Heinz Endowments to Leftist Causes through The Tides Foundation?-Disputed!

Presidential Candidate John Kerry's Wife has Donated Millions of Dollars to a Foundation that Funds "Anti-American" efforts-Disputed!

Summary of the eRumor The eRumor says that Senator John Kerry's wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, donates millions of dollars to The Tides Foundation. The eRumor says that the foundation supports various antiwar groups including one that offered to defend Saddam Hussein, another that seeks to ease restrictions on immigration from Muslin terrorist states, a group that has close relations with the terrorist group Hamas, and a radical Hispanic group that advocates returning all of California, Arizona, New Mexico and Arizona to Mexico.


The Truth This story is a complex one and each side has its own explanation. It got started with a report in December of 2003 by the Capitol Research Center, a conservative watchdog group in Washington, DC. It was quoted in several newspapers including the Washington Times and the Wall Street Journal. The report was titled "The Tides Foundation...Liberal Crossroads of Money and Ideas." It explored the founding of the organization and a companion group called the Tides Center and charged that they are used as channels for wealthy liberals to make donations to activist causes but without being tied directly to the activist organizations. The article didn't focus on Teresa Heinz Kerry or the Heinz Endowments but did use Heinz donations as an example of what it was describing. It claimed that between 1999 and 2001 the Howard Heinz endowment, one of two of the Heinz endowments, donated $4,298,500 to the Tides Foundation or the Tides Center. There is no dispute that the Tides Foundation and Tides Center fund liberal groups. But supporters of Teresa Heinz Kerry say the Heinz Endowments donations have been for specific projects in Pennsylvania. They liken the Tides Foundation and Tides Center to the United Way through which donations can be given for a specific group or cause and don't suggest that there is support for all the other United Way organizations. A statement by the Tides Foundation disputes the Capitol Research Center's estimate of more than four million dollars in donations to Tides. It says that the Heinz Endowments have given only $230,000 to the Foundation and that was between 1994 and 1998 and used solely to support a "pollution prevention initiative and other environmentally friendly practices by industries in Western Pennsylvania." Confusingly, however, a document on the Heinz Endowments website itemizes its own donations to the Tides Foundation and the Tides center, which total $8,116,000 between 1994 and 2004. Both the Tides Foundation and the Heinz Endowments are headquartered in Pennsylvania. The president of the Heinz Endowments, Maxwell King, said that any of the articles that charged that donations were being secretly given to political activist groups are wrong. One of the contentions of the Capitol Research Center that some of the donations are "fungible," meaning that they can be used for something other than the stated reason for the donation. In a response to an article about all this in the Washington Times in March, 2004, King said, "In fact, by contract, every penny of our support to Tides has been explicitly directed to specific projects in our region. It cannot legally be redirected and is the exact opposite of 'fungible.'" So the bottom line is that the Tides Foundation and the Tides Centers do provide grants to many left-wing activist organizations. The Heinz Endowments to make sizable donations to the Tides Foundation and the Tides Centers. But there is dispute over whether any of those Heinz donations find their way into some of the leftist causes that are mentioned in the eRumor. Heinz supporters say they do not and that the money donated has gone to specific community causes in Pennsylvania. Heinz critics say the Tides organizations exist, in part, to provide ways of making donations to activist groups in secret so the Heinz contributions should be scrutinized. Last updated 7/13/04
A real example of the eRumor as it has appeared on the Internet:
Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry. Married Senator Kerry in 1995. She only took his name eighteen months ago and she is an "interesting" paradox of conflicts. If you thought John Kerry was scary, he doesn't hold a candle to his wife! Maria Teresa Thiersten Simoes-Ferreira Heinz Kerry was born in Mozambique, the daughter of a Portuguese physician, was educated in Switzerland and South Africa. Fluent in five languages, she was working as a United Nations interpreter in Geneva in the mid-60's when she met a "handsome" young American, H. John Heinz, III, who worked at a bank in Geneva. He told her his family was "in the food business." They were married in 1966 and returned to Pittsburgh where his family ran the giant H. J. Heinz food company. He was elected to the US House of Representatives in 1971, and in 1976 he was elected to the first of three terms in the United States Senate. A Republican, he wrote a burning diatribe against some of the causes backed by young House member John Kerry. Several years later, in 1991, he was killed when his plane collided with a Sun Oil Company helicopter over a Philadelphia suburb. The senator, his pilot and copilot, and both of Sun's helicopter pilots were killed. He was survived by his wife, Teresa, and their three young sons. Four years later, having inherited Heinz's $500 million fortune, she married Senator John Forbes Kerry, the liberal then-junior senator from Massachusetts. She became a registered Democrat and the process of her radicalization was set in motion. Heinz Kerry is not shy about telling people that she required Kerry to sign a prenuptial agreement before they were married. John Kerry may not have check writing privileges on the Heinz catsup and pickle fortune, but he is certainly a willing and uncomplaining beneficiary of it. A lot of hard-earned money, made through many years of hawking catsup, mustard, and pickles has fallen into the hands of two people who despise successful entrepreneurship and who believe in the confiscatory redistribution of wealth. So how does Mrs. Heinz Kerry spend John Heinz's money? Just one example: According to the G2 Bulletin, an online intelligence newsletter of WorldNetDaily, in the years between 1995-2001 she gave more than $4 million to an organization called the Tides Foundation. And what does the Tides Foundation do with John Heinz's money? They support numerous antiwar groups, including Ramsey Clark's International Action Center. Clark has offered to defend Saddam Hussein when he's tried. They support the Democratic Justice Fund, a joint venture of the Tides Foundation and billionaire hate-monger George Soros. The Democratic Justice Fund seeks to ease restrictions on Muslim immigration from "terrorist" states. They support the Council for American-Islamic Relations, whose leaders are known to have close ties to the terrorist group, Hamas. They support the National Lawyers Guild, organized as a communist front during the Cold War era. One of their attorneys, Lynne Stewart, has been arrested for helping a client, Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, communicate with terror cells in Egypt. He is the convicted mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. They support the "Barrio Warriors," a radical Hispanic group whose primary goal is to return all of Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Texas to Mexico. These are but a few of the radical groups that benefit, through the anonymity provided by the Tides Foundation, from the generosity of our would-be first lady, the wealthy widow of Republican senator John Heinz, and now the wife of the Democratic senator who aspires to be the 44th President of the United States. Aiding and supporting our enemies is not good for America, regardless of your political views.