Ferraro and the Family Trials : Atmosphere of Mistrust Spills Over on Candidates’ Private Lives, She Complains

Two flights up from the street in Little Italy, in the decidedly unplush offices of P. Zaccaro Real Estate, Geraldine Ferraro relaxed into a chair, carefully ignoring the mountain of papers on the desk behind her.

“My desk is so loaded, I hate looking at it,” she said in the same fast, Queens-accented voice that for four months in 1984 rose to national recognition when then-Rep. Ferraro became the first woman to run for vice president for a major party. “That’s why I’m sitting with my back to it.”

Book, Speeches, Trials

Ferraro’s second book is in the word processor. There are speeches almost every week, all over the country. Former Assistant Dist. Atty. Ferraro would like to go back to practicing law, specializing in trade, but first there is the upcoming trial in New York, now scheduled for next Monday, of husband John Zaccaro on charges of bribe-seeking and attempted extortion. Before the end of the year, Ferraro hopes their son John, 24, will face his own much-postponed trial in Vermont for possession and attempted sale of cocaine.

“All I have ever asked is that they be dealt with fairly,” Ferraro said of the family’s legal morass.

But in tones not entirely unreminiscent of former Democratic presidential aspirant Gary Hart, Ferraro expresses concern that her own public profile has compromised her family’s privacy. While carefully sidestepping any discussion of the substance of the cases pending against her husband and son, she laments that spouses and children of public figures become targets of what she contends is excessive scrutiny.

“In an atmosphere like today’s atmosphere, where corruption is on everyone’s lips,” Ferraro said, “there is a tremendous distrust of public figures.” That suspicion and lack of trust, Ferraro argues, spill over onto the families of those figures, so much so that she jokes to her husband that “When you die, John, I’m going to put on your tombstone, not just ‘John Zaccaro,’ but ‘John Zaccaro, husband of Geraldine Ferraro-ran-for-Vice-President-1984.’

“That’s the man’s name,” she said, and quips with a slight bite of bitterness that much the same name could apply to her son.

“That’s wrong,” Ferraro said. “They do have lives of their own.”

In the case of Ferraro’s husband, allegations of wrongdoings by Zaccaro in real estate transactions ate away at her image and became a factor in her campaign. Almost as soon as she was nominated for the vice presidency, the financing of Ferraro’s early congressional campaigns became an issue. Talk of possible Mafia connections sent reporters scouring through the family closets for Cosa Nostra-approved skeletons. The resulting cloud hovered hard over Ferraro’s own integrity.

While daughter Donna was steaming through Harvard Business School and daughter Laura studied drama at Brown, John Zaccaro was earning the nickname of “The Pharmacist” at Middlebury College in Vermont. Soon after the 1984 vice presidential defeat, when Ferraro made her controversial television commercial for Pepsi, a spoof of the college paper’s ran a parody featuring a picture of John Zaccaro. “My mom may drink Pepsi,” read the caption that ran two months before young Zaccaro was busted, “but I like Coke.”

“I was talking to John’s lawyer the other day,” Ferraro said, “and he said to me, ‘Remember, this is the biggest case the D.A. up there has ever had and will ever have.’ ”

Ferraro said she was appalled, pointing out that the lawyer’s statement implied the local authorities “had never handled a rape or a homicide.”

Ferraro’s voice grew tight. “What my son is accused of is selling one-quarter of a grain of cocaine to an undercover agent. How can you compare that to a rape or a homicide?”

In her own career in the district attorney’s office, Ferraro said she was “extraordinarily sensitive” to the ramifications indictments and even allegations of crimes could have on personal lives. Ferraro ran the D.A.’s special victims bureau, where her clients were “elderly victims, victims of sex crimes, that kind of thing.”

Her sudden laugh sounded hollow. “(New York Dist. Atty. John J.) Santucci, the guy who indicted my husband, was my boss,” she said.

Indictment is Damaging

Recalling the case of an attorney accused, and later acquitted, of rape, Ferraro said, “You can ruin a person’s reputation with just an indictment.”

Then the famous Ferraro barbed-wire tongue came out. “You can indict anyone. You can indict a bologna sandwich, I’m telling you.”

Still untitled, and as yet unsold to a publisher, Ferraro’s new book will address precisely those issues.

“It’s about the press,” she said. “The press and the First Amendment.”

In it, she will drawn on “a lot of personal stuff” as she discusses “the role of the press and how they deal with political figures.” Specifically, Ferraro said she will focus on “First Amendment vs. Sixth Amendment rights,” that is, the possible conflict between rights of free expression and the right to privacy.

In a recent speech on what is clearly among her pet topics, Ferraro pointed to the case of Rep. Mario Biaggi (D-N.Y.), whose trial for fraud and conspiracy went to the jury last Friday. “The week before they were supposed to start picking a jury,” Ferraro recalled, several news organizations had sued to have “the tapes that the prosecutor was going to use in the course of the trial released.”

The contents made headlines, Ferraro said, “and I guess they were assuming they could pick a jury that did not read newspapers, watch television or listen to the radio.”

No Right to Privacy

Ferraro’s suddenly intense expression suggested more than a little empathy as she remarked that “Mario Biaggi is a public official, and he has given up his right to privacy.”

She pursed her lips. “My point was that when the tapes came out during the course of evidence a week and a half later, that was sufficient for the public to know. You have a right to know,” she said, “but you do not have a right to know prior to when the jury knows it. I have no problem with delaying the release of evidence in cases like this.”

Still, Ferraro insists the book she has been working on for the better part of a year “is not going to be Geraldine Ferraro sitting down and complaining about things, because I’m not.” Nor, she said, will it be purely an attack on the institution she once longed to join, the press.

“What I find absolutely hysterical is that when I started college, I wanted to be a journalism major and my mother talked me out of it,” Ferraro said. Jobs in journalism were scarce for women 35 years ago, so Ferraro heeded her mother’s entreaties and became first a teacher, later a lawyer.

“At 52, I’m beginning to do what I wanted to do when I was 16,” she said.

At 52, Ferraro also misses politics.

“I miss being in the middle of everything. I miss the decision-making, the policy-making,” she said. “What I do not miss at all is being a vice presidential candidate, not at all.”

Would she run for office again?

“Sure, but there doesn’t happen to be one around that I could run for. I’m certainly not going to run for president or vice president.” Another laugh, this one big and solid. “We can mark those two off.”

Not that Ferraro feels totally isolated from politics. She is deluged with mail: “Dear Ms. Ferraro,” she recited, her voice now a child’s singsong, “I’m writing a term paper about you, and . . .” And she says her former Capitol Hill colleagues have not forgotten her. “My buddies,” Ferraro said, “I still talk to quite frequently.”

For example, Ferraro and Rep. Patricia Schroeder (D-Colo.) had extensive conversations early in the summer when the latter was starting to explore a run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

While skeptical that a woman could carry the ticket in 1988, Ferraro said she admired Schroeder’s gumption.

“I wouldn’t have had the nerve to run in the primaries,” she said. “I was picked.”

Though her losing campaign on the Democratic ticket with former Vice President Walter Mondale of Minnesota effectively halted her political career, Ferraro said she does not consider the effort a complete failure.

“What we did, first of all, we showed that a woman physically and emotionally could deal with campaigning,” she said. “We also made people very aware that women have a stake in the future of politics in this country.

“Part of the legacy of the 1984 campaign,” Ferraro went on, “is that we showed that a woman candidate could raise money.”

For women on a national campaign level, “I think the door has been opened. I think that for people to accept the fact that a woman could be in the vice presidential slot, they have to accept the fact that a woman could be President,” Ferraro said. “You don’t vote for a vice president. You vote for a President.”

Now, she said, “No one is going to say a woman can’t run for top office.”

One name frequently mentioned as a possible contender for vice president is that of Elizabeth Hanford Dole, who, stepped down as secretary of transportation earlier this month in order to devote herself to the presidential campaign of her husband, Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.). Ferraro, a woman who has stood by her own spouse, heartily endorsed Dole’s decision.

Phenomenal Asset

“I think he is a very fortunate person to have a woman in politics like her,” Ferraro said. “She is going to be able to campaign for him in a way very few spouses can. She’s a phenomenal asset.”

As for persistent “silly talk” of a Dole-Dole ticket, Ferraro is quick to point out that the Constitution forbids a President and vice president who hail from the same state.

Often called on to comment on the subject of women in politics, Ferraro stresses that women must be considered for their roles at every level of the political process.

“If you’re talking about women in politics, you’ve got to talk about women in politics in every single direction,” she said. “Not only women candidates. Spouses, too. They’re in politics too.”

In the case of the Doles, “had the situation been reversed, if he were the Cabinet officer and she were the candidate, I do not doubt that they would have exerted the same pressure for him to step down,” Ferraro said.

But she admits such a scenario is unlikely. “The problem is that we don’t have women ready to do that,” she said. “We don’t have women ready to run.

“You’ve got to have women running in the primaries,” Ferraro said. “The more women get in those races and show they are willing to put themselves out there, the better.”

On the other hand, she put herself out there, becoming the country’s first female vice presidential candidate, “and now I’m unemployed, how do you like that?”

Soon after the election in 1984, Ferraro and her family escaped to St. Croix for a little Caribbean rest. Bemoaning the defeat, Ferraro asked her three children if the ordeal had been worth it. “And they said, ‘Are you kidding? It was an incredible experience.’ ”

Beneficial Experience

For the Ferraro/Zaccaro family: “it was four months, we never expected it to happen,” Ferraro said. “There’s no way you could take that little piece of history and say it was not a benefit.”

Now Ferraro did turn and face the mound of papers scattered about her desk.

“These people still exist, they still write letters,” she said. “It was not me personally that changed things, it was the candidacy.

“In that candidacy, women could see themselves being finally able to have opportunities that they never expected to have. That’s what came out of that campaign. It was the feeling that the candidacy was something they could be part of.”

For now, Ferraro is busy standing by her husband and son. “My personal life comes first,” she said. “And that I hope will be taken care of by the end of the year.”

Quickly, she hurried back to less tender turf. “I am not going to be in an elective office,” she said, “but I will be involved.

“Definitely, we are going to have a Democrat in the White House in 1988,” Ferraro pronounced with rock-solid certainty. “I intend on working very hard to help that person get there.”