April 10, 2005

Investigation

Castro cracks down as Cuba cries freedom

They once had a dream of an equal society, free education and health care in exchange for loyalty to the state. Now, 46 years on, Cuba’s communist regime lies in tatters amid increasing poverty and corruption. One day Castro will be gone — but the future could be even more frightening

Jostled in the back of an antiquated car on a tortuous ride through the Cuban countryside to avoid police checkpoints, Laura Pollan recalls the words of a song. Tapping her fingers on the worn leather seat, she begins to sing in a low voice: “We are the vanguard of the revolution, our books held high, bringing all Cuba literacy! Through valleys and mountains we carry the means to give light to truth!”

Translated roughly from Spanish, the words to this “Hymn to Literacy” lose much of their verve. But as she sings, Pollan, 56, flourishes her hands and smiles. She remains animated as she recalls how, as a 12-year-old girl, she had volunteered to join the ranks of nearly a million Cuban schoolchildren sent out into the countryside in the spring of 1961 to live with illiterate peasant families and teach them how to read and write.

The year before, Fidel Castro had vowed to the United Nations that one of the first aims of the Cuban revolution would be to make sure that every Cuban — an estimated 40% of whom were illiterate — could read and write within a year. It was something never before believed achievable in the developing world.

But less than 12 months later, tens of thousands of teenagers were marching through the streets of Havana carrying giant mock pencils to celebrate the accomplishment of this goal.

It was an achievement that caught the world’s imagination and helped define the romantic image of the revolution that had ousted the country’s military ruler, Fulgencio Batista, a dictator so brutal that he resorted, among other atrocities, to the public castration of opponents.

Pollan remembers her uniform, the lamp she carried for night-time study, thousands of which were donated by China’s communist regime, and the reading glasses the brigadistas were given to distribute to those who needed them — a donation by another communist ally, Bulgaria.

“I have great memories of that time,” says Pollan, who went on to become a teacher. “There was so much enthusiasm. The revolution was still young. It had not yet shown its true face.”

We are travelling to Havana from the central province of Villa Clara, where Pollan had been trying to visit her husband in prison. She had been refused. It was Christmas Eve and she was allowed to leave him a bag of apples and a letter. But prisoners such as her husband are permitted visitors only once every three months, if that.

To the Cuban government, her husband, Hector Maseda, is an enemy of the state. His crimes include founding Cuba’s opposition Liberal party — all opposition parties are banned — and writing articles about the explosion of sex tourism in Cuba and the history of the country’s opposition movement. These were published in magazines and websites in Europe and the US; all Cuban media is state-controlled, freedom of expression being an alien concept.

As the world’s attention was focused on the imminent invasion of Iraq in mid-March 2003, Maseda was among 75 government critics — mostly journalists, poets, independent librarians and political activists — arrested by the Cuban authorities, subjected to summary trials and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. In Maseda’s case, that was 20 years on charges amounting to sedition. It was the most severe crackdown on Cuba’s dissident movement since Castro led his guerrilla forces to victory in 1959.

Pollan stood by helpless that night as her husband was bundled out of their modest home in central Havana. Together with his typewriter and a fax machine, books were also confiscated. Among them were the works of Vaclav Havel, the playwright and former Czech president who led his country’s opposition movement until the fall of its communist regime. As he was led away, Maseda took his wife’s hand and told her: “Laura, do not feel ashamed. I am not a murderer or a thief. I have done nothing but defend my ideas.”

The rot of the Cuban revolution lies in the contrast between these two very different scenes painted by Pollan. The first: her recollection of a time of optimism, altruism and cataclysmic social change. The second: an act rooted in paranoia, stifling control and absolute determination by Castro to hold onto power at any cost.

For 46 years after Fidel Castro, the world’s longest-ruling leader, stood before the United Nations promising to transform his country into a tropical utopia, this island nation of 11m has been driven to exhaustion, and millions of them to despair, by the implacable will of its “maximum leader”. Even now, after the vow by the revolution’s ideologue Ernesto “Che” Guevara that future generations of Cubans would be “more perfect”, schoolchildren start their day with a salute and the solemn vow “Seremos como Che!” — “We will be like Che!” But what, really, has become of this generation of Che’s children and grandchildren? (Had he lived, he would now be 76.) And what is likely to become of them when his former comrade-in-arms, 77-year-old Castro, no longer holds Cuba’s reins of power?

For more than 40 years, all administrations in the US, which once occupied Cuba militarily and then dominated it as a debauched mafia playground, have tried to topple Castro. First through the bungled CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, then in a series of bizarre assassination plots, including one to plant toxic powder in Castro’s clothing. Throughout, the US has held the island in the stranglehold of an economic embargo. Despite all this, Castro has seen off nine American presidents and is determined to increase that count.

Yet in George W Bush he appears to see a more formidable foe. One reason for the roundup of political opponents such as Maseda is believed to have been speculation that countries other than Iraq accused by the state department of being “state sponsors of terrorism” could become US military targets. The threat of US invasion was portrayed as so great by the Castro regime that three weeks before Christmas, more than 1m Cuban soldiers, reservists and support teams were mobilised in a military exercise dubbed Bastion 2004. So extensive was the coverage of the simulated invasion on all state TV channels, and so pervasive the sound of military alarm sirens, that some older Cubans thought they were genuinely under attack.

For most Cubans, however, there is only one way that Castro will ever relinquish his hold on power. This is by means of what they refer to obliquely as “biology” — his death. Ever astute about his own image, the maximum leader makes light of his age, and jokes about his immortality regularly make the rounds. Like the one about the baby turtle expected to live to 100 years, which he refused as a pet on the grounds that it would “make me sad when it passed away”.

But a brief glimpse of what is likely to happen if, as seems almost certain, Castro dies while still in power came just six months ago, when he stumbled and fell after delivering a speech in the capital of Villa Clara province, Santa Clara.

Santa Clara is the holy grail of idealistic fervour for many foreign tourists piling into this dusty provincial town. It is here that Che Guevara’s remains were brought from Bolivia, where he was killed in 1967 after attempting to foment revolution in the rest of Latin America and Africa. His vast, white marble mausoleum lies on the edge of town, and it was here that Castro tripped and fell last October. The fall was the latest in a series of health scares. Although he is still capable of delivering interminable speeches, his voice has become increasingly tremulous in recent years and his hands sometimes shake, leading to speculation that he is suffering from the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. Several years ago he collapsed owing to heat exhaustion during a speech. When he finished his speech in a TV studio later that evening, he joked that he’d been “pretending to be dead to see what my burial would look like”.

But while film footage of the aftermath of his most recent fall last October was broadcast around the world, Cubans say the moment their leader began to stumble to the ground, the image on the country’s state-run television station became blurry. It was then quickly replaced by cartoons of Popeye and Bugs Bunny.

What his countrymen did not apparently see was Castro being helped into a chair as doctors danced attendance (he had fractured bones in an arm and a leg), nor the rehearsed response of Communist-party functionaries who were present raising their fists and chanting “Viva Raul!” as Castro’s brother and heir apparent, Raul Castro, was hailed. Had the fall proven fatal, he would have been anointed immediately.

Less than a mile from the mausoleum, Guillermo Farinas eases his wheelchair into the small, enclosed porch of his mother’s home and hands over a photograph of himself taken shortly after his most recent release from jail. In it he is emaciated. The scars where tubes were inserted into his stomach for force-feeding are still raw. Farinas, 42, has staged numerous hunger strikes over the past six years during prison terms meted out for opposing the government. He repeatedly yanked feeding tubes out of his stomach, vowing he’d die for his ideals. He was eventually released from jail and placed under a form of house arrest. But malnutrition has left him so weakened, he is not yet able to walk.

Farinas — like Pollan and all others identified here — realises speaking out could bring further reprisals. But all are determined that the reality behind the image carefully crafted for tourist consumption of Cuba as a sultry Caribbean isle offering sun, salsa, cigars — and, though the state denies it, cheap sex — should be widely known.

“Nobody here discounts the possibility that Castro, or Bush, could provoke hostilities between Cuba and the US,” says Farinas. “And in many ways this would suit Castro: if he dies fighting, he remains a myth. But the real danger is the apocalyptic language this regime has used for so long, planting the idea of violence in people’s minds for after he dies.”

Aside from street placards proclaiming “Socialism or death!”, Castro’s communist regime has fostered deep hatred and resentment, not least that orchestrated by the state against, and felt by, the more than 2m Cubans now living in exile. The idea that there will be a big welcome to a returning flood of exiles when Castro goes is scoffed at by most Cubans. While many older ones who remember the brutal Batista regime revere Castro — though 70% of the population was born after the revolution — most are genuinely afraid of what will come after his demise. With good reason.

Some predict if the baton is passed, as planned, from Castro to his 73-year-old brother, an even more authoritarian regime could be imposed. As head of the armed forces, which now enjoy great privilege as they control the most profitable two-thirds of the country’s struggling economy, the vested interest of Raul and his military cohorts in maintaining the status quo would be intense. Yet little of the legitimacy Fidel Castro has as the revolution’s figurehead is expected to pass to his brother. The hunched, elfin-like Raul, whose drinking is said to have left him with serious liver problems, is widely disliked — particularly among the young, who see him as a grey apparatchik.

But if Raul Castro fails to stamp his authority quickly, or dies before his brother or shortly afterwards, infighting among the Communist-party elite could lead the armed forces to step in and form the sort of military government led by General Jaruzelski in Poland in the 1980s. Says one European who is based in Havana: “The perception in Europe that there will be the equivalent of the fall of the Berlin Wall here is not how the situation is viewed by Cubans. For some, Cuba’s civil war is ongoing and they don’t rule out a second round of hostilities.”

Anachronistic as it seems, no visitor to Cuba can fail to sense that this is an island stuck in a past era. The many lumbering 1950s American Chevrolets and puttering Soviet Ladas still on the roads are one trivial sign. More potent is the sight of dozens of workers standing to attention along Havana’s vast curved corniche, the Malecon, swearing allegiance to the revolution and holding aloft documents marking them out as especially fervent party loyalists.

But the fundamental difference between Cuba and former eastern-bloc countries such as Poland, which threw off communism’s shackles 15 years ago, is not only that Cuba’s revolution was home-grown, but that it has virtually no civil society. Internal opposition, in contrast to the often-bellicose exile community, is both painfully weak and disorganised. To follow Farinas’s story and those of other government opponents is to understand not only why, but also how, this makes an eastern-European-style “velvet revolution” post-Castro highly unlikely.

Like many of those interviewed, Farinas was initially the epitome of Che Guevara’s “new man”. Raised in a revolutionary household — his father fought Batista’s forces and then served in the Belgian Congo with Guevara — he spent his youth training as a military cadet before going to Africa in 1981 to help defend Angola’s Marxist regime. There he won two distinguished-service medals and was sent on to the Soviet Union for further military training. After returning to Cuba he was discharged on medical grounds. “I believed in the revolution until my ideals were crushed blow by blow,” says Farinas.

One of the first blows was the 1980 Mariel boat lift, during which 125,000 Cubans left for Miami after Castro announced Cuba would be well rid of all those who wanted to leave. Party members were ordered to stone the houses of those leaving and denounce them as gusanos, or worms. When Hector Maseda, who was an engineer in a prestigious scientific-research facility, argued that he had better things to do, he was expelled from the party and lost his job.

The corruption Farinas says he witnessed, both while in the Soviet Union and when he started work in a Havana hospital on his return, further eroded his faith in the system. After witnessing a senior party official pilfering sheets and powdered milk donated for sick children, Farinas was sent to prison for making false accusations. He had already been kicked out of the party for speaking out publicly about an act that also appalled many of his countrymen: the 1989 execution of Arnaldo Ochoa, a popular general convicted of drug smuggling, and three other senior army officers.

It is said to have been Raul Castro, who has held the post of defence minister longer than any counterpart in history, who orchestrated the executions of four of his own senior officers because of Ochoa’s political ambitions as a rival to his brother. The act reinforced Raul’s reputation as a hardliner and consolidated his own power. He is also the second secretary of the Communist party and effectively controls the interior ministry and all state-run media.

Increasingly disillusioned, Farinas started meeting other government opponents. But each group he associated with was broken by a wave of arrests. Most recently, this included a network of small independent lending libraries set up after Castro pronounced there were no prohibited books in Cuba — even though works by most Cuban exiles, Camus, Solzhenitsyn, George Orwell and many others are banned. Some of those who ran such libraries were among the 75 arrested in the most recent crackdown. Farinas slips out of his wheelchair and drags himself upstairs on his hands and knees, to show what remains of his own small library after a similar raid; the tatty collection of Spanish cultural magazines and scientific journals do not look like a threat to state security.

Then he and others started collecting signatures in support of a referendum on changes to Cuba’s communist system. The Varela Project has been trying to exploit a clause in the Cuban constitution that allows for discussion of new laws if at least 10,000 citizens request it. So far, more than 25,000 signatures in support of the project have been collected and presented to parliament. But the request has been ignored. Dozens of the project’s organisers were among those arrested in March 2003; many were convicted on the testimony of state security agents who infiltrated the dissident movement.

This is the history of political opposition in Cuba: groups are formed, infiltrated, members arrested and accused of conspiring with the US to bring down the government, which is enough to ensure the group is discredited to many Cubans. The level of infiltration makes even those within the groups mistrustful of each other.

In recent months, a dozen of the 75 arrested, whose health was failing, have been released — partly in response, it is believed, to overtures by the left-wing Spanish government. The EU has traditionally believed more was to be gained from a more moderate policy towards Cuba than the zealousness of the US, which Castro turns to his own advantage by painting himself as a plucky David to America’s Goliath. Following the arrest of the 75 dissidents, however, relations with most EU countries, including the UK, sank so low that all diplomatic ties were severed and are only now being slowly repaired.

Among those released was Marta Beatriz Roque, a long-term opposition figure who is calling for all of the island’s diverse dissident groups to attend a “grand assembly” in Havana in May. Few believe this will be allowed to go ahead. Another of those released was Manuel Vasquez, a journalist, prizewinning poet and former editor of a Communist-party youth magazine, who believes that another reason Cuba’s opposition is so fragmented is that “everyone wants to be a leader, not a soldier”. “There is no democratic tradition here,” says Vasquez, who was held in solitary confinement for 14 months and was only released because he was found to have a potentially fatal pulmonary embolism. “People here just don’t know how to defend their rights. This dictatorship is based on control of all means of communication.

“People, especially those in Europe with a more romantic idea of Cuba, need to realise we are in danger of passing from a communist to a military dictatorship,” says Vasquez, 53, sitting outside his dingy high-rise flat. Several days later, I learn the government has issued him an exit permit to leave Cuba. He looks certain to use it. But this also underlines another problem.

Half an hour’s drive north of Santa Clara is the downtrodden town of Placetas. The sign on the door of Berta Antunez’s wooden shack marks her out as a government opponent: a crude black-and-white painting of a prisoner behind bars. Antunez’s brother Jorge Luis Garcia has been in jail for the past 14 years for, initially, criticising Cuban foreign policy. Scribbled notes to his sister smuggled out of prison and since published abroad have highlighted the appalling conditions and brutality to which prisoners of conscience are regularly subjected in Cuba.

Antunez sums up one of the main problems she sees facing Cuba as “geographical fatalism”. She says: “We are so close to freedom across the Florida Straits, many people would rather leave the island than stay and fight for a better future here. If all those who put their energy into constructing small rafts to escape put it into trying to change things here, we might have had a change of government long ago.”

Turning a blind eye to the waves of balseros, or boat people, who risk death by attempting to flee the island in flimsy craft, has been used as a safety valve to avoid explosions of social unrest. During the most recent mass exodus, in 1994, when economic hardship was at its worst following the collapse of the Soviet Union, more than 30,000 tried to reach Florida on hastily constructed rafts. After the majority were intercepted by US coastguards and returned to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay while the political implications of their admission to the US were debated, they were finally allowed to emigrate.

Rather than a flood of exiles wanting to return to Cuba once Castro goes, it is this prospect of an even greater exodus of those wanting to leave the island that has the US worried. If a successor regime allows would-be emigrants to cross
the Florida Straits unchecked, it could well be the US military that steps in to stop the flow.

The official mantra of the Cuban government is that life may be tough — owing principally, they argue, to the US embargo — but most people are content. Crime is low (police are everywhere); there are few beggars (ditto); nobody is starving (a UN report claims 17% of the population was undernourished by the end of the 1990s); and education and health care are good and free. There is little evidence of such contentment on the streets. Fifteen years after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the disappearance of the island’s indulgent sponsors in the Kremlin, Cuba’s economy is still in crisis. It has improved in recent years owing to trade deals with China, Venezuela and a growing number of European companies. But basic goods are still rationed. A family ration book allows one tube of toothpaste every three months, a bar of soap every two months, 5lb of rice, 2lb of beans, 1/2lb of coffee per person and six eggs — on an average monthly wage of less than £10. As a result, a black market flourishes and nearly everyone is forced to find unorthodox and illegal ways of surviving.

Unlike the gerontocracies that prevailed behind the Iron Curtain, however, Castro has recruited highly educated young economists into the ruling elite. Some believe they offer the best hope Cuba has of a peaceful transition to democracy. Others fear that a power struggle — between moderates who support more market-oriented reforms and hardliners who fear that too swift an opening up of the economy could lead to a Tiananmen Square-style revolt — will play into the hands of the military; Cuba has little record of compromise.

After a brief flirtation with market reforms led by moderates in the 1990s, the hardliners now hold sway. What limited private enterprise had been allowed has been severely curtailed. Cuba’s main industry is tourism, but the face of its tourist industry — like that of its leadership — is almost exclusively white. Apart from free health care and universal education, the elimination of racial discrimination has been trumpeted as one of the greatest achievements of the revolution. Yet there are many who view racial divisions on the island as a time bomb.

More than half of Cuba’s population is black or mulatto. They live in the island’s most dilapidated areas, make up a disproportionate share of the prison population and complain of constant police harassment. They are excluded from the “convertible peso” — the tourist currency — as most tourist-sector employees are white, and so they are invariably poorer. Simmering racial tension exploded briefly and was brutally repressed in April 2003, when the government decided to make an example of young blacks who attempted to hijack a ferry and force it to change course for the US. Three were executed. When riots broke out on the Malecon in Havana in protest, the demonstrators were dispersed by club-wielding security forces.

To keep a lid on such discontent, the authorities have swelled the neighbourhood spy system — the committees for the defence of the revolution (CDRs) . There are an estimated 15,000 watch posts in Havana alone. Parents also say that their children are being indoctrinated with ever more vehement “anti-imperialist” views. One display was of primary-school children laughing and whistling to each other as their teachers encouraged them to sit scrawling anti-American graffiti and swastikas on the pavement with chalk in front of the US-interests section on the Malecon. Behind the children were giant billboards carrying pictures of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by US soldiers in Iraq. The sign read “Fascists — Made in the USA”.

The billboards were erected in response to Christmas decorations put up by the US-interest section containing a large illuminated “75” in protest at the jailed political prisoners.

Far from such playground politics, in Havana’s gritty neighbourhood of Alamar, Cuban youths start talking openly about what they really want.

“I want to be able to afford to buy a drink and take a girl dancing in a club, and I can’t,” says one 17-year-old. “I want a pair of Nikes or Reeboks,” says another. “I want to be able to walk into a tourist hotel and not be stopped like I am a criminal,” says a third. “Here, tourists have more privileges than we do in our own country. It stinks.” “Here they’ll arrest you for nothing. We are not free to say what we want. I just want out,” says one 22-year-old, who has already tried to flee Cuba on a flimsy raft and says he will try again. None of them wishes to be identified.

“The climate of fear this regime plays on has been very effective. We are frozen in time. At the moment, there is no sign of a thaw,” said one prominent academic, who also wants to remain anonymous. “There is a great emptiness and disorientation in this society. People are searching for alternatives. But the government does not give alternatives any space to grow.”

Some turn to religion, to the growing number of evangelical sects, to Santeria — an Afro-Cuban form of voodoo — or to traditional Catholicism. Outsiders point to the Catholic Church as a potential force for change in Cuba, but within the country itself there is less optimism.

Father Jose Felix Perez, of Santa Rita Church in Havana’s Miramar district, says despite hopes that the Catholic Church would be given more space in society following the Pope’s visit to Cuba in 1998, “nothing has changed fundamentally. We are still not recognised as an interlocutor with the government. People here are spiritually exhausted. We all need to be able to look to the future, but people see a future with little hope”.

Every Sunday morning, a group of women dressed in white gathers for morning mass at the church of Santa Rita, among them Laura Pollan. All have husbands, fathers or sons among the 75 dissidents still in jail. They come to his church, Father Jose Felix says, because Santa Rita is the patron saint of difficult causes. But the church is also close to the embassy district of Havana and the women, calling themselves the damas en blanco (the women in white), hope such a high-profile location will draw attention to their campaign to have the political prisoners released.

After mass, these women walk silently up and down outside the church with pictures of their loved ones pinned to their clothes. They then stand before the church and say the Lord’s Prayer in unison. After praying, the women raise their hands and call loudly for what all but those who rule Cuba now desire: “Libertad!” — “Freedom!”

Passers-by pay them little attention. “Those who know what they are doing are afraid to show them any sign of support,” the priest says. “The problem for dissidents is one of solitude.”

“We will never give up our protest,” declares Pollan. “The authorities have three options — free our husbands, imprison us or kill us.” Sadly, there is a fourth: the women are ignored — not only by their countrymen but by the world.

October 3, 2004

Investigation

The barbaric murder of a black schoolboy scarred small-town Mississippi — and led to one of the worst miscarriages of justice in American history. So why, 50 years on, has the FBI decided to reopen the case? Christine Toomey reports

As temperatures reached 118F in the Tallahatchie County courthouse on the afternoon of September 19, 1955, the two small ceiling fans did little to stir the stifling, soupy heat. It was the busiest time of year in the Mississippi delta — the peak of the cotton harvest — and fields stretching almost to the courthouse steps were blanketed with what locals still call “white gold”. Yet the small brick building was so packed with white farmers and their families that extra seats had to be crammed into the aisles.

The few black spectators who dared to attend were forced to the back of the room by the county sheriff, Clarence Strider, who called for cane-bottomed rocking chairs to be brought in for the comfort of the two white defendants in the trial getting under way, one of whom then sat ostentatiously twirling a cigar as he rocked himself back and forth. When the heat, humidity and fug of smoke became almost unbearable, the presiding judge invited all men in the courtroom to remove their jackets. Eventually, fearing the overcrowding was hazardous, the judge called for the courtroom to be cleared in early recess with the warning that “if fire develops anyplace in this courthouse, a great tragedy will take place”.

Though some of those present in the courthouse did not see it that way, the real tragedy had already occurred. Three weeks earlier, the horribly mutilated body of a 14-year-old black schoolboy had been discovered floating feet up in the Tallahatchie river, with a large industrial fan wrapped around his neck with barbed wire. The boy’s tongue and eyes had been gouged out, his skull crushed and his genitals mutilated before he was shot in the head.

The boy’s name was Emmett Louis “Bobo” Till, and it would be repeated by poets, songwriters and playwrights for years to come. Till was not from the Deep South. He was from Chicago, so was unschooled in what passed for “southern etiquette” — the sort that called for black males to bow their heads and step off the pavement if they saw a white woman approaching. He was spending the summer with his great-uncle and cousins on the outskirts of a down-at-heel Mississippi community inappropriately called Money.

In the mornings the boys helped out in the cotton fields. In the afternoons they were allowed to take a trip to the nearby country store — Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market — to buy sodas, sweets and bubblegum. Till had only been in Money a few days when rumours started to circulate that he had wolf-whistled at the young wife of the white storekeeper Roy Bryant, and maybe even suggested he take her on a date. Bryant was driving a shrimp truck to Texas at the time. But when he returned four days later, the boy was hauled from his bed in the middle of the night by Bryant, his cigar-chomping half-brother, John Milam — and, it was claimed, up to 10 others — stripped naked and tortured for hours before being shot. One witness, prevented from testifying to what he knew of the brutal murder, was smuggled out of the state of Mississippi in a coffin for fear that he too would be killed.

While most lynchings in the American south — and Mississippi had the worst record of all — had been hushed up or ignored to that point, the murder of Emmett Till was different. When his body was returned to his mother in the north, she insisted that his funeral casket remain open so that people could see how he had been brutalised before being killed; 50,000 people filed past the coffin, some fainting at the sight. The resulting national and international outcry made it impossible to sweep the murder under the carpet. In a hurry to calm public outrage and appear to be addressing what had happened in their midst,county officials called for a trial to be held just three weeks after Till’s murder.

But holding a trial was still a far cry from convicting those responsible. After listening to a series of testimonies identifying Bryant and Milam as having abducted Till, the all-white, all-male jury retired for 65 minutes to deliberate. Bill Minor, then a journalist for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, still remembers hearing laughter coming from inside the room where the jury sat. One juror later admitted that they would have emerged to deliver their verdict in half the time had they not stopped for a “soda break”. When the foreman of the jury returned a verdict of “not guilty” on both men, Minor recalls the courtroom erupting “like it was a Fourth of July celebration”. Both Milam and Bryant then posed for the cameras in the courtroom, bouncing their brood of young sons on their knees and kissing their wives at length. Soon afterwards, protected by the double-jeopardy law — meaning they could not be retried on charges of which they had already been found innocent — the men sold their story to the now-defunct Look magazine for $4,000. In it they admitted they had murdered Till, though their intention had been to “just whip him and scare some sense into him”. “But we were never able to scare him. He was hopeless,” said Milam. Till, he said, kept shouting: “I’m not afraid of you. I’m as good as you are.”

“So I just made up my mind,” Milam boasted. “‘Chicago boy,’ I said. ‘I’m tired of ’em sending your kind down here to stir up trouble. Goddam you. I’m going to make an example of you — so everybody can know how me and my folks stand.’ I’m no bully. I like niggers in their place. I know how to work ’em,” he bragged. “But I decided it was time a few people got put on notice.”

The appalling crime and blatant miscarriage of justice was one of the sparks that set the civil- rights movement alight in America’s Deep South. The grotesque murder, hasty trial and subsequent confession of Till’s killers was headline news in late summer and autumn 1955. Three months after the trial ended, Rosa Parks famously refused to move to the back of the bus in Montgomery, Alabama, saying later that uppermost in her mind that day was the murder of Emmett Till. Martin Luther King also cited Till’s murder as one of the most egregious injustices that fuelled his passion in opposing segregation. Now, nearly half a century after Till was killed, the FBI has announced that it will help the district attorney’s office in the state of Mississippi to reopen its investigation into the case. Bryant and Milam are now dead; Milam died of cancer in 1980 and Bryant of the same disease 10 years later. But investigators for the DA’s office and FBI agents have begun sifting through old files and interviewing witnesses, some for the first time. The expectation is that others believed to have been connected with the crime may now face criminal charges of conspiracy to murder or attempting to pervert the course of justice by covering it up.

Some are dismissing this as a cynical ploy by a Republican administration keen to garner votes at a time when George W Bush is struggling for re-election. Few black voters, overwhelmingly Democrat, are likely to be swayed; Bush’s record on furthering race relations and improving the lives of American minorities is seen by most as dismal. But the fiercest battleground for control of the White House in November’s election is being fought in the Midwest states. It is here that those who support Bush welcome any initiative that might help paint a picture of the president as a more “caring and compassionate conservative”.

Yet many are already questioning the move. What is really to be gained, they ask, from reopening such a painful chapter in the country’s recent history? The answer to this question lies among those who still live close to the small rural community of Money, in what visitors arriving at the airport in Jackson, the capital of Mississippi, are assured is America’s “New South”.

There are no road signs left to show where Money begins or ends. Since the cotton plantations in the area became mechanised, most inhabitants have moved away. The only public building left is a part-time post office in a Portakabin parked in a stand of sprawling oak and magnolia trees by the roadside. To one side of it looms a giant disused cotton gin; to the other, the ruins of what was once Bryant’s grocery, where Emmett Till went to buy bubblegum with his cousins.

Exactly what happened on the last afternoon that Till went to that store before he was killed was the subject of heated debate at the time of the trial. That he wolf-whistled as he left the store there was little dispute. But in court, Carolyn Bryant claimed Till had come into the store alone, grabbed her hand and said, “How about a date, baby?” and then blocked her as she tried to get away, saying: “You needn’t be afraid o’ me. I been with white girls before.”

Till’s cousins disputed this and said he had whistled at two chequers players making a move as he came out of the shop onto the porch where they were sitting. A bout of childhood polio had left the boy with a stutter and his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, had taught him that if he got stuck on a word to “just whistle, then go ahead and say it”. She always believed that was what her son had done that day. Whatever the reason, the whistle led to Till being so badly beaten that when his body was pulled from the river, he was identifiable only by his dead father’s signet ring which he wore. His murderers were acquitted on the spurious grounds that prosecutors had failed to prove “beyond reasonable doubt” that the body was Till’s. Bryant and Milam’s defence team (which was supported by counter-top jar collections in local stores) suggested another boy’s body had been dumped there in place of Till’s by “people in the United States who want to destroy the way of life of southern people”.

Jurors ignored Till’s relatives, who said they had heard a woman’s voice — believed to have been Carolyn Bryant’s — identify Till as Bryant and Milam pulled him from his bed and shone a torch in his face. They also dismissed claims that the lynch party had consisted of others waiting with Bryant’s wife by the red truck in which Till was then driven away. They paid no attention to two farm hands who testified they had seen Bryant and Milam with two of Milam’s black employees, and at least two other white men, in the same truck in the back of which Till was seen crouching as it sped towards the farm of one of Milam’s brothers. The same witnesses testified that “licks and hollering” were heard coming from a barn on the farm and that a large, heavy object wrapped in tarpaulin was later loaded back onto the truck and driven away.

Jurors never heard evidence from Milam’s two black employees, Henry Lee Loggins and Leroy “Too Tight” Collins, one of whom, it was said, was later seen washing blood from the back of the truck. The men, it emerged, had been kept locked at a secret destination by Sheriff Strider and intimidated into keeping quiet. When they were released, it was feared they too would be killed if they testified. So black activists — hoping to have the trial moved to a neighbouring county, where a less bigoted sheriff might permit a fairer trial — smuggled the men over the state border to Tennessee. Although Till’s body was found in Tallahatchie County, the barn to which witnesses testified he had been taken — and it was presumed killed — was in neighbouring Sunflower County. But the trial was never moved.

Had Loggins and Collins testified, however, it is unlikely it would have made any difference. In his summing-up, one defence attorney’s advice to the jury was that they should do their “Anglo-Saxon duty” and acquit Bryant and Milam. If the two men were convicted, the jury was told, “your forefathers will turn over in their graves”. After their acquittal, Bryant and Milam moved away from the area. Despite rejoicing by white spectators at the end of the trial, most customers at Bryant’s store had been black and they boycotted the business, forcing it to close. Bryant’s wife, now 70, divorced her husband, changed her name several times and kept on the move, first in California, then Florida. Till’s uncle’s family and other witnesses moved away too. Though the murder and subsequent sham trial remained a festering sore, few talked about it openly again in the community in which it happened, preferring to put it in the past.

For the past nine years, however, a young black documentary maker has been tracking down witnesses in the case: both those who testified and those who were never called. As Keith Beauchamp began piecing together his film, he also started touring the country giving previews of the material he was gathering to special-interest groups and state legislators, in an attempt to get them to support his conviction that the case should be reopened. Two years ago the veteran black film-maker Stanley Nelson made an award-winning documentary about the case and called on the attorney general’s office to reopen Till’s murder investigation. Yet in May, when the US Justice Department announced that the investigation was being reopened, a spasm of dread gripped some still living in and around Money, Mississippi. The community has now dwindled to isolated clusters of dwellings: the larger, stylish homes belonging to white farmers who have diversified from cotton into catfish farming and growing soya and corn, and the smaller red-brick bungalows of their black neighbours, who commute to the nearby town of Greenwood for what work they can find. Few appear to feel easy talking about what happened even now, nearly 50 years later. William Henley, a 72-year-old former field hand who lives close to the site of the cabin that once belonged to Till’s great-uncle, summed up the feelings of many of Money’s older black residents with his conclusion that “ain’t nothin’ much going to change in Mississippi by opening all this up again”. “What happened then could happen now,” says Henley, sitting under a thin awning outside his front door in the early evening rain. “It don’t take much to stir up bad feelings.”

Anniebell Hill, 64, who lives by the side of the railway track that winds through fields of cotton and corn, agrees. Hill still remembers listening to news of the trial of Till’s killers on the radio when she returned from working in the fields as a girl. “What good will it do now to put an old woman on trial?” she says referring to Bryant’s wife, who, it is thought, is the most likely to face charges. “I don’t think many people here think it’s a good idea… We get on fine with the white folk, don’t have no problems now.”

The reasons for such reluctance at the prospect of a fresh trial becomes clearer after speaking to some of the community’s white inhabitants about their attitudes now to what happened to Emmett Till. “I reckon he got what he deserved,” says Roy Petty, Money’s elderly part-time postmaster. “Maybe it got a little out o’ hand. Maybe it was a case of taking chivalry to the extreme. But Bryant was protecting his wife from insult and injury — from what we used to call ‘uppity niggers’. That boy was smarting off, grandstanding, and when they went to deal with it, he did the same to them, far’s I understand. In my opinion, if he had been contrite, he would have gotten away with a whippin’.”

Delmar Turney, 39, who lives next door to the ruins of Bryant’s old store, which some are now talking of turning into a museum, adds: “Like we say around here, if a dog does his business in the street and you leave it alone, it’ll smell a bit, but then you won’t pay it no heed. But if you poke it with a stick, the stink will come up again. Dragging this old case up will create such a stink, it will pit neighbour against neighbour.”

Ted Kalich, the editor of the Greenwood Commonwealth newspaper, in the nearest town to Money, also believes reopening the case could damage race relations in the area. “What is to be accomplished by going after the bit players now the two principal protagonists are dead? What are the chances of there being a fair trial 50 years after the fact?” he asks. Kalich admits to “mixed feelings” about the prospect of a new trial. While conceding the historical significance, he believes it could end up as an exercise in “beating up on Mississippi”. “Mississippi in 2004 is not what it was in 1955,” he stresses, pointing to the fact that 47 of the state’s 174 legislators are now black. But one of those legislators, David Jordan, a 70-year-old Mississippi state senator who lobbied hard for the case to be reopened, stresses that while some things have changed in the delta, much has not. As we drive through an affluent northern neighbourhood of Greenwood, Jordan remembers that when he was a boy in the 1940s, no blacks could walk the streets here unless they were wearing worker’s overalls, showing they had come to provide some service to white residents.

Jordan was the first in his family to escape such servitude. He had just started college at the time of the murder trial and was among the handful of black spectators — allowed in, he believes, because he was wearing a shirt and tie, not work overalls. “Few people who know about what happened to Emmett Till want to talk about it now,” he says. “But unless there’s a fair trial, this thing will never end.” As we drive, Jordan, a former science teacher, points out Greenwood’s private Pillow Academy, where pupils are almost exclusively white. Despite desegregation of the school system, pupils in the town’s state schools are overwhelmingly black.

“The [Ku Klux] Klan still exist in splinter groups here,” he says. “If you make too many waves you still get harassed.” When Jordan publicly backed a black candidate for the post of lieutenant governor recently, he had eggs thrown at his wife’s car. He also had the windows of his home broken several times. Whether a new trial will aggravate such attitudes or expose them and lead to change remains uncertain. “Perhaps the state of Mississippi will eventually reap the greatest benefit from a new trial, if it’s clearly and unequivocally fair,” said a Washington insider. “Perhaps it will rid itself once and for all of its image as a lynch-mob society.”

But for many, questions of image are beside the point. “There is no statute of limitations on murder. Justice was never done. As time has gone by, people have become more willing to talk, and now is the time to try to bring closure to this terrible crime,” stresses Hilary Shelton, director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

The reopening of the Till case should also be viewed, Shelton argues, in the context of a wider reckoning with the south’s murderous past. In the past 15 years, nearly two dozen “cold cases” from the civil-rights era have been reinvestigated, many leading to successful prosecutions. Among the highest-profile of these was the 1994 conviction of Byron de la Beckwith for the murder of the civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in 1963. Two years ago, a 72-year-old former Ku Klux Klansman, Bobby Frank Cherry, was finally convicted for the murder of four black schoolgirls in the 1963 bombing of an Alabama Baptist church.Two weeks after the announcement that Till’s case was being reopened, the justice department was also called on to help reinvestigate the killing of three civil-rights workers in Neshoba County, Mississippi, during the 1964 “freedom summer” drive to register black voters. The murder of Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner — both civil-rights workers from New York — and James Chaney, a local black activist, was portrayed in Alan Parker’s 1988 film Mississippi Burning. But Mississippi’s attorney general has recently expressed doubt about whether there’s enough fresh evidence to continue pursuing the case.

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights advocacy group based in Alabama, believes the Emmett Till murder could be the end of an era as far as reopening old civil-rights cases is concerned. He believes the move is particularly significant as America is now facing a resurgent neo-Confederate movement. “There is still a vast swathe of white America that refuses to believe what occurred in the south,” says Potok. “These are people who continue to describe the antebellum and postbellum period here as some kind of Garden of Eden, when the reality was, it was a society based largely on violence and the threat of terrorist murder. I hope these cases will help lodge that fact in the American mind.”

While welcoming the initiative to reopen the case, Potok is cynical of the current administration’s motivation for doing so. “Whether this is based on new evidence or is an attempt by Bush to look good before the election is unclear to me. I think the latter is a clear possibility, which is rather disgusting.”

Keith Beauchamp, 32, is quick to dismiss such scepticism. “Even if this is being done for political reasons, we have to take the ball and run with it,” he says. “This is the last opportunity we are going to have to see justice done.” Till’s mother, who died last year, fought all her life, he stresses, to have the case brought before a just court. Beauchamp believes there are at least five people still alive — including Carolyn Bryant, Loggins and “Too Tight” Collins — who need to be held accountable for the part it is alleged they played in the boy’s murder.

The seasoned film-maker Stanley Nelson is more sensitive to the repercussions a new trial could have for the locals. “The power structure in Mississippi is still in many ways what it was. The economy is still controlled by white landowners who operate a feudal system. Many African-Americans live on their land and buy their food on credit, and if someone testifies even today, they could find themselves the victim of a backlash.” But there comes a time, says Nelson, when everyone has to examine his or her own conscience and do what is right. “And in the case of Emmett Till,” he says “that time is long overdue.” As Bob Dylan wrote in his ballad The Death of Emmett Till, released in 1963,the year of Martin Luther King’s “I have a dream” speech and a time of particularly brutal and frequent Ku Klux Klan activity in the south, “If you can’t speak out against this kind of thing / A crime that’s so unjust / Your eyes are filled with dead men’s dirt / Your mind is filled with dust.”

April 4, 2004

Investigation

If her husband beats George W Bush in the US election, Teresa Heinz Kerry will become first lady. But can the fabulously wealthy canned-food heiress keep the lid on her gaffes and sell herself to the American people?

Sitting on a shelf in Teresa Heinz Kerry’s comfortable Washington office — just a stone’s throw from the White House, but more like an intimate sitting room than a hub of the $1-billion-plus Heinz food empire of which she is the ruling matriarch — are two pop-psychology manuals by the bestselling author and psychiatrist M Scott Peck. Under the heading Problems and Pain, the opening line of The Road Less Travelled puts the dilemma of human existence simply: “Life is difficult.”

It is a verdict Heinz Kerry feels does not go far enough. As she addresses a select crowd in a large private home in Fairfield County, Connecticut — an area favoured by Wall Street bankers and rich financiers — while drinks flow at a private bar at one end of the room, she can’t help but bemoan her lot. “This is not life. It is an existence. It has a beginning and an end,” she says in a soft Portuguese accent, before rushing off to a $1,000-a-head dinner in nearby Greenwich.

Ever since her second husband, the Massachusetts senator John F Kerry, became a Democratic challenger for the US presidency, his wife, also his second, has taken to the road to campaign on his behalf. And though the rigours of the campaign trail are softened by having her own ketchup-red-and-white Gulfstream jet (named the Flying Squirrel, with the number 57 painted on its tail fin), she is not finding it easy.

Bombarded by cameras and quizzed incessantly wherever she goes, she has found herself under the media microscope and, with the election more than six months away, the scrutiny has only just begun. But already there have been worrying headlines. “Teh-Ray-Zah the Terrible” ran one article in the Philadelphia Daily News in February. “Is Teresa Heinz an asset or an Achilles’ heel?” asked the Los Angeles Times more recently, followed by a piece in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram with the headline “Linchpin or Liability?”

Much has been made of Heinz Kerry’s tendency to speak her mind — acknowledged by many as both refreshing and engaging in a political fray where double talk is often the order of the day. But then there are — according to one who knows her well but prefers not to be named — her “Marie Antoinette” moments.

First there was the time Heinz Kerry looked aghast when asked if she’d insisted on a prenuptial agreement before marrying for the second time. “Of course. Everybody has a prenup,” she stated blithely. “You’ve got three kids with somebody else, you’ve got to have a prenup.” Then she said of cosmetic surgery, “When I need it, I’ll get it,” after admitting to wanting another shot of Botox “soon”. Finally, there was the time she described her second husband as being “like a good wine” that takes time to mature. “Then it gets really good and you can sip it,” she said, adding that she believed John Kerry was “at that stage now”.

None of the above would, under normal circumstances, merit even a mention. After all, when her first husband, John Heinz — also a US senator and sole heir to the Heinz family fortune — died, she became one of the richest widows in the world. Circumstances, however, are anything but normal. November’s presidential election looks set to be a very closely run race. Aside from critical concerns over national security, the key issue on which it will turn is almost certainly the dismal state of the US economy.

Over the past four years, nearly 3m Americans have lost their jobs. This means John Kerry’s chances depend largely on winning the votes of struggling blue-collar workers in key states such as Ohio, Michigan and Missouri in the Midwest. Workers who voted Republican last time but have fast lost faith in George W Bush; workers with no need for prenups and no money for cosmetic surgery, Botox or fine wines.

So, are Heinz Kerry’s “let them eat cake” lapses likely to cast a shadow over her husband’s chances of making it to the White House? With the US more bitterly divided and polarised than at any time in recent history, most predict this election will be one of the most viciously fought ever, and Heinz Kerry is certain to be caught in the crossfire. When asked if she is scared at the prospect, she laughs and brushes back a thick shock of auburn hair from her forehead. “Scared?” she scoffs. “I lived in a dictatorship. I marched against apartheid in the late 1950s. What am I scared of? What I do is put up a mirror and let them [my critics] see their faces. They can stoop as low as they want. But I will stay up here.”

The reference to her colonial childhood already marks her out as different from the spouse of any previous presidential contender. But Heinz Kerry knows well that she has at her disposal a weapon much more powerful than a hand mirror. Although federal law prevents her from making a contribution of more than $2,000 to her husband’s campaign, if attacked personally she is fully entitled to tap into her vast fortune to mount a defence. “If the honour of myself or my family is trashed,” she has vowed, “I will fight to redeem it.”

She may now be a grandmother of 65, who often describes herself as “shy”, but Teresa Heinz Kerry is anything but retiring. While many women who inherit a fortune — in her case, personal assets worth $500m — wallow in the comfortable existence of the so-called “ladies who lunch”, she has forged a role for herself as one of America’s leading philanthropists. She now heads the Heinz Endowments and the Heinz Family Philanthropies — foundations with combined worth of around $1.2 billion.

“Teresa doesn’t need the White House,” says Phyllis Magrab, a professor of paediatrics at Georgetown University in Washington and a longtime friend. “Some people have needed it to catapult them into the public eye. But Teresa can be in the public eye any time she wants.”

She might not need the White House; the question is, does John Kerry need her to get there? Many believe he does. To understand why and appreciate what is driving her to help him, you need to look at the road she has travelled, problems and pain included, since her childhood — most of which was spent in Mozambique.

Born Maria Teresa Thierstein Sim›es-Ferreira in Mozambique’s capital, Maputo, at a time when the country was an overseas province of Portugal — then under repressive dictatorship — Heinz Kerry refers to herself as a “daughter of Africa”. She often talks with nostalgia about the time she spent travelling around that country as a child with her father, a Portuguese doctor who had moved to Mozambique to practise tropical medicine. Some of her happiest memories, she says, are from this period spent “in the bush with a cement floor and a thatched roof” observing her father treat patients, many of whom had queued up outside his surgery since before dawn.

Her father had wanted her to become a doctor too and, she confesses, she sometimes regrets that she did not. But in the circles in which she moved, there were few role models of women successfully combining careers with being wives and mothers and she knew she wanted to raise a family. Great emphasis was still placed on her education, and at a young age she was sent away to a strict Catholic boarding school run by British nuns in racially segregated South Africa. She went on to attend university there, which is when she took part in early anti-apartheid demonstrations. She then went to Europe and trained as an interpreter in Geneva, where she was a classmate of Kofi Annan. She speaks five languages fluently.

Though privileged in many ways, her early life was also marred by tragedy. When she was a teenager her mother was diagnosed as having a rare form of cancer that slowly deformed her facial features and led to 26 operations over the following 40 years before the disease eventually spread to her brain. When she was in Geneva her younger sister, Gita, who had come to live with her and study, was killed in a car accident while driving to Portugal. As the only relative nearby, she was called on to identify her sister’s body.

But it was also in Geneva that she met her first husband — a Harvard student working there on a summer secondment at a Swiss bank. All she knew about his background when they first met, she says, was that his father “made soup”. It was a few weeks before she discovered he was a descendant of Henry J Heinz, who founded the “57 varieties” multinational food empire. After returning to live with her parents for a year as the family mourned her sister’s death, she moved to the US to work as an interpreter with the United Nations and be closer to John Heinz. The couple married in 1966, had three sons and, in the same year that John Heinz was elected to Congress as a Republican senator from Pennsylvania — 1971 — she became an American citizen.

For the next two decades the family split their time between Washington, a farm on the outskirts of Pittsburgh and retreats in Sun Valley and Nantucket. But the man she still calls the “love of my life” was killed shortly after the couple’s silver wedding anniversary in 1991. When the plane in which he had been flying developed problems with its landing gear, a helicopter sent up to examine its undercarriage collided with it, killing all on board. The two aircraft then crashed into a school playground, crushing two children to death. With customary candour she admits she made it through the next year with the help of Prozac.

Since her husband had been an only child, at the age of 52 she not only inherited a vast personal fortune, but also took charge of one of the world’s largest charitable trusts. Rejecting an invitation to stand for her dead husband’s Senate seat, she set about reorganising the foundations by focusing them more sharply on support for issues she felt strongly about, such as early childhood education, affordable health care, women’s retirement and the environment. She also founded the annual Heinz Awards and continues to play an active role in handing out grants, awards and endowments worth approximately $70m a year to leaders in the fields of science, arts and education. “I don’t make money in my office,” she says. “I give it away.”

At the time she was being courted to enter politics, she described political campaigns as the “graveyard of real ideas and the birthplace of empty promises”. She also said she thought being first lady would be “worse than going to a Carmelite convent”. But this was before she got to know John Kerry. The couple had first met, briefly, when they were introduced by her first husband on the steps of the Capitol. They met again the year after Heinz died, at the Earth Summit in Brazil.

On their third meeting at a Washington dinner the following year, Kerry, a decorated hero of the Vietnam war, offered her a lift home and on the way asked if she had ever seen the Vietnam Veterans Memorial at night. “People were praying. People were crying. He didn’t say anything,” she remembers of that evening. After that she started seeing more of Kerry, who, divorced from his first wife, was known for a number of high-profile relationships with women including the actresses Morgan Fairchild and Catherine Oxenberg. Although she describes him as having been “skittish” and “very, very slow on the uptake in the beginning”, the couple married on Memorial Day weekend in 1995. “If he hadn’t asked me I would have bashed him over the head,” she once admitted.

The merging of the two families has been described by one of the five step-siblings as “difficult” in the beginning, and Heinz Kerry has admitted that she is “real needy”. It was only after Kerry entered the race for the presidency that his wife added his name to her own. “Politically, it’s going to be Teresa Heinz Kerry, but I don’t give a sh**, you know?” she says, adding that “swearing is a good way to relieve tension”.

More problematic for her husband, however, was the fact that Heinz Kerry remained a registered Republican. Although she would “go down the aisle” with him, she said she “wouldn’t cross the aisle”, meaning she would not become a Democrat. She only relented last year, changing her political affiliation with the rather grudging comment that she’d “rather just be independent, but then I couldn’t vote for my husband”.

Such outbursts have led at least one political strategist to observe that, if Kerry does make it to the White House, his wife would be “the Sharon Osbourne of first ladies”. “She is certainly a wild card,” says the Republican pollster Frank Luntz. “I think she will be very controversial. As far as the Republicans are concerned, they can just sit back and laugh, regard her with amusement.”

Continued on page 2

()Secret weapon or loose cannon? (continued)

While the Republicans deny that they will make an issue of her beyond questioning how “appropriate” it is for Kerry to “drag his spouse into the day-to-day dynamic of campaigning”, there are those who believe they are waiting for what has been called a “Muskie moment”. When Senator Ed Muskie, another presidential hopeful in the early 1970s, was goaded by the Republicans that his wife was a drunk, he retaliated by standing in front of a newspaper office to give a speech defending her before breaking down in tears and withdrawing from the race.

Few can envisage Kerry openly displaying such emotion. But there have been moments when he has shown exasperation with his wife. During the couple’s first lengthy joint interview, published in The Washington Post in 2002, when John Kerry said he had not had nightmares about his time in Vietnam “in a long time”, he could barely conceal his annoyance when Heinz Kerry contradicted him. Covering her head with her hands, she mimicked him having a flashback by shouting: “Down! Down! Down!” After that, Heinz Kerry was advised to keep a much closer check on what she said. But, as one former adviser admits, “In reality she defies handling.”

Some argue the spouse of any presidential candidate has very little effect on the way the electorate eventually casts its votes. Others fear there is a danger that if the spotlight is trained too much on Heinz Kerry it will detract attention from the candidate. In the months leading up to March 2’s Super Tuesday, when Kerry finally clinched the Democratic nomination, a serious rift developed among members of his campaign team, which threatened to sink his candidacy. Essentially, it was seen as a falling-out between a group of younger Washington-based advisers and an inner circle of older campaign hands from Boston. Rivals began to dub Kerry’s team “Noah’s Ark” because, as a result of the feuding, it was so split it had two of everything. The dissent was seized on by Kerry’s opponents as a sign of his weakness: if he couldn’t manage feuding factions within his own camp, they argued, how could he manage a country?

One element of this feud was a difference of opinion between the Washington faction and Heinz Kerry about how her husband should be campaigning. The latter prevailed; several of the Washington contingent left or were fired. Since then, Kerry’s team have a more focused idea of how they intend to sell their candidate to the country, and his wife clearly fits into that equation.

Although several points ahead of Bush in many polls, Kerry faces an uphill struggle to maintain that lead. The lackadaisical feel of the operation at Kerry’s campaign headquarters in a run-down town house on Capitol Hill contrasts starkly with the slick re-election machine Bush has up and running in a spacious glass-walled office block in the shadow of the Pentagon.

The opening salvos of the Bush campaign have already been fired. One television clip attacking Kerry’s avowed populism flashed a series of photographs of the various lavish homes he shares with Heinz Kerry and one of a luxury yacht, with a pay-off line copying the MasterCard ad campaign: “Priceless”. It was a signal that their first line of attack will be to condemn Kerry as elitist and out of touch with mainstream America. His mother was a member of the Forbes family — founding members of the high Boston “Brahmin” caste. His father, of east-European Jewish descent, was a diplomat, who sent his son to be educated in Switzerland, then private schools in New England and Yale, where, like Bush, he was a member of the elite Skull and Bones student society. Kerry, one columnist on The Boston Globe observed, “looks like the kind of guy who wrote a game plan for life when he was still sitting in a sandbox”.

The main thrust of the Republican machine will be to attack Kerry for being wishy-washy and constantly flip-flopping on issues. He initially supported the war in Iraq, for instance, and then opposed it. Kerry’s supporters point to his having sat for nearly two decades on the Senate foreign-relations committee and play up his considerable expertise in complex foreign affairs and matters of military policy. But already the Republicans are picking over his voting record on controversial domestic issues such as gun control (for), abortion rights (pro-choice), civil unions for gay couples (for) and the death penalty (against).

“God, guns and gays is terrain the Republicans are comfortable fighting on,” said one Democrat strategist. “The Senate is an institution that cuts the baby in half constantly… It is often about compromise, and presidential campaigns are not best fought over nuance.”

Kerry’s record as a decorated war hero in Vietnam is powerful ammunition against accusations of weakness. No opportunity is lost to recount his exploits as a US Navy “swift boat” captain, who set out to ferry troops up and down the Mekong delta under enemy fire, after blasting out tracks from the Stones and Jimi Hendrix to fire up his men. Kerry was wounded three times in four months and eventually sent home. But not before being decorated twice for valour. Once for saving a man’s life by pulling him from the river as both were being fired upon. The second time, when Kerry’s boat came under fire from a Vietcong rocket-propelled grenade launcher, he turned the boat towards the river bank, rammed it ashore and pursued the attacker on foot. It was a move so bold, his commanding officer later admitted he wasn’t sure whether to court-martial Kerry or award him the Silver Star. As to his change of heart over Iraq, it reflects the change in attitude of many Americans who initially supported the conflict and now regard it as folly.

But it is in addressing Kerry’s stiff and aloof image that his campaign team faces perhaps its biggest challenge, and it is here that his wife comes into her own. Accusations that there is an element of the “Gore bore factor” about Kerry — referring to Al Gore’s lacklustre campaign for the presidency four years ago — are becoming more frequent. Unlike John Edwards, his charismatic erstwhile contender for the Democratic nomination, Kerry has a tendency to deliver long, convoluted speeches in a dull monotone.

In the last public debate between the two in New York, before the smooth southerner pulled out of the race, Edwards was asked if Kerry had “enough Elvis to beat George Bush”. With one eye on his chances of being picked as a running mate, he deftly sidestepped the question. One Democrat loyalist listening to Heinz Kerry speak in Connecticut a few hours later observed that her husband was “less Elvis, more Leonard Bernstein — I could see him conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra”. It was meant, of course, as a compliment. But it is just the sort of comment that could swing wavering voters in Missouri or Michigan back in the direction of a president who professes to spend his spare time cutting back brushwood with a chain saw on his ranch in Texas.

To counter perceptions of Kerry as a refined, patrician figure with a long face and pinched smile, one of the early tactics adopted by his campaign team was to play up the daredevil side to his character. Frequent references were made to his love of motorbikes and sports like windsurfing and kite-surfing. His new advisers have, however, apparently forbidden him from straddling a Harley-Davidson at every opportunity and are trying to play up his softer side. This is where his family comes in. His daughters from his first marriage — Vanessa, 27, a Harvard medical student, and Alexandra, 30, a trainee film director — have been drafted in to talk about their “goofy dad”, who used to embarrass them in public with impersonations of Monty Python “silly walks”. They even told one audience about the time he performed heart massage on their pet hamster after it fell overboard in a cage while being transported on a family holiday.

But it is Teresa Heinz Kerry who is regarded as his trump card in this respect. Although aides accompanying her on the campaign trail look constantly pained in anticipation of another unfortunate comment, Heinz Kerry appears to be tempering her outbursts and channelling her energies into winning over voters. She still has a tendency to talk on the stump about herself and her own pet projects, only promoting Kerry in passing. But unlike the uncomfortably staged kisses between Gore and his wife, Tipper, for the cameras, it is clear that Heinz Kerry adores her husband. For instance, it did him no harm at all when she confessed she would be quite content to be stranded for some time with Kerry “in a foxhole”. He, in turn, describes her as “nurturing and incredibly loving, fun, zany and witty, definitely sexy. Very earthy. European”.

“While many Americans feel uncomfortable talking about their bodies, for instance, Teresa is very direct,” says one close aide. “She will talk openly about any bodily function. Sometimes talking to her is like undergoing a full medical examination.”

At first, Heinz Kerry admits, she was hesitant about her husband’s plans to run for president, aware of the heavy personal toll it would take. But, after long walks alone in the mountains of Idaho, she relented: “The last thing I want is someone to say, ‘You blew it for John.'” And when rumours surfaced earlier this year on the internet’s Drudge Report about the senator having had an affair several years ago with an intern — hastily denied by both Kerry and the woman concerned — Heinz Kerry leapt to his defence. “That Drudge. He’s such a smudge,” she said. There was nothing resembling the comment she had made years before that if she caught her then husband, John Heinz, cheating on her, she would “maim him”.

If you adopt the view that a spouse offers some sort of Freudian window into her husband’s inner character, Kerry’s choice of partner could be seen as a sign of emotional strength, a sign that he is comfortable with strong, outspoken personalities — in stark contrast to Bush, who once asked his wife what she thought was wrong with a speech and apparently drove the family car through the garage door when she told him.

“Among the major questions that get raised about Kerry over and over again are his coolness, aloofness, distance,” says Norm Ornstein, a political analyst with the American Enterprise Institute. “I think Teresa humanises him. He didn’t marry someone who is cool and aloof. Those are not terms you could ever apply to Teresa. She is extremely lively and colourful. A person with views of her own.”

Just how Heinz Kerry will play in middle America, however, is uncertain. There are those who still believe that a prospective first lady, like children, should be seen and not heard. At the same time as stressing that “the model of first lady as someone who puts on white gloves and gardens” has long gone, even Democratic supporters concede that lessons have to be learnt from the way Hillary Clinton deeply divided public opinion by involving herself with policy issues. From the outset she promised the country they would be getting “two for the price of one” in the White House. By contrast, Heinz Kerry admits she is bound to have influence over her husband by virtue of the fact they share the same dining table and bed. But if her husband makes it to the Oval Office, she says, she intends to go back to her work at the Heinz philanthropies.

“Teresa would be a breath of fresh air as first lady,” says Wren Wirth, wife of a former senator and one of Heinz Kerry’s tight circle of longtime female friends, sometimes referred to as the Ya-Ya Sisterhood. “She is cultured, sophisticated, has lived on three continents and is, above all, wise.”

While Pat Nixon played the long-suffering partner, Rosalind Carter the good southern wife, Nancy Reagan brought Hollywood (and mediums) to Washington and Barbara Bush became the nation’s favourite matron, Heinz Kerry would bring back some of the glamour of Jackie Kennedy, it is said. And lend the east wing of the White House more of a global air. “She may inhabit a world that very few do.

But she knows about the haves and have-nots of this world,” says another member of the sisterhood. “She has a compassion that comes from the losses she has suffered. She has got out there and done something in the world, not sat around clipping stock coupons.” Although she has been lampooned for her taste for Chanel and cashmere scarves, her friends paint a picture of her recycling jam jars and taking the remains of food and flowers with her as she moves between her various homes.

Most Americans do not have a chip on their shoulders about the wealth of others, in the way that those in more class-bound European societies do, some argue. What matters, they stress, is not the size of Heinz Kerry’s fortune but what she has done with the money she has. It remains to be seen if the struggling swing voters, whose sympathy she needs to help her husband win over, will feel the same way.

Until recently, Heinz Kerry’s appearances were geared to audiences where Democrats were having simply to decide whether to put her husband or Edwards on the ticket. Met by the sort of welcoming crowd she encountered in Fairfield, Connecticut — where street posters advertise the Architectural Digest and home deliveries of Atkins-diet meals — there was little doubt she felt more comfortable. “I feel very shy when I feel such warmth and adulation,” she began her address there. Her reception in a run-down neighbourhood of New York the following morning was a different matter.

The rows of pensioners lined up to listen to her at the Rain senior citizens’ centre in the Bronx sat stony-faced and grumbling that their exercise class had been cancelled as they waited for over an hour for her to arrive to speak to them. Few seemed to even know who she was, except for one elderly woman who sat grimly clutching her handbag. “I hear she’s loaded,” she sniffed. “What does she know about the lives we lead?”

After being introduced to the largely Hispanic crowd as Madam First Lady, Heinz Kerry began her short address in Spanish as a table of old boys continued clicking their dominoes at the back. “Soy la mama de todos. Me llaman Mama T [I am everyone’s mother. They call me Mama T],” she began uneasily as the pensioners sat in silence. “John will work very hard for you.

“He has been a fighter always,” she continued. Silence. “I promise you if he gets to the White House the American people will be No 1 and the people of the world will be No 2.” Hesitant clapping. “We will make our country dream again. We promise a campaign of hope. We are going to be above the fray, no dirty politics, just work hard,” she concluded to, finally, applause.

“I guess what matters is what you have in your heart, not your bank account,” said 75-year-old Roy Parson, a retired plumber sitting in the back row, as Mama T was whisked away to another event. John Kerry can only hope that voters in the Midwest will reach the same conclusion.