Heidi Hanson

April 4, 1950 - January 6, 2025

In 1978, as a member of Jimmy Carter's State Department, Heidi Hanson went on a goodwill tour of Africa with the President's mother and unofficial diplomat "Miz Lillian." On a stop at a remote village in what was then Upper Volta, Ms. Carter pushed Heidi onto the lap of the morho naba (great lord) and suggested that she become the newest of his many wives. A voice called out from the crowd, "Heidi… Heidi Hanson? Did you go to our class reunion this year?" No matter where she went in the world, the odds were uncanny that Heidi would know someone, and this time it was a missionary who had gone to high school with her in Birmingham, Alabama.

Heidi Ann Hanson, who died on January 6 at 74 after a long struggle with cancer, had the sort of legendary charisma and beauty that one associates with a very favored youth. Friends and family called her "Heidi High School" throughout her life of serious purpose. (Miz Lillian mischievously nicknamed her "Booger.") There was some irony in her perpetual in-crowd aura, for during her childhood in Birmingham, her parents were classic "outside agitators" fighting the ruthless racism that prevailed in the city Martin Luther King Jr. called the most segregated in America.

The family had left Los Angeles, CA in 1953, three years after Heidi was born, when her father, Roger Hanson, an Iowan with a new Ph.D. from UCLA in zoology and pharmacology, was recruited to help build the medical center at the University of Alabama in Birmingham. Heidi's mother, a classically trained opera singer from Minnesota, made her name in Birmingham as Bette Lee, a TV and radio celebrity whose own perky blondeness belied her subversive liberalism, enabling her to spike her fashion and food beat with stories about legalized abortion in Sweden and the threat of nuclear war.

While the elder Hansons worked for desegregation behind the scenes, Heidi pursued the phase-appropriate holy grail of alpha-girl popularity. It was the beauty pageants on top of the cheerleading that put her mother over the edge, almost as much as the death threats the parents were getting. "We know which way your children walk home from school," an anonymous phone caller informed Roger, not long after he had overheard a Klansman at a pro-school-desegregation forum that Bette was covering say, "That Commie doesn't need a microphone in her hand, she needs a bullet in her head."

In July 1964, Roger took a university teaching job in Java, Indonesia, sponsored by the State Department's USAID in order to get his family to safer ground. (They had to cut their intended two-year stay in half because of the unrest leading up to the CIA-backed coup against the Jakarta government in 1965.) Heidi, who had been sent to an international boarding school in the Philippines, was back home with the family in Birmingham in time to finish high school, as a cheerleader and "Best Looking" in the Class Who's Who.

Bette said no way to Heidi's plans to attend the University of Alabama. She settled for Goucher, a women's college outside Baltimore, and went on to get a master's degree at Washington University in St. Louis. She returned home to work and teach as a psychiatric social worker around the time director Bob Rafelson was on location filming his 1976 movie about Birmingham "society," Stay Hungry, following up his Oscar-nominated Five Easy Pieces. The movie's producer competed for Heidi's attention with Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was in his first starring role (alongside Jeff Bridges and Sally Field). At the wrap party—kindly hosted by Heidi's parents because the budget had been shot—Schwarzenegger asked Bette for her professional opinion of his chances as an actor. "Arnold," she replied, "with that accent, you'll never make it in Hollywood."

Such was the professional experience that landed Heidi a job as a Hollywood coordinator for Jimmy Carter's 1976 presidential campaign. She became "Darling Heidi" to Shirley MacLaine and, predictably, caught the eye of her brother, Warren Beatty. After the election, President Carter put Heidi at the State Department in Assistant Secretary Patricia Derian's groundbreaking Bureau of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, which (finally) made human rights a pillar of U.S. foreign policy. Heidi's flashiest assignment was to negotiate the fate of 101 destitute Haitians who washed up at Guantanamo in August 1977. After suggesting that the refugees be considered for asylum on a case-by-case basis (rather than treated collectively as a diplomatic albatross), Heidi was put on a military plane to Cuba to take on a job so unexpected of a 27-year-old woman that the nametag the Navy had waiting said "Mr. Hanson."

Heidi went on to other jobs in the Carter administration and became an intimate of the First Family, living in the White House for a time when she was dating the President's son Chip. On Election Night 1980, Heidi sat with the Carters in the White House watching the returns, and she flew out of Washington with them to Georgia on Ronald Reagan's Inauguration Day. In Atlanta, she joined Ted Turner's new cable television network and relocated to New York to produce CNN's Freeman Reports (forerunner of Larry King Live) out of the World Trade Center.

Making her way back to Washington, Heidi eventually became a successful lobbyist and also maintained her Hollywood contacts. She served as a fixer for her pal Goldie Hawn's 1984 comedy set in Washington, Protocol, and stayed in touch with Arnold, who would show up when she needed him to headline a fundraiser. Arriving in Las Vegas to promote an education nonprofit, the Terminator spotted Heidi in the crowd that was being restrained by police and said, "Heidi, does your mother think I've made it yet?"

At 39, Heidi was introduced to Michael Kaiser, a Harvard rugby player and doctoral candidate nearly eight years her junior. He was the one for whom she was willing to turn in the tiara. Heidi talked Michael into leaving Harvard and moving to Washington, where he did counterintelligence and foreign interventions for the U.S. Government. They married in 1990.

While battling simultaneous cases of cancer, both had to take an early retirement and moved to Maryland's Eastern Shore. Heidi beat bladder cancer, breast cancer, brain cancer, and small-cell lung cancer before the brain cancer came for her again. True to form, she sustained her Heidi High School spirit in the face of utmost doom. She was so much more than her accomplishments: a big, generous personality with the southerner's zest for exaggeration; the go-to person for tips on fashion and interior design; a friend who earned love and gave lifelong loyalty.

In addition to husband of 35 years, Michael, Heidi is survived by her brother, Eric, nine nieces and nephews, 16 grand-nieces and -nephews, and a bevy of friends and admirers, including the Carter administration comrades who buried the late President the week of Heidi's passing.

Heidi didn't want a funeral to mark her death. She wanted a celebration to mark her life. She will be getting three: one for friends and family in Washington, DC another on the Eastern Shore, and a third for loved ones in Minnesota and Iowa. In lieu of flowers and cards, Heidi's two favorite nonprofit organizations were Talbot Hospice, 586 Cynwood Drive, Easton, MD, 21601, and For All Seasons, 300 Talbot Street, Easton, MD, 21601.