by Jan Reid
Let the People In
THE PUBLICATION OF THIS BOOK WAS SUPPORTED BY THE GENEROSITY OF THE FOLLOWING PEOPLE IN HONOR OF MARY MARGARET FARABEE, FOR HER INESTIMABLE CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AND TEXAS LETTERS.
Becky Beaver and John Duncan
Susan Block
Stephen L. Clark
Eleanor and Jim Cochran
Carolyn Curtis
Gabrielle de Kuyper Bekink
Jess Hay
Jane Hilfer
Joanna Hitchcock
Luci Baines Johnson
Cynthia Keever
Jeanne and Michael Klein
The Lebermann Foundation
Teresa Lozano Long
Alice Ann Lynch
Maline G. McCalla
The MFI Foundation
Brad and Michele Moore
Dr. Nona Niland
Rosalba Ojeda
Ellen and Ed Randall
Jean and Dan Rather
Edward Z. Safady
Jane Schweppe
Sander and Lottie Shapiro
Suzanne and Marc Winkelman
Mary and Howard Yancy
ALSO BY JAN REID
Comanche Sundown (a novel)
Texas Tornado: Doug Sahm, with Shawn Sahm
Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs
The Hammer: Tom DeLay, with Lou Dubose
Rio Grande
Boy Genius: Karl Rove, with Lou Dubose and Carl Cannon
The Bullet Meant for Me
Close Calls
Vain Glory
Deerinwater (a novel)
The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock
Let the People In
THE LIFE AND TIMES OF ANN RICHARDS
Jan Reid
RESEARCH ASSISTANCE BY SHAWN MORRIS
UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS AUSTIN
Copyright © 2012 by Jan Reid
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
First edition, 2012
Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:
Permissions
University of Texas Press
P.O. Box 7819
Austin, TX 78713-7819
www.utexas.edu/utpress/about/bpermission.html
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Reid, Jan.
Let the people in :the life and times of Ann Richards / by Jan Reid ;
research assistance by Shawn Morris. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-292-71964-4 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-292-74452-3 (e-book)
ISBN 978-0-292-74579-7 (individual e-book)
1. Richards, Ann, 1933–2006. 2. Governors—Texas—Biography. 3. Politicians—United States—Biography. 4. Democratic Party (U.S.)—Biography. 5. Texas—Politics and government—1951– I. Title.
F391.4.R53R45 2012
976.4'063092—dc23
[B]
2012016118
For Dorothy, Lila, and Isabelle
The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.
ELEANOR ROOSEVELT
Let me tell you, sisters, seeing dried eggs on a plate in the morning is a lot dirtier than anything I’ve had to deal with in politics.
ANN RICHARDS
Contents
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PROLOGUE: Glimpses
PART ONE: GARDENS OF LIGHT
CHAPTER 1: Waco
CHAPTER 2: New Frontiers
CHAPTER 3: Lovers Lane
CHAPTER 4: Mad Dogs and First Fridays
CHAPTER 5: The Hanukkah Chicken
PART TWO: SUPERWOMAN’S CHAIR
CHAPTER 6: Problem Lady
CHAPTER 7: Landslides
CHAPTER 8: Raw Deals
CHAPTER 9: Capsized
CHAPTER 10: The Class of ’82
CHAPTER 11: Raise Money and Wait
CHAPTER 12: Cheap Help
PART THREE: ONLY IN TEXAS
CHAPTER 13: Poker Faces
CHAPTER 14: The Speech
CHAPTER 15: Dispatches
CHAPTER 16: Backyard Brawl
CHAPTER 17: Answer the Question
CHAPTER 18: Bustin’ Rocks
CHAPTER 19: The Rodeo
PART FOUR: THE PARABOLA
CHAPTER 20: The New Texas
CHAPTER 21: Fast Start
CHAPTER 22: Ethicists
CHAPTER 23: Odd Couples
CHAPTER 24: Favorables
CHAPTER 25: White Hot
CHAPTER 26: Heartaches by the Number
CHAPTER 27: Troubles by the Score
CHAPTER 28: Sass
CHAPTER 29: Collision Course
CHAPTER 30: Queen Bee
EPILOGUE: Passages
NOTES
PHOTO CREDITS
INDEX
Acknowledgments
This book is a biography that contains a thread of memoir. I must thank Don Carleton, Evan Hocker, and their fellow archivists and librarians at the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History of the University of Texas in Austin; they have done a masterly job of sorting, arranging, and preserving a massive archive detailing Ann Richards’s life and career. Joel Minor of the Wittliff Collections at Texas State University in San Marcos found and shared gems of the correspondence between Ann and Bud Shrake.
I am grateful to my wife, Dorothy Browne, who has been my best and most demanding source and reader, and Shawn Morris, my research assistant. The project drew thoughtful and enthusiastic input from the Richards family: David, Cecile, Dan, Clark, and Ellen. I am grateful to the late Bud Shrake and to Gary Cartwright for gentle and humorous pointers along the way.
I treasure memories of Ann, Bud, Phyllis Cartwright, Molly Ivins, Fletcher and Libby Boone, Lopez Smitham, Pat Cole, Bill Ramsey, Nancy Kohler, Wayne Oakes, Henry and Mary Holman, Marge Hershey, and Sam and Virginia Whitten.
Extremely helpful were professional associates of Ann, who include Mary Beth Rogers, Glenn Smith, Bill Cryer, George Shipley, Joe Holley, Joy Anderson, Marlene Saritzky, Rebecca Lightsey, Barbara Chapman, Richard Moya, Shelton Smith, Selden Hale, and Chris Hughes.
I am indebted to Suzanne Coleman, Monte Williams, Annette LoVoi, Margaret Justus, Ellen Halbert, John P. Moore, Chuck Bailey, Andy Sansom, Bob Beaudine, Jim Henson, Doug Zabel, Ronnie Earle, Carlton Carl, Harold Cook, Joaquin Jackson, Dick DeGuerin, John Massey, John Keel, Nadine Eckhardt, Kaye Northcott, Jeanne Goka, Bill Head, Mark Strama, Gary and Tam Cartwright, Michael and Sue Sharlot, Doatsy Shrake, Ben Shrake, Alan Shrake, Jody Gent, Eddie Wilson, Bill and Sally Wittliff, Mark McKinnon, Jerry Jeff and Susan Walker, Ave Bonar, Wayne Slater, and Tad Hershorn. Some may not know how they helped, but they did. I learned much from the work of my fellow journalists and researchers Jan Jarboe Russell, Lou Dubose, Dave McNeely, Paul Burka, Mimi Swartz, R. G. Ratcliffe, Robert Draper, Skip Hollandsworth, and Brant Bingamon.
I thank Garry Mauro, John Hall, Richard Raymond, Bob Krueger, Peggy Garner, Judith Zaffirini, Bob Rosenbaum, Jim Phillips, Elliott Naishtat, Kirk Watson, David Braun, Christopher Cook, and Bill Young for the friendships and the achievements shared in Texas politics and government over the past forty years; Bill Broyles, Greg Curtis, Evan Smith, and Jake Silverstein, my editors at Texas Monthly; Clayton McClure Brooks, the anthology editor who planted one of the essential seeds; my friend and agent David McCormick; and Dave Hamrick, Allison Faust, Lynne Chapman, Lindsay Starr, Theresa May, Joanna Hitchcock, William Bishel, Casey Kittrell, and other friends and colleagues at the University of Texas Press, as well as freelance editor Kip Keller and fact checker Kate Hull.
PROLOGUE
&nb
sp; Glimpses
The first time I saw Ann Richards, she was playing gonzo bridge, as her Austin pals called their game, in the home of Fletcher and Libby Boone. The party was on a Sunday night in the late fall of 1980 or early winter of 1981. With children whooping in the bedrooms, foursomes of cardplayers going at each other across tables that filled up the living room, and much strong drink poured in the kitchen, I was parked on a sofa with no interest in learning to play bridge. I was there because I had begun to court Dorothy Browne, a friend of Ann who worked for the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. (She later served as a senior aide on Ann’s staff at the state treasury and in the governor’s office. I was an adviser on environmental policy during Ann’s 1990 race for governor, and during her administration, I wrote speeches and research papers for John Hall, her chief appointee in that realm. Full disclosure, or at least half the glass.)
I had been living out in the country fifty miles from Austin during the years when Ann emerged in Austin politics and government. I must have heard of her, but little more than that. The crowd in the Boones’ house that night was full of characters who were hard to overshadow, but Ann filled up the room. She was forty-seven then. Despite premature lines in her face and throat, and a hairstyle that harked back to a time when “permanent” was used as a noun—some friends jokingly called the coiffure Hi Yo Silver—she was sexy as all get-out. Believe it; she sure did. Ann liked men, and when she turned on the charm, she was all blue eyes and dimples. As I watched her that night, she cocked an eyebrow at the dubious prospects of a hand she had been dealt, leaned back in her chair, and drawled loudly, “I’ve just got to tell you all about Club. We have such a good time at Club. We just talk and talk. And when we get to the end, we vote on what’ll be our next meeting’s topic of discussion. I think I’m going to propose vaginal itch.”
Ann looks over the crowd on the day of her inauguration as Texas governor, January 1991.
It was a while before I fully understood that joke. The bawdy and rowdy feminist was one of the familiar sides of Ann, but something else underlay her wisecrack about the stuffiness and pretensions of Texas social clubs. In a crowd that was well juiced and thought nothing of it, she was talking about the newness and rawness of her commitment to the twelve steps of Alcoholics Anonymous. A few Sundays earlier, her husband, David, her two oldest children, and nine of her closest friends had with great pain of their own reduced her to sobs in the ordeal of intervention. The ambush occurred in the home of her friends and neighbors Mike and Sue Sharlot. Mike was a law school professor, and Sue was then an administrative nurse who later got her own law degree. Sue called and made up some story about a parent who had fallen ill, and Ann rushed over to their house. Her two younger kids were away in school, and on seeing everyone, she responded with the instinctive fright of a mother: “Are the children all right?”
Hours later, she was on a plane to the St. Mary’s Chemical Dependency Services facility at the Riverside Medical Center in Minneapolis. She said later that she had tried to fight off their pleas and their harsh testimony of what she was doing to herself, and to them. “I was terrified,” she recalled in her subsequent memoir, Straight from the Heart. “I was a public person, there was no way I could survive it.”
She feared that when she came home, she would have nothing in common with her friends. She feared that if she quit drinking, she would lose her gift for being funny.
That fall she was reelected without opposition to the Travis County commissioner’s court in Austin, and her monthlong absence from work never came up in the press. But her twenty-eight-year marriage to David had been strained for some time, and two months after she came back from Minnesota, he moved out. They made two attempts to reconcile, but by 1983 the parting of their ways was permanent. Ann said that accepting the divorce was the most difficult thing she had ever done. Dorothy Browne and I were married on Fletcher and Libby Boone’s lawn in West Lake Hills on the Fourth of July 1982. We invited Ann, who was then waging a campaign for state treasurer, to join us that beautiful night. She sent us a nice gift, and I remember her note saying that she was having trouble with weddings right then. Dorothy recalled it as saying that “it would be like touching a warm burn.”
Ann was wounded in spirit those first months I came to know her. By standards she held dear—as a wife, as a mother, as an elected official, as a responsible person—she had reason to feel like crawling under a rock. But that was not her way of doing things. With her wisecracks at that bridge party, she had been making a statement that she was not going to give up friendships and rituals that enriched her life. And those months at the start of the 1980s were the very time when she negotiated a leap upward in politics that would make her grin, drawl, and grit known and celebrated throughout the world.
Ann was one of those characters who seem to pop up everywhere all the time. When Ann lived in Dallas, she and her family were far too close for comfort to the John F. Kennedy assassination. A decade later, after moving to Austin, Ann and David became central figures in the most uproarious and bohemian years in the capital’s history—anti–Vietnam War protests, a madcap bunch called Mad Dog, Inc., the coming of Willie Nelson, and the famous concert hall, Armadillo World Headquarters. In 1972, Ann managed the first state legislative race of Sarah Weddington, the young attorney who was preparing to deliver the winning Supreme Court arguments in Roe v. Wade, the landmark ruling that became the political and philosophical mainstay of American feminism. In her political coming-of-age, Ann experienced unpleasant face-to-face encounters with Lyndon Johnson and Jimmy Carter in the days of their overweening power. In 1982, taking advantage of a corruption scandal, she was elected state treasurer and became the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in fifty years. Then came the opportunity that made her a sensation.
Most of the 1988 presidential race between Michael Dukakis and George Herbert Walker Bush has faded into obscurity. That race proved to be the most triumphant time in the elder George Bush’s life. He emerged from the long shadow of Ronald Reagan, who had routed him in his first race for the presidency and then had largely ignored him during his eight years as vice president. Bush’s landslide victory over the Massachusetts governor was a stinging rebuke of the Democrats. But at the start of the race, Dukakis led in many polls, and a telephone call initiated by his campaign changed Ann Richards’s life. Paul Kirk, the chairman of the Democratic Party, tracked her down in the Austin airport one day and asked her to make the keynote speech at that summer’s national convention in Atlanta. “I was standing there on the linoleum at a pay phone in the airport, and I was floored,” she recalled in her book. “‘You’re kidding.’”
One of Ann’s erstwhile allies in Texas Democratic politics, Attorney General Jim Mattox, responded with a huffy call to Kirk and bellowed that this wrongheaded scheme would be a grievous insult to his 1990 race for governor. But Ann was fifty-four when her call to the big time came; she was no unseasoned rookie. She ignored Mattox and sought advice from Mario Cuomo; Barbara Jordan; Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s press secretary; and Ted Sorensen, JFK’s famous speechwriter. Cuomo told her, “You have no idea how much your life is about to change.”
Bob Strauss, a native of Texas, an associate of Lyndon Johnson, and a former chairman of the Democratic Party, recommended a veteran speechwriter in Washington, D.C. The writer faxed drafts to her tiny political office in Austin. Ann felt the speech was turning into a mishmash that sounded nothing like her. At the last moment, a computer crash destroyed the Washington speech-writer’s files and morale. Ann and her party left for the convention in Atlanta with no speech. In her hotel suite, she went to work with a group of women who included the speechwriter she trusted to anticipate her thoughts and capture her voice. Suzanne Coleman was an affable former lecturer in political science at the University of Texas; for nearly twenty years, she had to be the most overworked speechwriter in the country, and though she was not widely known because Ann did not achieve n
ational office, she was one of her generation’s best.
The day of the speech, Walter Cronkite left a message at the hotel and asked Ann to come by and see him in the convention hall if she had time. The veteran CBS newsman had attended Houston public schools and the University of Texas; Ann had known him for years. She looked him up that afternoon and told him, “Walter, I want you to be prepared for what kind of speech you’re going to hear from me tonight.” Cronkite gave her a quizzical look. “I’m going to talk Texas,” she announced.
With a snort of laughter he replied, “Oh. Well, that’s great.”
That night Ann wore a stunning blue dress—the color that is television’s favorite—with her silver hair swept up and back. She began by criticizing her party. “Twelve years ago Barbara Jordan, another Texas woman, made the keynote address to this convention, and two women in a hundred sixty years is about par for the course. But if you give us a chance, we can perform. After all, Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backward and in high heels!”
Ann and her team had anticipated that about fifteen lines in the speech would draw applause or laughter. She was interrupted more than forty times. Once during the applause she reached for her glass of water and realized her hand was shaking so badly that she very carefully set it back down. “She looked so small out there,” recalled her son Dan, who sat with the family in the wings.
But viewers perceived none of Ann’s anxiety. Her timing was exquisite, the material drawn from a populist upbringing that put her out in the world as a junior high schoolteacher when she was barely out of her teens. She was not impressed by class distinctions born of Connecticut wealth and privilege. “Poor George,” she said, throwing her arms wide with a delighted grin, “he can’t help it—he was born with a silver foot in his mouth.” Though the New York Times and others quickly noted that the taunt was not original, Ann’s delivery of that line made her famous.
Toward the end, she softened the tone and reflected on the promise and the challenges of this nation, which had come to mind while she was playing a game of ball on “a Baptist pallet” with her “nearly perfect grandchild, Lily.” (She had one grandchild at the time, the daughter of Cecile.) “I spread that Baptist pallet out on the floor,” she described the moment, “and Lily and I roll a ball back and forth.” It was her metaphor of a politics that spanned generations and lived up to its obligation to make lives better.