Teresa Heinz Answers Her Critics
	The ex-Republican talks about attacks by members of her former party
	By CATHY BOOTH THOMAS

Posted Tuesday, February 3, 2004
With John Kerry's meteoric rise in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republicans swiveled their guns last week and began firing not only at Kerry, but also at his wife. Billionaire babe Teresa Heinz — that's still her name legally — who married into the Heinz 57 fortune and has spent the last decade as a privileged Republican handing out millions to environmental and educational causes, suddenly finds herself the target of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, the National Review and other G.O.P. outlets. Even the supposedly liberal press can't resist a shot or two.

Conservative attack dog Coulter, in a syndicated column posted on anncoulter.com (also touted on rushlimbaugh.com), called Kerry "a cad and a gigolo" whose "primary occupation has been stalking lonely heiresses" who then apparently turn him into "a poodle" too weak to stand up for himself. Last week on a campaign swing through New Mexico the poodle's wife talked to TIME about the attacks from her former partymates:

• Coulter's jabs: "Well, she has to make a living. But personally, I don't care about people like that. She's not important to the fate of the world. I'm more concerned about cleaning up our environment, working on AIDS in Africa, helping the future for my grandchild. That's what I care about."

• When both of her husbands wanted to run for president, her response was "over my dead body". The prospect of being First Lady was, she said, "worse than going to a Carmelite convent." So why the change? "I was terrified at first. I wasn't ready," she says. But after Heinz died abruptly in an airplane accident, and as friends got sick and died, she says, "You realize life really is short. John was ready and I really couldn't be a barrier to that. The issues were important and he thought he could solve some of them. I thought, it's just really selfish on my part not to let him do it."

• She vowed she’d never "cross the aisle", from Republican to Democrat, for her husband but she did just that last January. Why? She says she "lingered for years" as a Republican, hoping the party would come back to the themes of fiscal responsibility and social progress — ideas she says her "late husband" (yes, he pops up a lot in the conversation) embodied in his political career. "I was thinking of becoming an Independent because I'm not a particularly partisan person. But I could no longer stay a Republican because of what they did to Max Cleland. I was embarrassed," she says. The senator from Georgia, who lost three limbs in Vietnam, went down in defeat in 2002 after his Republican opponent attacked his patriotism for refusing to back the Homeland Security Act.

• As for the attacks on her "radical pet projects" like Environmental Defense Inc., (see Christopher Horner on www.nationalreview.com), she is practically gleeful. "Good!" she exclaims. "They can attack Environmental Defense but they should know that the group briefed Bush for two hours at the beginning of his administration. And Bush Sr. himself named me as delegate to the Rio conference [the world summit on sustainable development]." Then she sniffs. "These people don't have principles."

• And what of the news that Ken Lay, the former Enron chairman attacked by her husband on the campaign trail, had served as a trustee for one of her foundations (Bernardo Issel on www.NonprofitWatch.org) even after the firm went into bankruptcy? "Ken Lay and Paul O'Neill (another trustee) both believed in global climate change. Ken Lay was doing some interesting things in his company about alternative energy policies," she explains, then she goes on defend her husband's attack too. "My husband criticized Enron absolutely for their practices. I criticize categorically the fact that companies have been allowed to do this and have gotten off scott-free. That's wrong." She says Lay left his trustee's job "a while ago".

	Premium Content