“For a long period, after 2004, every time he even half fell asleep all he saw was voting machines in the state of Ohio,” Mike Barnicle, a close friend of Kerry’s and a former columnist for the Boston Globe, told me. This summer, Barnicle spent time with Kerry on Nantucket, where Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz, have a house on the water and a seventy-six-foot, seven-million-dollar sailboat called Isabel. “We were sitting in the bow,” Barnicle recalled, “and we were talking about a bunch of different things—about Iran, about what the President of Iran was like—and I said, ‘Other than not being President, this is pretty good.’ There was a security boat sailing off to the side of us. Then he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, I realize how badly Shrum screwed me.’ ”
A few weeks ago, between Kerry’s trips to Europe and the Middle East, I had dinner with Kerry and Heinz at their house in Georgetown, a twenty-three-room mansion decorated with Early American portraits, Dutch still-lifes, and an amiable yellow Labrador retriever named Ben. (The Lab has the Twitter handle @DiploMutt.) I asked Kerry how long he carried around a sense of anger and resentment.
“I didn’t carry it,” he insisted. “I didn’t. I didn’t. My wife was mad at me that I didn’t carry it longer.”
From across the table, Teresa Heinz said, “I’m still carrying it.”
The Secretary of State looked up from his halibut. An ill wind of panic swept the oblong plain of his face. From the thick thatch of gray hair to the improbably long and thrusting chin, Kerry’s visage is immense and, in its implacable resting expression, resembles one of the monolithic heads that rise from the loam of Easter Island.
“Well, I’m not,” Kerry said.
His gaze turned to his wife, wordlessly imploring her to keep quiet. Heinz is seventy-seven, five years older than her husband, and, in 2013, she suffered a seizure that she has attributed to an earlier concussion “that was not properly treated at all.” It’s not easy for her to get around, and she appears infrequently at public events, but she spoke clearly and ardently throughout the evening, much as she had during the 2004 campaign.
She was not quite done. “I knew from looking at the . . .”
Kerry uses many terms of endearment for his wife; now he called her by the telegraphic “T.”
“T, let’s not go . . .” he said gently.
As she tried to speak again, he shut it down.
“T, T, we’re not . . . I didn’t want to spend time there,” he said. “I just consciously did not spend time there, and I moved on, and I moved on as rapidly as . . . It’s over. It’s behind me. . . . I could have done some things a little bit differently. We didn’t. But I’m not going to feel regret the rest of my life.”
