Geraldine Ferraro was the first woman on a major party’s presidential ticket. Geraldine Ferraro dies at 75

Geraldine Ferraro, the Queens congresswoman who made history as the first woman to serve on a major party’s presidential ticket, died Saturday. She was 75.

Her family said she passed away at Massachusetts General Hospital of complications from multiple myeloma, a blood cancer she struggled with for 12 years.


Eager to shake up a race he was losing, Walter Mondale chose Ferraro as his running mate on the Democrats’ 1984 ticket. The pair lost the race badly, carrying only Minnesota and the District of Columbia against Ronald Reagan, but Ferraro became an inspiration for women in both parties to get into politics.

“Every time a woman runs, women win,” Ferraro famously said.

Former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright served as Ferraro’s foreign policy adviser on the 1984 campaign and recalled that the New Yorker drew large, enthusiastic crowds but also tough scrutiny.

“When she stepped up on the stage at the San Francisco convention, that really opened the door in so many different ways,” Albright told POLITICO. “People questioned, frankly, whether a woman could do foreign policy. They asked her if she could press the nuclear button — questions they don’t ask men. But she cut through it all.”

Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.), who now represents part of Ferraro’s old district and named a post office after her in Queens, was at the Moscone Center in San Francisco that July night when the then-48-year-old, three-term House member accepted the vice-presidential nomination.

“It was the ultimate breaking of the glass ceiling,” Maloney said in an interview Saturday. “She gave that glorious speech in that white suit and they I remember they put me on television because I had tears running down my face.”

Her voice breaking, Maloney called Ferraro “a wonderful friend, a role model and a mentor to me.”

Mondale remembered with pride his “very feisty” running mate, whom he last spoke with two weeks ago.

“She was very competitive and effective and had a spirited belief in social justice,” he told the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Sarah Palin, the only other woman to be a major party’s nominee for vice president, recalled chatting with Ferraro on election night last November about “our excited expectation that someday that final glass ceiling would be shattered by the election of a woman president.”

“To be a pioneer means you go before others and prepare the way,” Palin said on Fox News. “She plowed through so many things that have allowed the rest of us to be able to progress because [of her], standing on her shoulders. I just can’t say enough good things about what it is she accomplished.”

Ferraro, an outspoken feminist, worked intensely for women’s equality through groups like Emily’s List, which issued a statement praising her, and on behalf of other female candidates. She was a high-profile surrogate for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign in 2008 and made waves for repeatedly accusing the media of sexist coverage.

Ferraro became a harsh critic of Barack Obama and his candidacy as Clinton faltered. After suggesting that Obama was ahead “in large measure because he is black,” she resigned her position on Clinton’s finance committee in March 2008. The president, who called Ferraro’s comments “patently absurd” three years ago, put old grudges aside in a Saturday statement.

“Sasha and Malia will grow up in a more equal America because of the life Geraldine Ferraro chose to live,” Obama said.

Bill and Hillary Clinton issued a joint statement, calling her “a New York icon and a true American original.”

“Gerry Ferraro was one of a kind — tough, brilliant, and never afraid to speak her mind or stand up for what she believed in,” they said.

Virtually every woman who matters in politics rushed to express condolences, including tea party firebrand and likely Republican presidential candidate Michele Bachmann. “Our politics may have differed, but today I pay tribute to a pioneer in American history,” Bachmann said Saturday in a Facebook posting.

Ferraro was a power player in New York politics for decades. After four years in the Queens County district attorney office, she won her U.S. House seat in 1978. She lost Democratic primaries for the U.S. Senate in 1992 and 1998, but her endorsement remained especially valuable.

“The attacks against her were vicious, but she always carried herself with dignity throughout the process,” said George Arzt, a longtime public relations man in New York who was Mayor Ed Koch’s press secretary and knew Ferraro since the 1970s.

Geraldine Anne Ferraro was born on Aug. 26, 1935, in Newburgh, N.Y.

Her father, an Italian immigrant, died when she was 8. Her mother was a seamstress. Ferraro got a law degree from Fordham University by going to classes at night while working as a second-grade public school teacher.

After taking some time to raise her kids and volunteering in local civic groups, she got a job in 1974 as an assistant district attorney in Queens County [her cousin had been elected D.A.]. She specialized in prosecuting sex crimes, family violence and child abuse.

In 1978, she was elected to the House from a conservative district in Queens.

Former Rep. Elizabeth Holtzman, another pioneering New York Democrat who was the first female district attorney in Brooklyn and the city’s first female comptroller, recalled the day in 1978 when Ferraro came to her to ask for political advice.

Holtzman had been elected to the House six years earlier when, at age 31, she defeated the senior-most House member and the then-Chairman of the Judiciary Committee, Emanuel Celler, in a primary.

“She wanted to run against [former Rep.] Jim Delaney, who had also served in Congress for years,” Holtzman recounted of Ferraro in an interview Saturday. “I said, ‘Don’t you think you should run for something lower than Congress in your first try for elected office?’ She said, ‘No, I can do it,’ and of course she was right and my hesitation was wrong.”

Delaney, the chair of New York’s delegation and House Rules Committee Chairman, ultimately retired that year and Ferraro won in a three-way primary.

Rep. Joe Crowley (D-N.Y.), the head of the borough’s Democratic organization, said Ferraro “was bigger than life in Queens politics” and inspired other women to get involved in its rough-and-tumble brand of urban politics.

“She was Queens’s own,” Crowley said in an interview. “She was Geraldine Ferraro from Forest Hill, Queens, and she walked and talked like a Queens gal.”

Maloney recalled attending a NOW meeting in New York and seeing Ferraro’s first campaign poster before even meeting the candidate. It said: “Finally, A Tough Democrat.”

Ferraro won reelection in 1980 and 1982 by increasingly large margins. Her closeness with Speaker Tip O’Neill allowed her to become the Secretary to the House Democratic Caucus after only one term. In Congress, she opposed busing black students into white areas. Though Catholic, she strongly supported abortion rights.

In 1984, she garnered attention as the first woman to head of the Democratic National Committee’s platform committee.

Mondale hoped that Ferraro could bring independent women voters into his coalition.

His strategists liked that she would be the first Italian-American major party nominee. They figured the ethnic background would help Democrats win back some of the blue-collar voters Jimmy Carter hemorrhaged to Reagan four years earlier in urban areas in the Northeast and Midwest.

Time Magazine heralded her selection on its cover as “ A Historic Choice.” The bold move initially helped Mondale, who had served four years as Jimmy Carter’s vice president, tighten a 16-point gap in the polls.

“Change is in the air, just as surely as when John Kennedy beckoned America to a new frontier; when Sally Ride rocketed into space and when Rev. Jesse Jackson ran for the office of president of the United States,” Ferraro told Democratic delegates in her July 1984 acceptance speech. “By choosing a woman to run for our nation’s second highest office, you sent a powerful signal to all Americans. There are no doors we cannot unlock. We will place no limits on achievement. If we can do this, we can do anything.”

The hype didn’t last long.

Problematically, she had never been thoroughly vetted or faced intense scrutiny. For several weeks, critical press reports about the refusal of Ferraro’s husband, real estate developer John Zaccaro, to release his tax returns put the Mondale camp on the defensive.

Eventually, the campaign released Zaccaro’s tax returns, which showed Ferraro and her husband were far wealthier than she’d ever let on and included embarrassing disclosures that prompted Ferraro to hold a two-hour press conference to answer questions.

Ferraro complained publicly about how she was treated.

Reagan wound up with 55 percent of the women’s vote, according to exit polls. He even carried Ferraro’s House district.

Bigger issues were obviously at play too, including the booming economy and Mondale’s unpopular pledge to raise taxes.

Then-Vice President George H.W. Bush made a big issue of the family’s accounting problems during the 1984 campaign. Bush came under fire after a live microphone caught him telling supporters that he’d “kicked a little ass” after their one debate. But the two made up in later years.

“Though we were one-time political opponents, I am happy to say Gerry and I became friends in time — a friendship marked by respect and affection,” Bush said in a Saturday statement. “I admired Gerry in many ways, not the least of which was the dignified and principled manner she blazed new trails for women in politics.”

The scrutiny of the family’s finances continued after the 1984 campaign. The House Ethics Committee looked into her past financial disclosures, the Federal Election Commission fined her and Zacarro was sentenced to 150 hours of community service after pleading guilty in 1985 to a charge that he profited from a fraudulent real-estate transaction.

Ferraro returned to the public stage in the mid-1990s as a television political commentator and co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” where she squared off against Pat Buchanan. She served as a permanent member of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights from 1993 to 1996.

For Democrats, in retrospect, it’s sad that Ferraro left elected office at age 47. She would certainly have had a bright future if she remained in the House.

Christine Pelosi, the former House Speaker’s daughter, posted a picture on Twitter Saturday of a March 1987 fundraising solicitation that Ferraro wrote on behalf of Nancy Pelosi, then seeking her first term.

The parallels between Ferraro and Pelosi are obvious and extend far beyond gender. They were ethnic, urban, tough-as-nails and adept at working the levers of Washington power.

“As a woman and Italian American, my family and I loved her dearly and will miss her personally,” Nancy Pelosi said in a statement.

Eager to get back in the game, Ferraro ran unsuccessfully for the U.S. Senate twice.

History remembers 1992 as the “Year of the Woman,” but Ferraro lost by one point to Robert Abrams, the state attorney general, in the Democratic primary.

She tried again in 1998, but then-Rep. Chuck Schumer beat her 51 to 26 percent in the primary.

Ferraro went in to see her doctor for an annual checkup soon after she lost the 1998 primary. A blood test eventually led to the multiple myeloma diagnosis. The typical survival rate at the time was only three to five years. She had a bone marrow biopsy and went on steroids. Later, she was treated with an oral form of chemotherapy and experimented with a range of clinical trials for new drugs.

After keeping her illness private for two-and-a-half years, she decided to come out publicly in an effort to raise awareness for her relatively obscure form of cancer. She fully cooperated with an NBC special in 2001, testified before Congress, helped get more federal funding for research and pushed for faster approval of drugs from the FDA.

“Over the last few years, as Geraldine has struggled with illness, she demonstrated every day what it means to be courageous, to be strong and, no matter what the circumstance, to fight for what you believe,” New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, a close friend, said in a statement.

Even though she couldn’t win elections, she remained a sought-after power broker. Her endorsements were prized, and she offered a huge boost to Maloney when she faced a tough primary challenge last year.

“When she walked into a room, you knew that an elite member of the political scene was there,” said Arzt, her friend and a powerful consultant. “Everyone turned to her, and she was given tremendous respect.”

Congress was planning to honor Ferraro this year, Maloney said, but the former vice-presidential nominee wanted to wait until July at which point her grandson was going to be a congressional page. Up until she died, Ferraro was focused on public service, said Maloney.

“The last time I saw her was a few weeks ago and she had a constituent case she was concerned about,” Maloney recalled.

Former Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), who ran for president in 2000, invoked the words of Helen Keller as she mourned the loss of her friend: “One cannot consent to creep when one feels an impulse to soar.”

“Gerry Ferraro will always be remembered as an individual who inspired women to soar as far as our skills and talents could take us,” Dole said in an email.

Ferraro is survived by her husband of 50 years, three children and eight grandchildren.



Maggie Haberman, Richard E. Cohen and Andrew Glass contributed to this report.