Interview With Ben Johnson: Teresa Heinz Kerry's Radical Giving

By Bill Steigerwald

Teresa Heinz Kerry, the Heinz ketchup heiress and Pittsburgh ’s most generous left-wing philanthropist, is very hands-on when it comes to deciding who gets a slice of the $140 million in charity that three Heinz Endowments dispense every year.

In his new booklet, “Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Radical Gifts,” Ben Johnson documents how the wife of Sen. John Kerry (and the late Sen. John Heinz) shares the Heinz family’s wealth with a collection of left-wing groups and morally challenged cultural organizations that many Americans would find outrageous or appalling.

Johnson is the managing editor of FrontPageMag.com and author of “57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving.” That 2004 work, a prequel to his forthcoming one, did what the mainstream media did not do when Teresa Heinz Kerry and her husband were trying to win the White House. It documented the highly politicized, partisan and often self-serving tax-exempt giving of Teresa Heinz Kerry. I talked to Johnson by telephone on Tuesday:

Q: What do the Heinz Endowments say they are?

A: The Heinz Endowments say that they are charitable organizations based in Western Pennsylvania with the intention to aid the citizens of the entire area. So they are purely charitable organizations motivated by their love of mankind.

Q: How much control does Teresa Heinz Kerry have over the way Heinz Endowments' money is dispensed?

A: We can assume she has absolute control. She is the chair of the foundations. Some of her children are also on the board. So as a trustee, and as in some cases a chair, she is entrusted with overseeing the way that the wealth is distributed.

I think it is indisputable that the Heinz family, with its long ties to the Republican Party, would not be in favor of supporting Democratic constituencies -- certainly not in supporting organizations that, for example, say that the United States has quote “a slave and empire form of governance” or that the history of the United States is quote “the history of racism codified in law.”

Q: How much money do the Heinz Endowments give out?

A: Overall, it’s $140 million in grants every single year -– total. Now, again, not all of that is political. Some of it is for praiseworthy causes like the YWCA or the Imani Christian Academy . But a large portion of that money, in fact, goes to political causes, radical groups that are absolutely indefensible and, in the most recent cases, pro-pedophilia and gay porn films.

Q: Does the general tilt of the politics of the endowments -- and where the money goes and to whom -- reflect Teresa Heinz Kerry’s politics very closely?

A: Oh, certainly. There is no diversity in the funding. That is to say, conservatives and liberals don’t get an equal share of the funds. Those grants that are political are 100 percent on the left-hand side of the spectrum, whether it’s environmentalist groups -- which is her pet passion and certainly the largest recipient of money -- or whether it’s supporting affirmative action, abortion, union involvement in elections or what I would refer to as the “Hate America Left.” All of these things are exclusively left wing and they reflect Teresa Heinz Kerry very well.

Q: Are endowments like this permitted to give money to partisan organizations and openly activist political groups?

A: There’s nothing illegal about what she is doing. I want to make that clear. ... What she does is legal; it’s simply not really charity. It’s political activism and it should be labeled for what it really is.

Q: What would you point to as examples of her “substantial abuse of funds entrusted to her care”?

A: The most outstanding example of this would be the money that she has given to organizations that are involved in specifically trying to get out the vote. For example, she gave $25,000 to the Gay and Lesbian Victory Fund, which is a constituency that voted for John Kerry in 2004 by 77 percent…. In terms of the radical side of where she’s giving, she’s given several hundred thousand dollars to Pittsburgh-based radical organizations. The two most outstanding would be the Three Rivers Community Foundation and the Thomas Merton Center .

Q: What’s wrong with those organizations?

A: The two are themselves umbrella groups of far-left radicals -- not simply liberals or liberal Democrats, but, in fact, many of them are socialists or explicitly communist anti-Americans. The Three Rivers Community Fund was given $100,000 in 2004, the year that her husband did run for president, to “support the work of grass-roots organizations.” Among those grass-roots organizations is ACORN, the voter-fraud organization.

Perhaps the greatest service that the Thomas Merton Center rendered to Teresa Heinz Kerry was in 2004, when they actually protested against the Republican National Convention.

They tried to block delegates’ buses from getting to the convention center. They interrupted several speeches on national television.

Q: You say the Heinz Endowments have been responsible for a wide variety of radical or offensive “art.” What's an example of that?

A: The most outrageous example of this would be the 2006 Pittsburgh International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival, which screened not one but two films that glorified same-sex statutory rape.

One was “Loving Annabelle,” which is a film about a Catholic school teacher who has sexual intercourse with one of her underage students.

Q: Teresa Heinz and John Kerry are left-liberal Democrats. You wouldn’t expect them to give money to the GOP or the Moral Majority. What are they doing that is worse than what any other ideologically based endowment is doing?

A: What they do that I think is worse than what anyone can do, to begin with, is being involved directly in the political process in a way that personally benefited both of them.

Secondly, justifying pedophilia; screening films that are explicitly pornographic; aiding domestic radicals who are violent; and promoting films and performances which accuse our soldiers of systematic torture and rape around the world.

Q: What was your intent in writing this book?

A: Well, I wrote a book called “57 Varieties of Radical Causes: Teresa Heinz Kerry’s Charitable Giving" in 2004 because I thought it was worth exploring what the future first lady might be doing in the White House. … This is work that no one else is doing, that the media should have been doing throughout the 2004 campaign. We should have known, throughout, that Teresa Heinz Kerry had spent her money promoting radical organizations in a way that certainly violates the spirit if not the letter of the law -- and in a way that may have personally benefited her husband’s candidacy. It is to the everlasting shame of the media, and testimony to its bias, that we know none of this except through the work of an obscure right-wing blogger.

Q: By the name of …?

A: By the name of Ben Johnson (laughs).

Bill Steigerwald is a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. E-mail Bill at bsteigerwald@tribweb.com . ©Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, All Rights Reserved.