Privacy of Wife's fortune casts shadow over Kerry - LordOx -

True this news is a bit long for my taste.. but just skim through to pick out the more "interesting points" :) ********************************************************************************

WASHINGTON (April 24) — Now that Senator John Kerry has made his military records public, his presidential campaign is bracing for an even bigger battle over whether to disclose his wife's tax returns, a highly charged issue that pits the privacy of his wife and her children against the political exigencies of his candidacy.

But Mr. Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry — whose personal wealth, estimated at more than $500 million dollars, derives from the family fortune of her late husband — said this week that she would not release her returns because her finances were deeply entwined with those of her three adult children and she wanted to protect their privacy.

Two of her sons are active in the campaign while the third lives an intensely private life.

"What I have and what I receive is not just mine, it is also my children's, and I don't know that I have the right to make public what is theirs," Mrs. Heinz Kerry told reporters. "If I could separate it, I would have no problem."

But citing history and the demands for candidates to release information about their finances, several political analysts said disclosure seemed inevitable.

Stephen Hess, an expert in presidential politics at the Brookings Institution who worked in the Eisenhower and Nixon White Houses, said the Kerrys relinquished their claims on privacy when Mr. Kerry decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination.

"No one makes you run for president," Mr. Hess said. "If you're asking your fellow Americans to make you president, you're asking for as much power as can be bestowed." Ed Gillespie, chairman of the Republican Party, said Mrs. Heinz Kerry's finances were relevant to the campaign, especially because Mr. Kerry borrowed $6 million against the equity in a Boston town house they jointly own to keep his campaign afloat earlier in the year.

"It seems to me that that's a legitimate question," Mr. Gillespie said.

Moreover, Mrs. Heinz Kerry has said that she will dip into her personal fortune if she and her husband deem it necessary.

"In this case, there's an intermingling of her assets and his political capacity," said David R. Gergen, who worked in the Nixon, Ford, Reagan and Clinton White Houses and who urged the Clintons to release papers on their Whitewater real estate transaction.

Mr. Gergen, a professor of public service at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, said of releasing Mrs. Heinz Kerry's tax returns, "I don't think it's required, but I think it's wise."

Almost every president and nominee for president and vice president since Richard M. Nixon in 1973 has released tax returns. And almost all have filed joint returns with their spouses. The last time the release of a spouse's taxes was an issue was in 1984, when Geraldine A. Ferraro, the Democratic vice presidential nominee, initially withheld information about her husband's business dealings. She later released the personal returns of her husband, John A. Zaccaro, but not the returns of his real estate business.

Mrs. Heinz Kerry, 65, the widow of Senator John Heinz of Pennsylvania, heir to the Heinz ketchup fortune, files separately from Mr. Kerry. Mr. Kerry has disclosed his tax returns, as have President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

People who have studied personal disclosures in political campaigns agree on two points: some material, like that involving young children, is off limits, and with each presidential campaign, the standard shifts toward less privacy.

Some experts say Mrs. Heinz Kerry's tax returns fall into a gray area.

Lanny J. Davis, a lawyer here who worked on damage control in the Clinton administration and who supports Mr. Kerry's candidacy, said "post-Watergate, post-Enron, you cannot be half-transparent; if you try to be selective in what you disclose, you simply whet the appetite for what you haven't revealed."

But Mr. Davis said he was unsure whether his prescription applied to the Kerry case. "A prior marriage is involved, and there are children involved," he said. "I need to know more about what's in the returns and know what the sensitivities are before I could say what she should do."

Within the Kerry campaign, the subject is extremely delicate. No one has more influence with Mr. Kerry than his wife, and both highly value their privacy. Mr. Kerry has tried to deflect calls for the release of his wife's tax returns by directing the curious to the voluminous forms he filed as a member of the Senate, forms that he described last Sunday on "Meet the Press" as "very, very, very intrusive."

These forms show in broad strokes that his wife's wealth is mostly in trust funds, some of which she holds jointly with her sons. The amounts of assets and transactions of the trusts are listed in ranges like "$100,001 to $1 million" and "over $1 million."

The Senate disclosure forms do not include certain details, like charitable contributions and tax shelters, which would be evident from her tax returns.

Some Democrats contend that on "Meet the Press" Mr. Kerry actually left the door open for some form of releasing his wife's returns. He urged viewers to look at the Senate forms, then added: "If they're not satisfied with that, we'll see where we are."

One Democrat close to the campaign said one possible outcome could involve examination of the records by an objective third party, who would then make some kind of public report. Bill Allison, a spokesman for the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said tax returns were private because the government gets more detailed information that way. For a candidate or spouse to refuse to release the returns, Mr. Allison said, could set a dangerous precedent and lead future candidates to file returns separate from their spouses.

"Down the road, someone could use the same exception nefariously and put all their business in their wife's name and avoid disclosure that way, and soon everyone will be filing separately and that will gut the whole idea of disclosure," he said. "She has to disclose."

Disclosure has emerged as a campaign issue in part because none of the candidates have been fully forthcoming with various records.

In his 2000 campaign, Mr. Bush established a zone of privacy around details of his bout with alcohol and questions about possible use of illegal drugs. Not until he was accused this year of having been AWOL from the National Guard in the 1970's did he release some of his military records, and they did not establish whether he reported for duty.

Mr. Cheney has never released his complete medical records. Over the last quarter-century, he has had four heart attacks, including one during the recount that followed the 2000 election.

In addition, Democrats have long criticized Mr. Cheney for keeping secret the meetings between administration officials and energy lobbyists in advance of his writing the country's energy plan. The Supreme Court is to hear arguments Tuesday regarding the secrecy of the Cheney task force's work.

Mr. Kerry has been on the defensive about releasing various records, and on Tuesday his campaign began what aides called "dump week" two days after Mr. Kerry said on "Meet the Press" that his military records were available when actually they were not.

A senior Kerry adviser said the campaign had planned to stage a public release of the military records, which were uniformly positive, with much fanfare, but those plans went awry with Mr. Kerry's statement that the records were available. As a result, the adviser said, the campaign looked as though it had something to hide and was forced to release the records under pressure.

On Wednesday, the Kerry campaign put out a partial list of the lobbyists with whom Mr. Kerry has met over the last 15 years in an unsuccessful attempt to prompt Mr. Bush to do the same. And on Friday, it made available some of Mr. Kerry's medical history from the period while he was in Vietnam. But the medical records' release was carefully controlled, with the campaign insisting that only reporters traveling with Mr. Kerry — not necessarily those versed in medicine or the military — be allowed to review the records for just 30 minutes.

Michael Meehan, a campaign spokesman, said the time limit was longer than the 20 minutes the Bush campaign had given reporters to view Mr. Bush's partial medical records from the National Guard.

- Taken form AOL News and the New York Times

- LordOx -

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