God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  * * *

  AS I WAS STANDING in line to go through security for the president’s speech, I ran into Andy Stoker, the pastor of my old church, First United Methodist. The last time I was in that church, I stood in the pulpit and gave a eulogy for my father. For him, First Church had been a spiritual home. He had left a bequest to the church to create a meal service for the homeless. But for me, the church was a source of disillusionment and anger. It was in that very church that another tragedy had taken place that would shake the city of Dallas, a tragedy that also touched my family’s life.

  Walker Railey was one of the great stars of Methodism when he took over the pulpit of First Church in 1980. I was living in Austin by then, but I sometimes saw him preach when I came back to the city. Railey was bald, with a bulbous forehead and intense blue eyes, which scanned his congregation like searchlights. I experienced what so many would later remark on—Railey’s gift for seeming to speak directly to me.

  Dallas at the time had more churches per capita than any other city in America. The preachers were compensated like business executives, which allowed them entrée into the uppermost social circles. The piety that the city was known for hid another Dallas, however—one that had the highest rate of overall crime and the highest divorce rate in the country. Railey quickly became seen as a progressive leader, championing causes that were often unpopular within such a conservative milieu—gay rights, racial justice, opposition to the death penalty, equal rights for women—issues that brought younger people into the congregation. His social activism was just what Dallas needed. In his very first sermon, he had blown into the microphone on the pulpit, indicating that he was breathing life back into the church.

  On Easter Sunday 1987, Railey preached what would be his last sermon in First Church. For the past several weeks he had been receiving threatening letters, including one that very morning. “Easter is when Christ arose, but you are going down,” the message said.

  Railey approached the pulpit wearing a bulletproof vest under the pastoral stole that his wife, Peggy, had sewed for him. She was an organist in the church and the mother of their two young children. Uniformed police officers guarded the entryways. The odd topic Railey had chosen to speak on this Easter was drawn from a book titled The Passover Plot, which airs the theory that Jesus faked his Crucifixion.

  Three days later, Railey came home to find Peggy lying on the floor of the garage, her face blue, her body heaving. She had been strangled. Police would later say that Railey’s three-year-old son had been partially strangled as well. “Wife of Anti-Racist Cleric Is Attacked,” read the headline in The New York Times. Railey was viewed as a martyr for racial justice; it was as if the threats against him and the attempted murder of his wife were attacks on Dallas as well. His friend Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman of Temple Emanu-El, who had lunch with Railey the very day of the attack, said that he had been “singled out because of his almost prophetic stance in regard to injustice in any form.” Peggy had fallen into a coma.

  Nine days after the attack, Railey himself was in a coma, having swallowed three bottles of antidepressants and tranquilizers. He left behind a suicide note, calling himself “the lowest of the low,” and saying that he was besieged by demons. By that time, the police had discovered inconsistencies in his story. They learned that he himself had written the threatening letters he received. They also discovered that he had been having an affair with a psychotherapist who called herself Lucy Papillon. Her family name was actually Goodrich. She was the daughter of the minister of the church when I was growing up. Dr. Robert E. Goodrich Jr. and his wife, Thelma, were close friends of my parents, and Lucy played the piano in the adult Sunday school class my father had taught for many years. Her brother, Bob, was an all-American split end on my high school team.

  Railey recovered. He was the only suspect in the case, but the evidence against him was entirely circumstantial, despite his semi-confession. In my interview with him, in 1987, I confronted him with the lies he had told, but he evaded, trying to keep the conversation on a theological level, repeatedly turning to my own quarrels with the church, which he had heard about through the grapevine. I was certain he was guilty and told him so.

  Soon after my interview, Railey went off to California to be with Lucy. Eventually, he began working in another church. In 1993, he was tried for Peggy’s attempted murder and acquitted. He did not contest a civil suit filed by Peggy’s parents, however, which found him responsible for the attack, and which demanded an $18 million judgment. Railey declared bankruptcy, voiding the judgment, but agreed to pay alimony of $337 a month in return for a divorce from Peggy. He married a wealthy widow two months later. She also died, reportedly of liver failure, in 2005. The last I heard, Railey had been fired from the homeless ministry in Los Angeles, where he served as the director of fundraising and community relations, after officials learned from a reporter that Lucy was volunteering at the same mission. On the ministry’s website, Railey described himself as a global peacemaker involved in monitoring elections in Third World countries, freeing hostages in Bolivia, and fighting poverty in Haiti. There is no evidence for any of this. Peggy Railey finally died in 2011, twenty-four years after the attack, never having regained consciousness.

  In the security line for the president’s speech, I asked Pastor Stoker how the church was doing. “We’re still in the healing stage,” he told me. “Next Easter, it will be the thirtieth anniversary.”

  * * *

  “DO YOU FEEL NERVOUS every time a president comes to Dallas?” I asked Robert Wilonsky, a city columnist for The Dallas Morning News. We were sitting in the press section of the symphony hall. Robert rolled his eyes. “My mother was the X-ray technician on duty in Parkland when Kennedy was killed,” he said.

  Wilonsky is a third-generation Dallasite. He harks back to a generation of reporters from another era, the kind who used to be called “hard-boiled” but who also carried the emotional weight of the city in their soft hearts. He would have been at home with Studs Terkel or Jimmy Breslin. During the Black Lives Matter shoot-out, he had been downtown, and close enough to the robot bomb that killed the shooter to feel the concussion go through his body. His nerves were still jangled.

  Below us, the auditorium was filled with blue uniforms. The injured officers who were able to leave the hospital sat together, in their bandages and slings. On the stage were an interfaith choir and a police choir. The cops in the choir were visibly exhausted, and some of them kept nodding off, despite the presence on the stage of both Texas senators, John Cornyn and Ted Cruz; former president George W. Bush and Laura; President Barack Obama and Michelle; Vice President Joe Biden and Jill; Mayor Mike Rawlings; police chief David Brown; and James Spiller, the chief of the transit police, which had also lost an officer.

  “The past few days have been some of the darkest in our city’s history,” Mayor Rawlings said. “I’ve searched hard in my soul to discover what mistakes we made. I’ve asked, ‘Why us?’ ” He boldly added, “There is a reason this happened here, in this place, this time in American history. This is our chance to lead, and to build a new model for a community, for a city, and for our country.”

  After seven years of near seclusion, George W. got a standing ovation in his adopted hometown when he approached the podium. He looked much older, his hairline receding, his face deeply lined. He still had that way of squinting when he makes a point. “At times, it seems like the forces pulling us apart are stronger than the forces binding us together,” he said. “Too often, we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.” As he spoke, I wished for the millionth time that he hadn’t invaded Iraq.

  “Another community torn apart,” Obama said. “More hearts broken. More questions about what caused, and what might prevent another such tragedy…The deepest fault lines of our democracy have suddenly been exposed, perhaps even widened.” He was preaching in his f
amiliar deliberate cadence, making sure every phrase sank in. “Faced with this violence, we wonder if the divides of race in America can ever be bridged. We wonder if an African American community that feels unfairly targeted by police, and police departments that feel unfairly maligned for doing their jobs, can ever understand each other’s experience.” Then he said, “We are not as divided as we seem.” Those who use violent rhetoric against the police “not only make the jobs of police officers even more dangerous, but they do a disservice to the very cause of justice that they claim to promote.”

  I glanced down to the section below me, where Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick was intently watching the president speak. Patrick applauded when Obama praised the police department, but otherwise seemed to study him like the political adversary he is.

  The division between these two men, and what they represent, really does seem unbridgeable. The America that Obama evoked in his speech was a community drawn together by common ideals while acknowledging the burdens of segregation and racial hatred. The Texas that Patrick seeks to create is one of exclusion. On his first day in the Texas Senate, he walked out when an imam gave the invocation. He opposed gay marriage, managed to strengthen anti-abortion laws, and crafted the gun laws that make it possible for Texans to carry weapons in public. There are two competing visions of the future, and of the two, Dan Patrick’s may be the more enduring one.

  “Can we do this?” Obama asked, near the end of his speech. “I don’t know. I confess that sometimes I, too, experience doubt. I’ve been to too many of these things. I’ve seen too many families go through this. But then I am reminded of what the Lord tells Ezekiel: ‘I will give you a new heart,’ the Lord says, ‘and put a new spirit in you. I will remove your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ ”

  After the speech, I joined Robert Wilonsky for dinner. He brought along his colleague Dr. Seema Yasmin, whom he introduced as “the new Dallas.” Seema, a British Muslim of Indian extraction, was teaching public health at the University of Texas at Dallas while also writing for the newspaper. That morning she had profiled a surgeon at Parkland Hospital, Dr. Brian Williams, who had treated the wounded the night of the shooting. “I want Dallas police also to see me, a black man, and understand that I will support you, I will defend you, and I will care for you,” Williams had said. “That doesn’t mean that I do not fear you.” When the shooting began, Seema’s husband, who is black, had offered to drive her downtown. She immediately rejected the idea, fearing that the police would mistake him for an assailant.

  Everywhere you saw blue ribbons on trees and people embracing cops. There were two police cruisers parked in front of police headquarters, buried under flowers and balloons and children’s drawings. It was immensely touching, but transitory. “Three weeks from now, after all the funerals are over, it will all be forgotten, and we’ll be fucked,” Robert said. He asked me, as a former Dallasite who had written a book that was very critical of the city during the era of the Kennedy assassination, what I thought of Dallas now.

  “I think it is a noble city,” I said.

  “Noble?” he said, with an edge of disbelief in his voice.

  I said that Dallas was a far more tolerant city than the one I grew up in. It’s still neurotic, pious, and materialistic, but in part because of the assassination and the humiliation it was made to endure, Dallas has become more open and diverse, more interesting and introspective in a way that it had never been in the past. “Dallas has shown it has the ability to transform suffering into social change,” I said.

  Robert was quiet, and I saw him wipe away a tear. It had been an emotional week.

  When a police officer dies, there’s an eerie send-off. As the flag is taken from his coffin and folded into a triangle, a “last call” comes over the police band. “Foxtrot 415, are you by the radio?” the dispatcher said, as Patrick Zamarripa was buried in the Dallas–Fort Worth National Cemetery.

  “Five thirty-one,” comes the response, “please put Foxtrot 415 on a double six.”

  “Received, Foxtrot 415 is double six. All elements, all elements, Foxtrot 415, Police officer Patrick Zamarripa, badge 10112, is out of service. End of watch: July 7, 2016. Godspeed, Patrick.”

  EIGHT

  Sausage Makers

  When Frederick Law Olmsted passed through Texas in 1853, he became besotted with the majesty of the Texas legislature. “I have seen several similar bodies at the North; the Federal Congress; and the Parliament of Great Britain, in both its branches, on occasions of great moment; but none of them commanded my involuntary respect for their simple manly dignity and trustworthiness for the duties that engaged them, more than the General Assembly of Texas,” he wrote. This passage is possibly unique in the political chronicles of the state. Fairly considered, the Texas legislature is more functional than the U.S. Congress, and more genteel than the House of Commons, but a recurrent crop of crackpots and ideologues has fed the state’s reputation for aggressive know-nothingism and proudly retrograde politics.

  Texas has always had a burlesque side to its politics. Molly Ivins made a national reputation as a humor writer by lampooning the people we elect to office. One of my favorites in this category was Mike Martin, a state representative from Longview. In 1981, someone shotgunned the trailer he lived in during his months in Austin. Martin, who was inside, was slightly injured. He declared that the shooting was in reprisal for an investigation he was pursuing that involved a satanic cult. Later, his cousin admitted that he had fired the weapon at Martin’s behest, ostensibly to gain Martin sympathy votes in his reelection campaign. Martin fled Austin, but as Molly noted, the police “tracked him to earth at his momma’s house, where he was found hiding in the stereo cabinet.” She added, “He always did want to be the Speaker.”

  Molly, who died in 2007, would have loved writing about Mary Lou Bruner, a seventy-year-old retired schoolteacher from Mineola, who in 2016 ran as a Republican for an open seat on the Texas State Board of Education. Because 10 percent of the public school students in the nation live in Texas, the state exerts a great influence on the textbook-publishing industry. During her campaign, Bruner posted on Facebook that Barack Obama had worked as a male prostitute in his twenties. “That is how he paid for his drugs,” she reasoned. Bruner went on to assert that climate change is a “ridiculous hoax,” school shootings are caused by students being taught evolution, and dinosaurs are extinct because the ones on Noah’s Ark were too young to reproduce. Somehow, she lost a runoff.

  For several years, like many reporters, I had been receiving emails from a man named Rob Morrow. He claimed that George H. W. Bush was “a seriously addicted homosexual pedophile,” who also was involved with a CIA drug-smuggling ring with the Clintons. In 2011, Morrow took out a full-page ad in a local newspaper:

  HAVE YOU EVER HAD SEX WITH RICK PERRY?

  Are you a stripper, an escort, or just a “young hottie” impressed by an arrogant, entitled governor of Texas?

  I never heard that anyone came forward because of the ad, which Morrow said was designed to expose “a Christian-buzzwords-spouting, ‘family values’ hypocrite and fraud.”

  Morrow, 53, a Princeton graduate with an MBA from the University of Texas, describes himself as an independent investor. In 2015, he wrote a book with the political provocateur and Donald Trump adviser Roger Stone, called The Clintons’ War on Women. The Austin American-Statesman noted that it “appears to be serving as a playbook for Trump” in his attacks on the Clintons. (Upon its publication, Trump tweeted, “The latest book on Hillary—Wow, a really tough one!”)

  In March 2016, Morrow was elected the Republican Party chairman in Travis County. He tweeted, “Top priority for Travis GOP: beautiful Big Titty women!!” Morrow began popping up everywhere, wearing the tricorne motley fool hat that he started sporting after his victory. Mainstream party officials were mortified. They promised to “explore every single option that e
xists” to remove Morrow from power. Morrow responded, “They can go fuck themselves.”

  My friend Steve Harrigan was part of a history panel that was discussing his latest novel, A Friend of Mr. Lincoln, when the newly elected GOP chairman showed up. In the middle of a sober discussion about the Lincoln administration, Morrow asked, “How many of you would agree with me that Lyndon Johnson was responsible for the assassination of John F. Kennedy?” One of the startled historians asked if Morrow had any proof. He didn’t, but he claimed that there were numerous other murders that the Bushes and the Clintons had committed or covered up.

  Texas Republicans were already having an unhappy time of it in 2016. Perry, now an ex-governor, was KO’d early in the presidential primaries, and Senator Cruz—“Lyin’ Ted”—was overmatched by Donald Trump. Compounding the humiliation, Rob Morrow announced that he was running for president himself. That turned out to be against the rules for the Travis County chairman. In August, Morrow was deposed.

  That month, Trump campaigned in Austin. Morrow protested his party’s nominee by carrying a giant red sign saying:

  TRUMP

  IS A

  CHILD RAPIST