Reading notes

I knew the moment she came into widespread public view that I liked Teresa Heinz Kerry. As I learn more about her, that appreciation deepens. Judith writes a lengthy and fascinating article about Teresa’s life in The New Yorker:

Kati Marton, the author of “Hidden Power,” a study of modern Presidential couples (her husband, Richard Holbrooke, advises Kerry on foreign policy), believes that, whatever her liabilities as a candidate’s wife, “Teresa would be an enormous asset” as the country’s second foreign-born First Lady. … “At a time in American history when we have alienated so much of the world, Teresa, with her languages and her cultivation, could perform a real service as an envoy in a way that Jackie Kennedy or Hillary did,” Marton says. …

Yes, yes, that was one of my first thoughts, too.

Maria Teresa Thierstein Simões-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Lourenço Marques on October 5, 1938. …

[Her father, a Portuguese-born oncologist] emigrated to Mozambique about the time Salazar seized power, and, having married a young woman from Lourenço Marques’s cliquish British colony, set up a practice in Manjacaze, northeast of the capital — an inland village that was a center of cashew-nut cultivation. …

[Irene] Thierstein [Teresa’s mother] was born in Mozambique to a couple who had immigrated from South Africa at the time of the Boer War. Her father was the scion of a Swiss-German family living on Malta, and her mother was the half-French, half-Italian daughter of an Alexandrian shipowner who traded with Russia during the Crimean War.

This multi-ethnic heritage fascinates me. How wonderful!

[Son Andre] calls Kerry his mother’s “kindred spirit,” though he adds that, while “John has a lot going on upstairs — he is thinking all the time, parallel processing — Mom is very intuitive. At the end of the day, she listens to her gut, and that’s why she is such a conundrum.” …

I’m desperate for a leader of whom it can be said “he is thinking all the time, parallel processing,” and if we can get intuitive input from Teresa as well, then we’re hugely better off, for now we have neither.

[via Melanie]