Geraldine Ferraro: GERALDINE FERRARO, who has died aged 75, was the first woman chosen by a major American political party to be its vice-presidential candidate. Though firmly established in the history books as Walter Mondale's 1984 running mate, she was, in fact, far from his first choice.
When it became evident Mondale would lead the Democrats’ battle against a second term for Ronald Reagan, he originally wanted to run with Tom Bradley, the highly respected black mayor of Los Angeles. But Bradley, who had only narrowly been beaten in the California gubernatorial election two years earlier, was then 66 and thought unlikely to appeal to young voters, an important segment for any Democrat campaign.
With his first choice ruled out by the party hierarchs, Mondale wavered across a broad field of alternatives. One of his principal rivals for the nomination, the Colorado senator Gary Hart, emerged briefly as a favourite until press accounts of his colourful personal life began to appear. Mondale began to work through politically acceptable alternatives.
The Mexican-American mayor of San Antonio, Henry Cisneros, came briefly into focus, but failed on the opposite grounds to Bradley: Cisneros was only a year older than the minimum age for the vice-presidency. With a slight air of desperation, Mondale began considering the then revolutionary idea of choosing a woman. He finally turned to the chairwoman of the committee then hammering out the party’s 1984 election manifesto, Geraldine Ferraro.
She was a classic example of what Americans like to see in themselves. Her parents had emigrated from Italy after the first World War. After her father died when she was eight, her mother moved to New York City to work as a seamstress, while her highly intelligent daughter clawed her way up the educational ladder.
The young Geraldine was advanced by three years to race through Marymount high school and win a university scholarship to Marymount College (now part of Fordham University). After graduation, she began working as a schoolteacher, but also devoted five years to evening classes at Fordham Law School so that she could gain legal qualifications.
In 1960 she married a Manhattan property developer, John Zaccaro. Though Ferraro was admitted to the New York bar, the birth of their three children meant that for the next 14 years she could only practise part-time. She nonetheless became highly active in the city’s Democratic party and in 1974 was appointed an assistant district attorney for Queens County. In that position she eventually specialised in cases of rape, child abuse and domestic violence, but resigned noisily when she discovered that, because she was married, she was being paid less than her male colleagues.
She decided that the answer to such injustices could only be found in politics and in 1978 ran successfully in Queens for its House of Representatives seat. She quickly demonstrated her political nous by becoming a close ally of the speaker of the Democrat-controlled House, Tip O’Neill. Throughout 1980, as the Carter administration was ground down by the Iranian hostage crisis, O’Neill became the nation’s most powerful Democrat. The following year, he spearheaded the party’s opposition to the newly installed Reagan White House.
As part of that battle, he appointed Ferraro to the powerful budget committee (only the House has the constitutional power to raise revenue), where she fought a sustained battle against the new administration’s economic policies. She also served on the select committee on ageing, using the position to resist Reagan’s attempts to reduce pensions and medical care for the elderly. On a wider front, she was a passionate advocate for the proposed constitutional amendment to guarantee equal rights for women, a measure that eventually failed to gain support from the required number of states.
Against this background it should have been apparent to Mondale that he was dealing with a pretty tough character, but he seemed not to grasp the problems that lay ahead. In the preliminary discussions before her nomination, Mondale’s campaign organisers thought it had been agreed they would mastermind Ferraro’s campaign activities. It was never quite clear from the recriminations that followed where the relationship started to unravel, but it seems to have happened almost from the start.
The new team’s first planning session ended in a blazing row, with Ferraro accusing Mondale’s staff of patronising her.
No sooner had Ferraro embarked on her campaigning than she exploded a bombshell by casually telling reporters she would not conform to the 1978 Ethics in Government Act, which required details of her own and her husband’s tax records.
“If you’re married to an Italian man, you know what it’s like,” she commented, apparently lightheartedly.
To the horror of the Mondale team, the ensuing row dominated the election for the next 10 days. It grew worse when Ferraro bowed under overwhelming public pressure and released the family’s records. They showed her owing more than $50,000 in back taxes and her husband involved in more than $300,000-worth of illegal loans. The campaign, already in deep trouble from Mondale’s pledge to raise income tax, never really recovered: Reagan won 49 of the 50 states and 98 per cent of the electoral college vote.
Ferraro continued her political career in various appointive offices, though she made an unsuccessful bid for the US Senate in 1992.
In 1993 President Bill Clinton chose her as an American delegate to the UN Human Rights Commission, and she pursued a successful media career, offering political commentaries for CNN.
In June 2001 she disclosed she had a cancerous disease of the blood affecting the immune system.
She is survived by her husband, their three children, Donna, John and Laura, and eight grandchildren.
Geraldine Ann Ferraro: born August 26th, 1935; died March 26th, 2011