea that
he shared initials with his political idol, JFK. He graduated from Yale
and volunteered for the Navy during Vietnam. For his service, he was
awarded a Silver Star, a Bronze Star and three Purple Hearts.
Kerry has always been at his best in unsettled, improvisational
settings, like the jungle warfare of Vietnam, the Don Imus radio show or
the pickup ice hockey games he plays in at the Fort Dupont rink in
Anacostia. There he is "John," not "Senator," profane and earthy, his
guard down, his Boston accent more pronounced. After one shift, an
exhausted Kerry skates off the ice and offers this early morning
rejoinder to no one in particular: "It's time to barf!"
Being the junior senator to Ted Kennedy and, before that, the lieutenant
governor to Michael Dukakis is not a re{acute}sume{acute} that will
thrill swing voters. But Kerry's aides duly tout his mainstream bona
fides: his membership in centrist Democratic groups, his love of
hunting, the four years he spent as a prosecutor, his close friendship
with Sen. John McCain and his defeat of popular Republican governor
William Weld in the 1996 Senate race.
But Kerry's ace credential is Vietnam. His combat heroism could spring
him from liberal pigeonholes, just as his dissent has long endeared him
to a generation of antiwar activists the kind who still vote in
Democratic primaries.
Kerry commanded a Navy "Swift Boat" that patrolled the Mekong delta. His
crew recalls Kerry as brainy and extremely aggressive, "a good leader
and a bit of a hard charger," says Del Sandusky from Elgin, Ill.
Two years after Kerry returned to the United States, he appeared before
Sen. William Fulbright's Foreign Relations Committee in 1971. "How do
you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam?" Kerry said in the
speech's enduring sound bite. "How do you ask a man to be the last man
to die for a mistake?" After Kerry spoke, committee member Claiborne
Pell (D R.I.) expressed his hope that the young man would return to the
Senate one day as a member.
In his political career, Kerry has been hampered by an air of
self seriousness. He speaks in lecturing cadences and slopes his long
face downward when he's addressing someone. "My dad has a knack for
coming off as stiff and insincere," says daughter Vanessa Kerry, 25, who
says he is anything but. "Sometimes I see him speaking in that uptight
way that he does and I think, who is this guy?"
John Kerry is not a congenital backslapper. To compensate, he can seem
like he's play acting the role of ebullient pol. In a series of
interviews this spring, Kerry repeats the same lines, same stories, same
observations not uncommon for a politician but to do so with the
same person, within a few days of each other, suggests a mode of rote
showmanship.
He has always had difficulty with the political art of shrouding
ambition in nonchalance. He has been dubbed "Liveshot" by some in the
Boston press for his zealous pursuit of TV cameras. As Kerry prepares
for 2004, he could be suspect, oddly enough, because many people assume
it's something he has always wanted to do. This is a peculiar stigma,
given his profession, but one that affixed itself to Kerry decades ago.
In a "60 Minutes" report on Kerry's leadership of Vietnam Veterans
Against the War in 1971, Morley Safer asked him if he wanted to be
president. Kerry, who said no, was 27.
On a recent afternoon, Kerry was in his Russell Building office, sitting
on a wing chair with his legs crossed next to a fireplace. The office is
decorated with a watercolor painted by Ted Kennedy and framed $5 and $1
bills that Eugene McCarthy contributed to his first campaign. Kerry's
computer screen is filled with a smiling photo of . . . John Kerry.
Asked about the perception that he desperately wants to be president,
Kerry shakes his big head. If he wanted to be president so badly, Kerry
wonders testily, then why is he the only Democrat in his Senate class
who has not run?
"Sometimes in the past, I was a little bit defensive about" wanting to
be president, he says. "Al Gore ran in 1988. Do people throw that at Al
Gore? He ran in 1988, I didn't. He's run four times for national office,
I haven't run once."
He ticks off a list of other Senate Democrats who have run for
president: Tom Harkin, Bob Kerrey ("and Bob Kerrey came to the Senate
after me"), Paul Simon. "Jay Rockefeller went out and explored it.
"But I said no. I said no."
Lost Love
"If you interviewed 100 senators, you could get most of them to admit to
wanting to be president," says longtime Senate staffer Cliff Shannon,
who includes in that group his boss for 15 years, H. John Heinz III.
John Heinz was born in Pittsburgh and raised in San Francisco, the only
child of parents who divorced when he was 3. He graduated from Yale and,
between his first and second years at Harvard Business School, went to
work at a bank in Geneva, with an eye to one day working for the food
empire that his great grandfather founded in 1869. There he met the
daughter of a Portuguese doctor, Maria Teresa Thierstein
Simoes Ferreira, who was attending the Interpreters School of the
University of Geneva. (She is fluent in five languages.) They were
married in 1966, lived in Pittsburgh and moved to Washington when Heinz
was elected to Congress in 1971.
John Heinz would become the most popular politician in Pennsylvania, a
centrist Republican who won six elections for the House and Senate
between 1971 and 1988. His aides had begun holding events around the
country to stoke his national profile. He never mentioned his
presidential aspirations to Teresa. Others did, though, and her stock
response was "Over my dead body."
A presidential campaign would only disrupt her desire for a semi normal
family life. She was more engaged in issues than many Senate spouses,
but she viewed her role primarily as a wife and mother. By most
accounts, John and Teresa Heinz had a devoted marriage, although it was
not without difficulty.
Charming, driven and impatient, John Heinz had a knack for applying the
pointed questioning style that he honed in Senate hearing rooms to his
home life. He would grill his wife about the food she was cooking, his
three boys about school, Social Security, whatever came up at the dinner
table. Teresa would jump in. "I would say, 'Jack, this is your family.
We're just stupid. We're just normal. We don't know.' "
John and Teresa Heinz worked hard at their marriage and grew closer over
time. They were married 25 years. "It's a beautiful time of a marriage,"
she says. "The things that used to rattle you and make you upset all of
a sudden become endearing. And you never knew it could happen." They
were starting to think about grandchildren.
"And then, whoa, it's gone," she whispers. "That was so unkind. That was
so unkind."
One second, she was a Senate wife, downstairs in her Georgetown home, in
the den where the kids used to play. She got a phone call and learned
that John Heinz's plane had collided with a helicopter over a Lower
Merion, Pa., schoolyard.
Suddenly, she was political widow, principal heir to a
half billion dollar fortune, and head of the billion dollar Howard Heinz
endowments.
She was awash in logistics, details and boxes full of minutiae whose
previous master was now interred in the Heinz family mausoleum in
Pittsburgh. Republicans in Pennsylvania were urging her to take over
John Heinz's vacated Senate seat. She almost did, but it was too soon,
and there was too much else to do.
She was zooming through her life in a manic fog. A year later, when the
logistics thinned, the magnitude of her loss came pouring in. Heinz was
fighting with her boys, particularly the youngest, Christopher. He was
the closest of the three to his father. "If you wish that I was dead
instead of your father, that's quite normal and don't feel guilty about
it," Teresa Heinz recalled saying to him. "But just don't make me pay
the price for it." (Christopher Heinz, now 29, declined to comment.)
She saw a psychiatrist who prescribed Prozac, one pill a day. It eased
the paralysis, she says, not the sadness. She began devoting much of her
time, energy and money to issues that John Heinz held dear in the
Senate. In a sense, Teresa says, keeping John Heinz's issues alive was a
way to keep the senator alive.
Pittsburgh Mayor Tom Murphy calls her "Saint Teresa" for her charitable
work, much of which was concentrated in that city. She has become one of
the nation's foremost philanthropists, able to spin unscripted policy
yarns on the environment, women's health issues, pension planning and
other causes the Heinz foundation has taken on.
Teresa Heinz knew, however, that she did not want to be alone. "I think
because she had such a wonderful relationship with Jack, it allowed her
to fall in love again," says her friend Wren Wirth, the wife of former
senator Tim Wirth (D Colo.). Teresa first met John Kerry at a Washington
Earth Day event in 1990. They were introduced by John Heinz, who served
with Kerry on the Senate Banking Committee. They were friends in the way
that everyone in the Senate is a good friend, but they were more cordial
than close.
Kerry had been unhappily single for most of his time in Washington. His
election to the Senate in 1984 came two years after his separation from
his wife, Julia Thorne. They were separated six years and divorced in
1988.
His separation and divorce were "awful in every regard," Kerry says. He
had two young daughters, Alex and Vanessa. He spent hours on the phone
helping them with homework. He spent every weekend in Boston. "Trying to
make it all work, trying to be a senator, trying to be a father, trying
to hold those pieces together, I found challenging."
Kerry had been a prodigious but reluctant dater, linked in gossip
columns to many women, often much younger. He hated the scrutiny. "If
you have one date, and you go to a restaurant, and somebody sees you,
boom, you're going out," Kerry says. "There's no early test." He became
a "Senate hermit."
Then came Teresa Heinz. "There was a real void in John's life," says
Bruce Droste, a close friend. "He was a lonely person. She was a lonely
person, too."
Kerry renewed his acquaintance with Heinz at the Earth Summit in Rio de
Janeiro in 1992. They met again at a Washington dinner party a few
months later and, after a long conversation, Kerry invited her on a walk
to the Mall that ended at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Kerry and Heinz began dating late in 1993 and announced their engagement
in November 1994. They lived together four months and married on May 26,
1995, on the Nantucket estate where Teresa and John Heinz used to spend
their summers. Heinz was escorted down the aisle by her three sons, met
by Kerry and his daughters on the porch.
Party of Three
There was family friction. It centered particularly on Teresa Heinz and
the Kerry daughters. Little dust ups Alex or Vanessa calling after
Teresa's bedtime, showing up unannounced when there was company would
escalate. The macro issue was that all parties expected to be Kerry's
first priority. He would always drop everything for Alex and Vanessa who
were 18 and 21 at the time of the marriage. But if Heinz expected
something from Kerry and didn't get it, she would become wounded.
"I'm a real needy person," Heinz says, "and that's because of loss. . .
. It's like when you say to a child you're going to do something and you
don't, they're very threatened. For me, it's a loss."
Several of Heinz's intimates have died in crashes: Her husband, her
sister (at 19), her grandmother and godfather. She lost her father and
John Heinz's father within four years of her husband's death. Teresa
Heinz always learned the news by phone and, it seemed, when she was
alone. As she reflects on her life in her O Street NW home, the phones
ring constantly, an unnerving background echo to the grief she is
discussing.
Heinz frequently invokes her repeated disappointments. "It's hard," she
says, referring to her relationships with Kerry's daughters. "When they
want their father, they want their father, same as I want their father
when I want their father, because I don't have much."
Family sources say that Kerry often felt uncomfortable in the middle of
these disputes. All parties point out that such tensions are normal in
such family mergers. "We're not trying to play Ozzie and Harriet or
something," John Kerry says.
"I still think everyone is still finding their own comfort with one
another," says David Thorne, Kerry's close friend and the twin brother
of his first wife. "You have a lot of strong willed, strong minded
people trying to reach some combination with each other."
Vanessa and Alex have grown close to Heinz's sons, Chris, Andre and John
Heinz IV. "Strong characters sometimes, you know, adjust at different
rates, and in different ways," Kerry says. "I think the family and the
kids are very affectionate with one another."
Yes, they have all "grown" as a family, Heinz says, but she won't abide
explanations that are too clean. "Like everything else, you go forward
two steps, you go backward one," she says.
Heinz was reluctant to embrace parts of her new husband's life. Her
identity stayed rooted in the Heinz family, foundation and company. She
never considered taking the name "Kerry," never cast a vote for John
Kerry (she remains registered, as a Republican, in Pittsburgh) and still
spends much of her time in the four homes she shared with John Heinz in
Washington, Idaho, Nantucket and Pittsburgh. They are all adorned with
multiple photos of John Heinz, whom she still calls "the love of my
life," and their telephone numbers contain the digits "57," the
traditional number of Heinz food varieties. (Heinz and Kerry own a
mansion together on Boston's Beacon Hill.)
"The cliche is that time heals everything," says David Garth, the media
consultant who was a friend of John Heinz and remains close to Teresa.
"But that doesn't seem entirely true in this case."
Kerry is gracious about John Heinz's prominence in his marriage. He lets
out a quick, exasperated laugh when he is asked about it, and he
stammers out his answer. "I just feel, just sort of comfortable," he
says. "It's okay, it's not a . . ." He stops mid sentence and talks
about how he loves the Heinz boys, how they should be comfortable in the
home they grew up in. "I'm not trying to come in and replace that
memory," he says.
Teresa Heinz says Kerry knew what he was getting when he married her. "I
am sentimental, loyal," she says. "I love my husband" she means John
Heinz "I am in love with my husband, and I have three kids." Kerry
has plenty for himself, she says. He has his daughters, his mother,
three siblings, dozens of cousins. "When I go to Boston, he has family
and friends and everything," she says. "I have to make everything up.
He's got all his classmates he went to school with, they're all in
America. I have no classmates. I have no cousins."
The shared life of Kerry and Heinz is an ongoing and delicate balance
between past and present. It made for some uneasy scenes. In January
1997, Kerry and Heinz hosted a reception for a group of Kerry supporters
and campaign workers, many of them in town for the second Clinton
inauguration. The reception drew more people than expected and Heinz was
furious, according to two staffers who were present. When the guests
left, she vowed to Kerry that they would not hold such a reception
again. Kerry tried to calm her, saying that inviting people to their
home was part of the political process.
"This isn't your house, John," she said, according to a former staffer
who heard the discussion. "This is my house."
Neither Kerry nor Heinz say they can recall the exchange, and Kerry
points out that they have held several political events at their home in
recent years, often at his wife's initiative.
The Kerry Heinz marriage has invited crude assumptions from the outset.
The most cynical is that he needs the fortune she inherited from John
Heinz to be president. To that, Kerry says he won't spend any Heinz
money on a campaign and Heinz says she won't make it available
unless, in her words, an opponent engages in "character assassination"
against her or Kerry. As an example, Kerry says that if he is attacked
in the way that McCain was attacked by George W. Bush before the South
Carolina Republican primary in 2000, he would not hesitate to tap "other
resources."
The questions about Teresa Heinz's fortune obscures a recurring
observation among people close to Kerry: that she has been fundamentally
good for him. "My dad's basal rate is much slower, calmer and more
peaceful than it used to be," says Vanessa Kerry, a Harvard Medical
School student who uses terms like "basal rate" when talking about a
person's constitution. She ascribes much of this to her stepmother, whom
she, while acknowledging past strains, calls "an extraordinary woman."
Friends of Kerry say that Heinz has kept him on edge, a necessary
function as he can be prone to a kind of mental cruise control. "John
needs a kind of tension to be at his best," says Thomas Vallely, a
Vietnam veteran and close Kerry friend. "Part of him needs the high wire
act."
The context of Vallely's observation is Kerry in politics and, to a
lesser extent, warfare. But it could just as easily apply to his life
with Heinz.
"They have a relationship that makes me like and respect John more,"
says one former Kerry aide who has been with the couple on several
occasions. With Heinz, Kerry chose a woman who challenges him, who
nurtures his less developed sides. "She's warm, a little soulful and
pretty high maintenance," the aide says. "And you don't have to be
around Teresa much to know that she defines a lot of who she is by what
she's lost."
Once every two or three months, Heinz will retreat to Idaho or Arizona
where she likes to "collapse for a week," by herself. Kerry, who faces
no serious opposition for reelection this year, has assumed a vigorous
fundraising regimen: His $3.2 million war chest exceeds that of any
other Democratic presidential aspirant. On average, Heinz says, she and
Kerry are together two or three nights a week, and they set aside one
weekend every month to "do nothing" together.
Kerry has come to look to Heinz for what one friend calls the "emotional
catharsis" for Vietnam. She provides a place to soften the memories that
had calcified beneath his public skin. A few weeks ago, Kerry asked
Heinz to come with him to see the Vietnam War film "We Were Soldiers."
She said no at first, but agreed to go after he said it would mean a lot
to him.
They went to a theater on Boston's Tremont Street early on a Sunday
evening. Heinz cried as she hadn't in a long time, especially during the
scenes where children and wives learned that their fathers and husbands
had died. She sobbed loud and hard, while Kerry sat upright next to her,
crying quietly.
Over two long interviews, Teresa Heinz is by turns effusive and harsh,
warm and slightly bitter, solemn and melodramatic. And she is always,
unfailingly, smart, original and provocative. She hits on the following
things: the excessive drinking of a Massachusetts politician, the
miscarriage suffered by one senator's wife, her own miscarriage, and the
Boston TV reporter who is an "unhappy, lonely man." She speaks of how
her oldest son, John IV, started "hating her" two years ago, when his
daughter was born. (He declined to comment.) She also talks about how
shy she is.
You wonder how Teresa Heinz's "shyness" would play in the blitz of a
presidential campaign, and how the relative peace that Kerry and Heinz
have achieved would be sustained in such a pressured environment.
Kerry says his wife is a huge campaign asset, someone who "raises things
up a little bit," who brings freshness to the dialogue.
Some aides worry that her bluntness could become a problem, though they
won't say it for attribution. The topic of how to "handle Teresa" has
been raised in several conversations within Kerry's political circle,
the aides say, including at least one discussion where Kerry was
present. The conclusion is that it would be futile to try.
Heinz says as much. She has no intention of subverting her hard won
wisdom to the on message orthodoxies of a campaign. "I don't want to be
perfect, I want to be engaged," she says. "But that makes a lot of
people uncomfortable."
Teresa's Turn
The bright face of John Heinz smiled down onto a cozy gathering of his
family and friends. He filled a big video screen at the Heinz Awards at
the Folger Theatre, the signature event of the Heinz family foundation's
year.
Teresa Heinz, who spends hours each year on the ceremony's smallest
details, presents the five $250,000 awards and is the night's featured
speaker. She gulps water and tries not to cry. She speaks in a small,
mumbly voice. In a 2 1/2 hour ceremony, there is no mention of Kerry,
who is sitting slightly hunched in the second row, separate from the
rest of the family. He says he always enjoys the evening. "It doesn't
threaten me," he says later. "I'm lucky enough to be alive and able to
enjoy it."
When Teresa Heinz is asked if such an elaborate tribute to her first
husband might be difficult for the second, she shrugs, as if the
question has never crossed her mind. "No, he's a tall guy, he's gotten
enough attention," she says of Kerry. "Just when you love one child, you
love your next child. You might have a predilection for one because you
get along better, but you'd give your life for any of them."
The scene is a watercolor that distills the awkward novelty of how three
Washington lives have aligned. Teresa Heinz walks away from the stage as
the program concludes and Kerry slaps triceps several feet away.
Heinz is engulfed by her children and by old family friends who
congratulate her on a perfect tribute to her husband. She squeezes
hands, gives long hugs, and soaks in the assurance that the legacy of
John Heinz abides in the room, and in the world, just as John Kerry is
declared "our next president" by a guest waiting to shake his hand.