I read this a long time ago, and I thought Joe Klein got it mostly right on their marriage. There is definitely a messiness to John and Teresa, like most REAL marriages. But I think they're in love, and will stay together forever. I will say, though, that I am uncomfortable with her remarks about this being his first marriage, when in fact he had been married and divorced before, having two kids. And since I was born and raised Catholic, I feel I have the moral authority to say she was out of line for saying such an odd thing. One more example of how the Catholic Church forces their flock to do the wrong thing.
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/021202fa_fact1The notion that John Kerry married Teresa Heinz for political reasons—specifically, to use her money to run for President—is put to rest within nanoseconds of meeting her: this is a flagrantly impolitic human being. The marriage is bursting with strong emotions and ill-concealed conflicts, and much too complicated for the facile armchair psychologizing that goes on during a Presidential campaign. It is not the sort of relationship that an ambitious politician, in his right mind, would want; it is likely to be a distraction for the press corps, an easy way to obscure the campaign's "message." One can only conclude, it must be love.
Heinz will not be censored. "John went on too long," she said the day I met her, after watching her husband deliver his Iraq speech in the Senate Chamber on C-SPAN. "But that's what happens when he starts thinking about history."
But Heinz's descriptions of the courtship with Kerry, which began when they were both delegates to the 1992 Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, were cautious and dispassionate. She seemed to be trying out a new, more politic story line; she had clearly been rehearsed, but she was unrehearsable. She went to Mass with Kerry in Rio, she recalled, and heard him singing in Portuguese. "I found that interesting," she said. (He explained that he knew some Italian and had been faking it.) They were joined for dinner by Senators Frank Lautenberg and Larry Pressler, neither of whom is known as a barrel of laughs, but the meal somehow turned out to be riotous fun. They spent the evening, she said, mocking the inanities of public life.
Months later, in Washington, there was another dinner, and Kerry offered to drive her home. They stopped at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial; he showed her the names of his friends on the granite wall. When he dropped her off in Georgetown, he didn't accompany her to the door, which irked her. (Kerry claims that he was double-parked, with a bus coming up behind him.) "I thought he was interesting, but . . . a specimen who'd been out in the woods a long time," she said, in her softly accented English. "He was like having a pet wolf who comes in and you say, 'Yeh, cute.' " She made a face and pulled away. "I need to teach him a couple of things. I think many people who get married late in life and who haven't been married have adjustment problems." (Several times, Heinz noted that Kerry "had never been married," an odd elision, which one friend attributed to her Catholicism: "She is not comfortable with the fact that he was married and divorced.")
Heinz's eccentricities and her awkward candor are indeed an easy target, but they are also misleading, according to friends, who are vehement in their support of the marriage. "She is incredibly loving and involved in his life," says former Senator Tim Wirth, who, with his wife, Wren, has been among Heinz's closest friends. "She won't let him get away with the things he used to keep to himself. She forces him to talk, to express emotions. This has been terrific for him."
Heinz is five years older than Kerry, and there is a motherly quality to her descriptions of him: "John has an elegant mind. His thinking is not brutish. He really likes to take his time, talk things through, to deliberate." In fact, his interests in the world are "insatiable," she said. "We see a beautiful sunset and he says, 'I really want to know how to paint that.' He's learning the classical guitar, he's learning windsurfing, he's learning sky-whatever-it-is, and I say, 'You got married, remember. What else do you want to learn?' "
I asked her once more about their courtship. "I think what happens when you're older and you've had a relationship like the one I'd had"—she was referring to her twenty-five years with John Heinz—"your measurements aren't quite the same. You find the things that are comfortable, like old shoes. Talking about a lot of issues, that was comfortable. It was nice to do that again. There were other things that were familiar, like languages, like having lived in Europe. . . . And then you get to the point where you like somebody so much that when you're not with him you miss him. We were careful. I certainly was careful. It's not like you're eighteen and it's ahhh."
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