Ukraine’s Reaganite First Lady

Although I have neither Ukrainian blood nor any special interest in foreign affairs, I have followed events in that country closely because a dear friend of mine, Katherine Chumachenko, is married to Yushchenko and about to become first lady of Ukraine.

Leading up to the election, I was called by Russian “reporters” looking for information on Kathy, or Katya, as she prefers today. I should say that they were looking for dirt, because the Russian press and its counterparts in Ukraine have been telling terrible lies about her for some time, saying that she is a CIA agent and other untruths designed solely to undermine her husband’s political support.

I know that these things are untrue because I was intimately involved in several of her career moves, which are now portrayed as some sort of nefarious plot to move Kathy into a position of power in Ukraine. If anyone is responsible, I am; not the CIA.

When I first met Kathy in 1987, she was working for the State Department in the human rights bureau. We met at a Heritage Foundation event where John Podhoretz, now a columnist for the New York Post and a Weekly Standard contributing editor, was speaking. Shortly thereafter, I went to work in the White House in the Office of Policy Development, headed by Gary Bauer. The Office of Public Liaison (OPL) was headed by Rebecca Range (née Gernhardt), whom I had known since my first days on Capitol Hill, when she was working for the late John Ashbrook, the conservative congressman from Ohio. (She is now married to Rep. Christopher Cox, whom she met when he was working in the White House counsel’s office for President Reagan.)

Public Liaison is the White House’s outreach office, which maintains contacts with groups and organizations viewed as politically important. In the Reagan White House, one of these groups was the Eastern Europeans, whose homelands still suffered under Communist tyranny and Soviet control. The Ukrainians were a key member of this coalition.

Shortly after I got to the White House, a position in OPL opened up for someone to work with the “captive nations,” as they were called. I pushed hard with my friend Becky to hire Kathy for the position and I think it helped. She was hired and we were able to work together for a year or so. Although Kathy’s main interest was Ukraine, she was equally supportive of people from the Baltic States, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, and other enslaved countries. They all understood that they would sink or swim together.

Toward the end of the Reagan administration, I moved over to the Treasury Department, where I was deputy assistant secretary for economic policy. The executive secretary–a job that involved managing the department’s official correspondence and the paper flow in and out of the secretary’s office–was a woman named Emily Walker, who hired Kathy as her deputy. So, once again, Kathy and I were able to work together. But after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, I could see that Kathy was becoming agitated about what might happen in Ukraine. While it seemed clear that most of Eastern Europe would soon free itself from the Soviet yoke, it was not at all certain that Ukraine would also be able to do so, since its position as a Russian vassal long predated the Soviet Union.

Kathy was also too smart to be content in what was essentially a bureaucratic position, and she looked to move on. Again, I was able to help. A friend of mine, David Malpass, had just become head of the Republican staff of the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, where I had previously been executive director, and was looking for someone to work on issues relating to what were called transitional economies. I recommended Kathy and she was hired. (David is now chief global economist for the investment bank Bear, Stearns & Co. in New York.)

Toward the end of 1991, Ukraine declared its independence, and there was no stopping Kathy from being part of it. Although born in Chicago to Ukrainian parents, she was always more Ukrainian in some ways than those born in Ukraine. She had been raised to speak Ukrainian and was thoroughly steeped in that nation’s culture and history. And with a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Chicago, she knew that she could help her people recover and prosper in a free economy.

Kathy left the JEC and began traveling back and forth to Kiev, where she hoped to establish some sort of business. But the situation was very precarious, even for someone with family there. For example, I recall her telling me that she could not buy a car because auto theft was rampant. But for less than a car payment, she was able to hire a full-time car and driver. She told me that her driver slept in the car to prevent it from being stolen.

Having studied Soviet economics, I was much less optimistic than she was that Ukraine would easily throw off the legacy of socialism. I urged her to get a position with a Western company, where she would at least be paid in dollars rather than rapidly depreciating Ukrainian currency.

As it happened, another old friend of mine named Clifford Lewis, now chairman and CEO of Currenex in New York, had just gone to work for KPMG, the big accounting and consulting firm, which had gotten a U.S. government contract for work in Ukraine helping to train the people there in Western methods of banking and accounting.

Kathy was obviously perfect to run the Ukrainian operation, and I was able to put her and Cliff together. She was soon working for KPMG under the direction of economist Rudy Penner, who had previously been director of the Congressional Budget Office.

Although Ukraine became independent, it took a long time before it was able to shed its Communist legacy. I recall Kathy telling the story of a reception in Kiev, where she struck up a conversation with one of the attendees. To her surprise, he knew all about her. It turned out that he had worked for the Ukrainian KGB and had been assigned to follow her career, since she was one of the more prominent Ukrainians in the United States. Kathy asked him what he was doing now, and he said he was running for the parliament–against one of her cousins, in fact.

Among the organizations KPMG consulted with was the Ukrainian central bank, whose deputy director was Viktor Yushchenko, now president-elect of Ukraine. He and Kathy married in 1998, before he was named prime minister, and they now have three children.

I haven’t seen Kathy since before her marriage, so I have no personal knowledge of their relationship. But knowing her as I do, I think it says a great deal for the new president of Ukraine that he won her heart.

Bruce Bartlett is a senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas.