by Jan Reid
Most political keynote speeches, and the speakers who deliver them, are forgotten in a few weeks or months. But now and then a few leave an aura of eloquence, reason, and passion that lingers on in the theater of democracy. When Ann walked offstage, she asked Wayne Slater, a reporter for the Dallas Morning News, “How’d I do?” He laughed and wondered whether she was serious. She had gone out into those lights a national unknown and come off a television superstar.
For several years, Ann had been a friend of the accomplished novelist, journalist, screenwriter, and dramatist Edwin “Bud” Shrake. After her divorce from David, Bud became the second great love of her life. The day after her speech, the avalanche of praise included a letter faxed from Bud.
Dear Ann:
Your speech was wonderful and your delivery was magnificent, and vice versa. You had me laughing, you had me crying. In short, you really got to me, kid.
I am so proud of you it makes my eyes run. Ever since you caught me under your pool table in Dallas (or was it ping pong?) I’ve known you are an incredible person. Now the whole world knows it.
[He told her about a call he’d received from his literary agent in New York.] She said, after much gushing of praise for your speech, “David Letterman’s people will be calling you today to see if they can get Ann on their show.” This is show biz thinking—call this one to get that one. . . .
You looked so beautiful on TV in your blue dress. The Belle of the Ball, for sure. I saw one shot of Mattox, looking like a little boy trying to be brave in the dentist’s waiting room.
You realize what a huge leap you just took? A Hollywood guy might call it “jumping over the shit.”
Love, Bud
After that fall’s election, Ann sent President Bush a telegram wishing him “the very best” in his administration. He responded some days later with a note and a small silver pendant in the shape of a foot. He wrote, “You’ve probably received a hundred of these ‘feet’ but I wanted you to have this one from me—a peace offering.” The gestures inferred that rough-and-tumble politics were just part of the process and were all in good fun, as long as politicians kept their bearings and remembered their purpose. But in the last debate with Dukakis, Bush had said, “I don’t want to be like the kid in the schoolyard—‘he started it.’” Then he went on to be just that kid in the schoolyard, arguing that the “ugly” and “nasty” tone of the race had been set at the Democratic National Convention. Bush and his family were thoroughly annoyed by the impudence of that woman, and as time went by, she made more sport of ridiculing the president. In tongue-lashing the elder George Bush, Ann lit the fuse of a grudge match that may have altered the course of American history.
Tiresome a throwback as televised political conventions seem today, huge numbers of Americans still watch them every four years, and like Barack Obama and Sarah Palin in more recent memory, Ann Richards demonstrated that a powerful and personality-enriched speech at either a Democratic or a Republican national convention can be a politician’s fastest climb up ambition’s ladder. Late in life as Ann got started in politics, and with the kind of base she possessed, it is almost inconceivable that she could have gotten elected governor of Texas in 1990 or any other year if she had not been handed that incredibly lucky break in 1988. Boosted into contention by her celebrity and wit, she overcame long odds and brutal campaigns against two veteran Democrats and a rich, colorful Republican to become the first ardent feminist elected to high office in this country. Hillary Clinton was her protégée, even when she was the nation’s First Lady and then a U.S. senator from New York. Some of the cracks in the glass ceiling were put there by Ann.
The question remains, though—what did she accomplish with her high office? In a state that continued to be saddled with a sternly limited governmental structure devised when the South was just emerging from the bruising experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction, she also had to contend with the fact that national politics and changing demographics had left her swimming for her life as a liberal Democrat in an ocean of conservative Republicans. In a failed presidential campaign, Texas’s Republican senator Phil Gramm once boasted that the best thing a politician can have is money. It helps, of course, and yet he was proved quite wrong: the biggest advantage a politician can have is that people like you.
Ann knew she had that going for her, and she shrewdly used it to her advantage. She knew that a governor or president elected with a slim majority or less had better push an agenda hard at the start of the term, before the sheer gravity of governing starts its ineluctable pull. Her greatest accomplishment was to bring to positions of responsibility and power in Texas the women, African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, gay men, lesbians, and disabled persons who had been so long denied. Because of that, the state government centered in Austin will never be the same. Whatever party wins the elections and controls the appointed boards that keep the bureaucratic agencies and institutions of higher education running, democracy in Texas is better because she won.
And yet like so many politicians who come into office promising reform and change, she found herself stymied and frustrated. As a philosophical leftist, she had to try to establish a footing at the center, and that was not so easy and comfortable as raising hell on the outside of power. Legislative majorities and courts enforcing lawsuits lost by the state forced her into unseemly compromises. She advanced some of the most progressive penal programs the country had ever seen, and yet she oversaw a massive prison buildup and did nothing to steer Texas away from being the nation’s most prolific executioner.
Her ideology constrained her more than once, with damaging political results. Her rigid insistence on support for abortion rights as a litmus test for appointments helped cost her party a chance to retain one of its seats in the U.S. Senate—one that twenty years later appears lost for good. Like many politicians, she was loyal to a fault, sidling up to powerful men who acted as if they were friends and then tried to gut her the first chance they got. The feminist heroine was confounded by the fear, resentment, and obstacle of white males. On one matter of principle—the need to balance the Second Amendment and sporting and other legitimate uses of firearms against a paranoid and murderous rage of gunfire in the streets—she dug in her heels in a way that was counterproductive. She ridiculed men and women who disagreed with her on that issue, and in her mind, their rebellion against her governance cost her more years of opportunity to accomplish things that inspired her.
She far transcended being a mere regional politician, but her time in the spotlight proved fleeting. When the end came, she remarked that if she had known she was going to lose, she would have raised a little more hell. The fact was, she raised plenty of hell. But she found that her state and most likely the nation were not ready to be led by a smart-mouthed woman. She might have gone further and risen higher in politics if she could have adapted to the contemporary necessity of having a squeaky-clean background—or at least making it appear that way—and trying to be all things to all people. In that way, she never veered and remained fundamentally true to herself. One thing Ann Richards could never be was bland. She had a large share of flaws and failures; she could be one hell of a boss to work for. But young people who flocked to her grimy campaign office and worked in her administration described a euphoria and a sense of calling they had never before experienced in politics. In Texas, of all places, one fall night in 1990 a silver-haired fifty-seven-year-old woman climbed on a stage in an Austin hotel, pumped her fist in triumph, and set off scenes of unabashed joy.
But that’s ranging far ahead of her story.
Let the People In
PART ONE
Gardens of Light
Portrait of Ann Willis as a Waco teenager, about 1950.
CHAPTER 1
Waco
The studio photograph of Ann Willis was probably taken in 1950, when she was seventeen. Born September 1, 1933, she answered to Dorothy or Dorothy Ann until her family moved into the small city of Waco f
rom an outlying country town at the start of her high school years; she decided then that she liked her middle name more. A gangly teenager, Ann wasn’t beautiful in all her pictures at that age. She printed a large, self-conscious “me” above her unflattering photo in her senior yearbook at Waco High, though elsewhere in the annual she was afforded a full-page airbrushed photo as the school’s most popular girl. She had worked at gaining that popularity and being a model student. She and a partner won two state championships in girls’ team debate, and as a delegate of a civics youth organization called Girls Nation, she got to go to Washington and shake President Harry Truman’s hand in the White House Rose Garden.
But the best portrait of her that year was taken in the studio of her uncle Jimmie, a shutterbug and popular figure in Waco. He raced about town on a big motorcycle, wearing the style of cap popularized by Marlon Brando in the movie The Wild One. The awkward kid was now a lovely young woman. In the photo, she wears a light sweater over her blouse and a pair of short earrings. Her short brown hair is styled in a relaxed wave over her brow, curling over her temples and ears and nape of her neck as she looks back over her shoulder. The blink of the camera lens captured the beginning of a smile and an elegant pair of eyes—her prettiest feature—and a frank and mischievous glance. One could see the glint in those eyes already. One part of her was a born hell-raiser.
Ann may have inherited her affection for motorcycles from her uncle Jimmie Willis, a popular news shutterbug and studio photographer in Waco in the 1940s and early 1950s. Ann believed she received her first newspaper board endorsement in Austin in 1976 because of a newspaper editor’s affection for her uncle.
Ann didn’t exaggerate much when she said the people she came from were dirt poor. All four of her grandparents were raised on Central Texas tenant farms. Her father, Cecil Willis, came from a community called Bugtussle. In the version of events that Cecil passed along, Bugtussle got its name from a Baptist camp revival in which people from miles around circled up their wagons, built fires, put their children down after supper on piles of quilts and blankets—hence the evocative expression “a Baptist pallet”—and spent the evenings praising the Lord and singing hymns. When night fell on the camp revival, a fellow whose last name was most likely Bugg switched sleeping children from wagon to wagon as a practical joke that was not funny; it set off a panic and brawl. The farming hamlet of Bugtussle soon dwindled away. Cecil Willis had to quit school after he finished the eighth grade. He got a job delivering pharmaceuticals to drugstores for a salary of $100 a month.
Iona Warren was born near another farming hamlet, also now extinct, called Hogjaw, but she and two sisters grew up in the community of Hico. Iona, who finished the eighth-grade schooling available to her, found work in Waco as a sales clerk in a dry-goods store. On a blind date, Cecil took Iona to a picture show; when the projector broke down, they were given a rain check, which guaranteed another date. They soon married. They paid $700 for an acre of land and built a little house in the burg of Lakeview. The town’s name must have referred to the summer’s heat mirage; there was no lake close around.
Ann’s parents were poor enough that at times they feared hunger. Cecil’s family had once come into possession of a field of tomatoes, and his mother canned them all. For the rest of his life, Cecil couldn’t stomach stewed tomatoes. Chickens, a major source of their protein, were just that to Iona—food that walked around. Dorothy Ann was born in a bedroom of their house in the hardest year of the Depression, following labor protracted enough that the attending doctor sighed and made himself a pallet on the front porch. The baby arrived at six in the morning. Iona had asked a neighbor woman to cook Cecil’s supper the evening after Ann was born, but the neighbor couldn’t stand to kill a chicken, so Iona had to wring the chicken’s neck and watch it flop and bleed all over the floor because she did not have the strength to rise from the birthing bed.
Cecil got his World War II draft notice at the age of thirty-five. Ann was nine years old; it was the first time she could remember seeing her strapping daddy cry. He went through navy boot camp and pharmaceutical school in San Diego, where he was stationed the rest of the war. The company that had employed Cecil gave Iona a job, but after a few months she decided to take their daughter and join him. Before taking off on the long highways across the southwestern desert, Iona wrung the necks of every chicken they owned, plucked them in stinking hot water, then cut them up, stewed them, and preserved them in quart jars. She assumed they were going to be hungry and short of money. Cecil later said that when they drove up, they looked like characters in The Grapes of Wrath.
Studio portrait of the infant Dorothy Ann Willis, Waco, 1934.
Housing was so scarce in San Diego that for a while they all slept in a cramped basement room. Iona lost a baby in a traumatic pregnancy during the less than two years they were in California. But for Ann, it was a thrilling time of riding a bus and streetcar to a large junior high school in the center of the city. There were verdant hills and palm trees. Shifts in the ocean breeze carried songs of the nation’s warriors as they put in their miles doing double time; giant warships in the harbor moved across the horizon. San Diego had a powerful effect on the skinny girl from Texas. She reminisced in her book, “This was my first exposure to kids who were Italian and Greek and black and Hispanic.” Yet she didn’t get to make the kind of friendships that would have allowed her to roam the neighborhoods and spend the night at other girls’ homes. Her parents feared having an eleven-year-old girl out on streets that were full of sailors and marines.
When the war ended, they moved back to the house in Lakeview. They had hunting dogs, some years they fattened and slaughtered a pig, and Dorothy Ann’s daddy took her fishing all the time. She loved to tell a story about a junior high school basketball game against Abbott, a rival school where Willie Nelson was one grade behind her. As she prepared to shoot a free throw one night, an Abbott boy hollered, “Make that basket, birdlegs!”
Iona and Cecil had made up their minds that their daughter would get the best education possible, and they wanted her exposed to more prosperous and sophisticated people in high school. Cecil had risen from driver to sales representative for the pharmaceutical company. He and Iona worked hard and saved well, and on the north side of Waco they managed to build a home that had a den and a living room with a fireplace, bedrooms situated at each end of the house, and that feature of postwar middle-class status—a picture window.
For Ann, Waco proved to be one of those hometowns that declined to let go. Founded in 1849, the town got its name from a band of Indians who were part of the Wichita confederation and camped along the Brazos, the most Texas of rivers. Long after the Huecos (Wacos) were expelled to cultural oblivion in Oklahoma, the town had a genuine cowboy element: forty-five miles upriver, the Chisholm Trail crossed the Brazos at a low-water spot called Kimball Bend. The river carved a tortuous horseshoe bend of more than a dozen miles to come back within a mile of that ford. Once the drovers got the cattle across the Brazos, they had to herd them hard to keep them from falling off tall cliffs at a place called Broke Rock, taking horses and riders with them.
As Waco grew, its most distinctive attribute became Baylor University. Originally opened in Independence, Texas, in 1846, Baylor was consolidated with Waco University and moved to its present location in 1886; it became the largest institution of higher learning supported by the Southern Baptist Church. Not everyone in Waco subscribed to those beliefs, and perhaps the most durable aspect of Waco’s lore—the story that everyone raised there has heard told again and again—concerned Baylor’s role in a gunfight that erupted downtown in broad daylight in 1898. Waco was the adopted home of a famous newspaperman, William Cowper Brann. Following the death of his mother in 1857, Brann, the son of a Presbyterian minister, was placed in the care of a farm couple named Hawkins in Coles County, Illinois. After running away at thirteen, and with only three years of schooling, he learned the journalistic craft in half a dozen American cit
ies. At one point, he sold his newspaper, the Iconoclast, to Austin’s William Sydney Porter, the short-story writer, embezzler, and ex-convict who took the pen name O. Henry. Brann bought the paper back and in Waco wrote screeds about Baptists, Episcopalians, Englishmen, Negroes, and New York City elites: “Sartorial kings and pseudo-queens . . . [who] have strutted their brief hour upon the mimic stage, disappearing at daybreak like foul night-birds or an unclean dream—have come and gone like the rank eructation of some crapulous Sodom . . . a breath blown from the festering lips of half-forgotten harlots.”
Even by the yellow-journalism standards of the day, Brann’s prose was sure to make its targets furious. His attacks on Baptists and Baylor University reached fever pitch in the last years of the nineteenth century. In an 1898 exposé, Brann claimed that Baptist missionaries were smuggling South American children into the country and making them house servants—tacit slaves—of Baylor officials. He alleged that a relative of the university’s president had gotten a Brazilian student pregnant, that professors seduced female students as a matter of course, and that any father who sent a daughter to Baylor was risking her disgrace or rape. The college, he wrote, was nothing but a “factory for the manufacture of ministers and magdalenes.” The slur was drawn from the centuries-old character attack on Jesus Christ’s follower Mary Magdalene—magdalenes were reformed prostitutes.