Great Barrington — Forty years ago, during the 1984 presidential campaign, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale announced that he would choose Geraldine Ferraro to be his vice presidential running mate.
At the time, Ferraro was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. She was first elected in 1978 for New York’s 9th District.
While the Mondale-Ferraro ticket did not win the election in 1984, over the years, many female politicians have cited Ferraro’s candidacy as influential.
In 2013, Ferraro’s daughter Donna Zaccaro produced and directed a documentary about her mother, “Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way.”
In 2020, 36 years after the Mondale-Ferraro campaign, Kamala Harris became the first female vice president when she was elected along with President Joseph Biden. Subsequently, 40 years after the Mondale-Ferraro campaign, Vice President Harris is now the Democratic presidential candidate.
In light of the relevance to the current presidential campaign, The Triplex Cinema will be showing Zaccaro’s documentary at a special event on Sunday, September 15, at 3 p.m.
Following the screening there will be a discussion of both the documentary and Harris’ current presidential campaign with both Zaccaro and journalist Letty Cottin Pogrebin.
The documentary traces Ferraro’s life starting with her childhood, including her father dying when she was just eight years old and her growing up in the South Bronx.
As an adult, Ferraro worked as an attorney in Queens, N.Y., and eventually worked in the Queens County District Attorney’s Office, including as assistant district attorney. During that time, she started the Special Victims Bureau and worked in the office until she was elected to Congress in 1978.
The documentary also looks examines Mondale-Ferraro campaign through archive footage and interviews with Ferraro before she died in 2011 from multiple myeloma. “I interviewed her a year and a half before she died,” Zaccaro told The Berkshire Edge. “At that point, she was incapacitated and confined to a wheelchair. I knew she didn’t have much time left, and I interviewed her for a full day. My mother was always easy to talk to and always open.”
Zaccaro added that, even at the end of her life, her mother was still very active. “She was in so much tremendous pain,” Zaccaro said. “Multiple myeloma causes lesions in your bones, then your whole skeletal structure collapses. She had broken bones all over the place and she was in a lot of pain, but she would still talk to any multiple myeloma patient who contacted her to try to provide hope and help. She was trying to get more funding for research into it, and she was also trying to help Democratic candidates running for office, particularly women candidates. She also had a former law partner with whom she was helping with a case.”
Zaccaro said that one of the questions she wanted to ask her mother was what was the source of her drive to keep working. “I asked her why do you feel the need to keep going, to keep working?” Zaccaro said. “I told her, ‘You don’t need to prove anything else. Why do you keep going?’ Then, she looked at me as if it was the most stupid question I could have asked her. She then told me, ‘If you don’t use where you are to help somebody else, then what are you here for?’ Her mission was to help people.”
Zaccaro said that helping people was the reason why her mother started the Special Victims Bureau in Queens. “It was the first one that ever existed because she saw all of these victims of sex crimes, crimes against senior citizens, and child abuse cases that had to be treated in a special way,” Zaccaro said. “She was always driven, and her life was all about making things better for other people.”
Zaccaro said that creating the film was “very difficult” for her. “Everything was difficult,” she explained. “This was the most difficult project I’ve worked on professionally. I didn’t go look at my interview with her until after she died, and I should have because there are other things I should have asked her, but I only realized this after she died.”
Zaccaro interviewed many famous political figures about her mother for the film, including former President George H.W. Bush, former First Lady Barbara Bush, former President Bill Clinton, and former Secretary of State and presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.
“The goal of this documentary was to make it journalistic,” Zaccaro said. “It’s not a tribute, and it’s not a home movie. I see myself as a journalist more than anything else. The premise was that, during the 1984 campaign, how she conducted herself during that campaign would have an impact, win or lose. I believe that to be the case which I show in the film. But there is also a legacy from that campaign, and there are lessons from my mother’s life that I wanted to share. The film shows the good, bad, and ugly, but also all of the positive things from that campaign and my mother’s life.”
Zaccaro said that there are many lessons that she hopes people will take with them in viewing the documentary. “My mother was taught her whole life that she could be anything she wanted to be,” Zaccaro said. “It was an unusual message for her to get. She had an uncle say to her mother, ‘What does she need to go to college for? She’s pretty and she’ll get married.’ She had a law professor once tell her, ‘You are taking a man’s place.’ She wasn’t the only one who was told that. There’s a message here in her story that if you work hard in America, you can get ahead. I think that the story of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is that they are the American dream. My mother felt very honored to have had this opportunity to try and help others realize that they could better themselves.”
Zaccaro said her mother “would be so thrilled and proud” of Kamala Harris for becoming the first female vice president and now the Democratic presidential candidate. “There are so many parallels between my mother and Kamala Harris,” she added. “They were both raised by single mothers, and they recognized the importance of an education. They were both attorneys and prosecutors dealing with the same sorts of cases, working to help and protect others. Kamala has been doing such a great job since stepping into the role of vice president and now a presidential candidate. My mother would be really happy right now, but she would also say ‘Now we have to win.’”
Visit The Triplex’s website for more information about its screening of “Geraldine Ferraro: Paving the Way.”
