Let Teresa's privacy reign
The law says that wives can file separate tax returns, but the culture says they cannot have lives separate from the men they marry.
No sooner had Senator John F. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, rightly released his own tax returns, then political rivals of the Massachusetts Democrat began demanding that his wife release hers.
Why should Teresa Heinz Kerry make her personal tax returns public? She is not running for elective office; her husband is. What has her wealth or her role as head of the $1.3 billion Heinz family philanthropies got to do with his bid for the White House?
The answer is nothing, but that will not silence the cynics who choose to equate preserving one's privacy with hiding something.
As every couple knows, family finances are an idiosyncratic mix of paychecks and checking accounts -- his, hers, ours. One household commingles all the income; another divides it up according to their mortgage, his mad money, and her secret stash. Still others maintain separate accounts and divide every expense straight down the middle.
Political marriages are not free to be quite so ad hoc in their money management, nor should they be. But just because a husband and wife live under one roof (or, in the case of the Kerrys, four roofs) does not mean that each does not have a right to a separate and distinct life.
It is more than a little difficult to deny Heinz Kerry's individuality. No one's better half, she is her own best self. When her first husband, Republican Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, died in 1991, she stepped in to run the 63-year-old Heinz Endowments. She continues to oversee the award of millions of dollars in annual grants to environmental, education, and cultural programs.
The sinister notion underlying demands for Heinz Kerry to tell all -- that she is clandestinely funneling her half-billion-dollar fortune into her spouse's campaign coffers -- ignores the realities of federal financial-disclosure laws. The law prohibits Heinz Kerry from contributing more than the $2,000 she has now to her husband's campaign. When Kerry secured a mortgage on the Boston town house they share in Louisburg Square, he borrowed against only the half of it he could claim to own. That he lives well, far better than he could afford to live on his own, might be a matter of great annoyance to Kerry's detractors, but his wife's wealth is no more their business than is the wealth of George W. Bush's parents.
Federal law prohibits charitable foundations from engaging in partisan activity, so any suspicion that Heinz Kerry might use the resources of the family philanthropies to advance her husband's candidacy is without basis. The Heinz Endowments issues annual reports, and public filings open for anyone to read.
Financial-disclosure laws were not nearly so tight 20 years ago when Democratic vice presidential nominee Geraldine Ferraro was forced to release her husband's tax returns, as well as her own. They filed separately, but she had taken campaign loans from him; he had named her a partner in one of his business enterprises. There was a legitimate public interest in knowing where their finances intersected.
Today's financial-disclosure laws are designed to expose a politician's potential conflicts of interest; they were not enacted to satisfy idle curiosity about the rich and famous, and that is the real source of the preoccupation with Teresa's purse. It isn't enough to see the Architectural Digest layout of her Idaho hideaway or the photographs of her Beacon Hill home, her Georgetown mansion, or her Nantucket cottage. The public feels entitled to see it all.
If John Kerry should win the presidency in November, there will be a thoroughly modern first lady in the White House. Heinz Kerry has said she has no intention of stepping away from the philanthropic work she has done for more than a dozen years. Take her word for it; she has no intention of releasing her tax returns.
Eileen McNamara is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at mcnamara@globe.com. 
