by Jan Reid
A man who had been Ann’s principal at Waco High was now the superintendent of the Austin school district. Because of that, she believed, she got a job teaching social studies at Fulmore Junior High. She was not yet twenty-two. Her ninth graders were at least fifteen, some older because they had failed a couple of grades. She stood her ground and did her best, but did not believe she was a very good teacher. She had also been trying to get pregnant, and during that year she went to a gynecologist to find out whether something was wrong. Tests revealed she had a cyst on an ovary. She talked to her principal, a former coach, who said kindly, “Ann, take my advice and get that thing out. It’s just like sleeping with a snake.” Great. She had the operation and worked on through the spring semester. David was preparing to take the bar exam when he received his draft notice. But the day he went to take his physical, Ann found out that she was pregnant—he never had to worry again about the draft.
In 1956, Eisenhower easily carried Texas in his rematch with Adlai Stevenson, and in a Democratic race to succeed the retiring and scandal-tainted Allan Shivers, the junior U.S. senator from Texas, Price Daniel, beat Ralph Yarborough by 3,000 votes and became governor. But Yarborough and his revved-up organization kept right on running. To LBJ’s dismay, Yarborough won the special election to fill Daniel’s senate seat. Yarborough was the hero of Texas liberals for the rest of his long career.
While David was job-hunting, recruiters for the Central Intelligence Agency, of all people, briefly turned his head. But he took a job with a Dallas law firm, Mullinax, Wells, Morris & Mauzy. Not many law firms in Texas specialized in representing labor unions, but this one had a reputation as being among the best that did. Oscar Mauzy, the junior partner and a future Texas politician of note, let the tall new addition to the firm sleep on his sofa.
Iona Willis and Eleanor Richards agreed that Ann could not have a baby in a strange new city with no one to help but David. “I was so stupid I didn’t argue,” Ann recalled in her book. “I had been running my own household for more than three years now, I was independent, and it was no picnic living in my parents’ house. I wanted to know what was going on with David, how our new life was progressing. Instead, he was starting a new career and I was in my old room. My mother scared up a tiny newborn rabbit in the yard and brought it to me. I nursed that little rabbit like it was a baby. Then the dog killed it and I had my first child the next day, July 15, 1957.”
In the years to come, David admitted to having some long-standing contentious issues with his mother-in-law, but he frowned when I asked whether Ann’s retreat to Waco was another instance of Iona Willis’s overweening control of her daughter. “No, no,” he told me. “That couldn’t be blamed on her. That was, well, me.”
Ann holds infant Cecile at home beneath her wedding portrait, Waco, 1957.
CHAPTER 2
New Frontiers
After Cecile was born, Ann spent six more weeks at home in Waco being helped and schooled on how to be a mother. At last, she bundled up the infant and joined David in Dallas, where they lived in a small house with yellow rock siding that she thought was ugly. Every morning, David would put on his coat and tie and rush downtown while trying to quell his fears of being overwhelmed by the tasks at hand. For Ann, those first weeks and months in Dallas were stressful, monotonous, and lonely. She sewed baby clothes, cleaned the house, cooked, ironed David’s shirts, and puzzled through the strenuous demands of motherhood. The highlight of many of her days was putting Cecile in her buggy and rolling it back and forth as she watched American Bandstand on television. Some nights their baby would go to sleep only if lulled by continual motion, so they would put her in the car and make aimless loops around the unfamiliar city.
“Thank God,” Ann later wrote in her book, “little babies are pretty strong and resourceful and can usually survive no matter who they have landed with; I had no more idea how to take care of a baby than a man on the moon. David was sort of mystified by the whole deal. We had never discussed having children. It was a different era. You didn’t think, ‘Do I want to do this?’ or ‘Is it time?’ or ‘Are we mature enough?’ None of these questions ever arose. We were typical of most Fifties couples: we got married; we had babies.”
David later made his mark in the law as a litigator and an expert on the First Amendment, civil rights, and voting rights. But he spent the first twenty-five years of his career representing labor unions and workers in disputes with employers. He never gave up his belief that union organizers and activists were a driving force of American progressivism, that ideally they were like his Austin pal Henry Holman, the joking master carpenter, Democratic Party dissenter, and vice horse at the Scholz Garten. But victims of corporate greed were not always easily identified among the clients he encountered in his crash course in labor law. Nat Wells, one of the firm’s senior partners, had been an attorney for the National Labor Relations Board and had successfully prosecuted Ford Motor Company strikebreakers during Franklin Roosevelt’s administration. The Dallas firm now handled all the legal business of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in the South—a major account. In 1957, just as David was breaking in, the Teamsters president, Dave Beck, was sentenced to prison on a bribery conviction, and Jimmy Hoffa took over. A federal judge in New York placed the union in trusteeship and appointed Nat Wells one of the trustees. The firm’s senior partner was always traveling on business, and a continuing rain of strikes, injunctions, and grand jury investigations fell on the head of the rookie lawyer. “It seemed to me,” David said in his memoir, “that every day for years was the same thing: I was constantly facing questions I could not fathom.”
David and Ann were still deeply involved in the Young Democrats, which periodically gave them a reason to drive down to Austin and catch up with the Holmans, Fletcher Boone, Wayne Oakes, and the rest of the gang. But if liberal politics was going to be their ongoing passion and resolve, they had to accept the fact that they lived in hostile territory. “Who Is John Galt?” inquired countless bumper stickers on the cars of people enraptured by the conservative revolutionary in Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. The editorial page of the Dallas Morning News was one of the most rabidly conservative in the country. A couple of blocks down Akard Street from Neiman-Marcus, the retail store that set the city’s style for women’s fashions and interior décor, the Adolphus and Baker hotels (the latter now demolished) presided over a spooky emptiness on the streets after the sun went down. Even bars were scarce. People came downtown to work and then hurried home. The nearest residents lived across a horseshoe-shaped clot of expressways and the floodplain of the Trinity River. The faces of people who lived east, south, and west of downtown were for the most part black or brown. The business oligarchy that controlled Dallas disposed of most of Deep Elm, pronounced “Ellum,” the black district famous for its blues musicians and back-alley dice games, by condemning and tearing down boardinghouses, pool halls, and black mortuaries and then building Central Expressway through a broad swath of the area. Looming over commuter routes were billboards advertising the John Birch Society.
Public schools, public restrooms, and drinking fountains were rigidly segregated; in bus stations, people in need of a toilet chose among doors marked “Men,” “Women,” and “Colored.” The Dallas school board simply ignored the directives in Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Topeka, Kansas, case in which the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools violated the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. In her book, Ann described the mundane cruelties imposed by segregation: “Black people were allowed to buy goods in department stores but they were not allowed to try them on; black women could buy hats but they couldn’t put them on their heads.”
Ann was frustrated, believing she knew no one of another race or culture. One night in 1958, after asking David to stay with Cecile, she went to an old house in east Dallas that was the local NAACP headquarters, where she stuffed envelopes for the insurgent campaign for governor of Henry González, a s
tate senator from San Antonio who lost that race but went on to a long and distinguished career in Congress. To Ann’s pleasure and surprise, she did know someone there. The man who welcomed her and introduced her to his small children was Pancho Medrano, a United Auto Workers activist who had worked with David on some of his union’s legal business. During that time, Ann and David moved to another rental house, this one near Love Field airport. The neighborhood was integrated in the sense that many whites were moving out to suburbs, and black families were moving in. Ann put Cecile in her stroller and walked the blocks, knocking on doors and trying to get strangers to vote and participate in the Democratic precinct convention. She came away with the realization that these African Americans were afraid to do anything overtly political. She tried to assure them that law enforcement would protect their right to peacefully assemble. They considered her with gazes that said: “You talking about the cops?”
Ann was pregnant in 1959 with their second child, Dan. She convinced David that they had to have a bigger house, and on Coogan Drive they made their first real estate purchase. They began to host backyard parties for local and visiting liberals, and word got around about the convivial gatherings. But motherhood and the guidebook of Dr. Benjamin Spock dictated Ann’s workaday routine. During that period, a friend of David’s mother introduced them to a couple that became as good a pair of friends as they ever had. Sam and Virginia Whitten, who had grown up in small towns in northeast Texas, first met while students at Paris Junior College. While serving in the navy in World War II, Sam had been thrilled to take part in some officer training at Harvard, but had little good to say about the long months spent on a supply ship. “It was like the movie Mr. Roberts, without Mr. Roberts.”
After the war, they finished their educations as librarians at the University of Texas. Sam first worked for the Dallas Public Library, and then was head of the science library at Southern Methodist University. Virginia would make her career as a librarian in the public schools, but her calling in life then was like Ann’s—she was a wife and mother. When Ann would start to get frantic, she would load Cecile and Dan in the car and drive to the house of her best friend. Virginia then had three children and was pregnant with a fourth. “I would charge through the door and there in the middle of this storm, with snotty-nosed children crawling, banging, screaming, Virginia would be placidly folding diapers,” Ann wrote. “I had a diaper service, but Virginia washed her own, and she’d be sitting there folding them. ‘Virginia,’ I’d babble, ‘I am just losing my mind.’ ‘I know,’ she’d tell me. ‘Why don’t you sit down and have a cup of coffee?’”
The 1960 presidential election stirred liberal Democrats with a sense of uprising, if not confidence. The Richardses’ first political volunteering effort that year was to work hard in support of the campaign of David’s law firm colleague, Oscar Mauzy, for national president of the Young Democrats. Mauzy, who was then thirty-four, lost the race, but not before his friend David Richards got in a fistfight with one of their adversaries in the lobby of a hotel in Toledo, Ohio.
The Young Democrats believed that operatives of Lyndon Johnson, who was now a presidential candidate as well as the Senate majority leader, had tanked Mauzy’s candidacy. The state Democratic convention took place soon afterward. The liberals descended on Austin and the Scholz Garten, growing more annoyed, as the night wore on, that a banner draped across Congress Avenue read “Lyndon Johnson: A Leader to Lead the Nation.” After a while, they decided to sabotage the affront. David and Ann rode forth to battle in the convertible of their friend Bill Kilgarlin, who, like Mauzy, was a future justice on the Texas Supreme Court. The banner was tied up securely across the six lanes of Congress. The insurgents were about to cut it down when one of their comrades took a Tarzan-like ride on one of the ropes—and swung right into the arms of some Austin cops. The leaders of the plot vanished in the darkness, and later that night David sheepishly got the ones who had been arrested out of jail. The next day at the convention, the labor unions cut a deal with the Johnson forces, and the true liberals, as they perceived themselves, were left soaking their wounded spirits at Scholz’s and singing “We Shall Overcome.”
In April 1959, Johnson had pressured the Texas Legislature and Governor Daniel to pass and enact the so-called Lyndon Law, which removed a prohibition against a candidate being listed for two separate offices in the same election. Democrats of all stripes perked up in January 1960 when President Eisenhower declined to endorse Richard Nixon, just two days after his vice president had announced his candidacy—a stinging rebuke. As the year went on, Johnson led a “Stop Kennedy” alliance with fellow candidates Adlai Stevenson, Stuart Symington, and Hubert Humphrey. LBJ hoped to thwart JFK on the first ballot and take the prize away from those fellow aspirants on the second or later ballots. The Stop Kennedy forces did not come close to derailing him, though Johnson finished second in delegates. Participants and historians have not reached a consensus on why JFK offered the vice presidential nomination to Johnson, or why Johnson accepted, but there is no doubt that JFK’s brother Robert “Bobby” Kennedy thought it was tantamount to a deal with the devil. It seems most plausible that after JFK looked at the field on which he had to engage Nixon, he took on Johnson as his running mate in hopes of carrying Texas and other states in the South and Southwest.
Kennedy repeatedly used the slogan “New Frontier” in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention: “We stand on the edge of a new frontier. The frontier of the 1960s, the frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, the frontier of unfilled hopes and unfilled threats.” Those words were prophetic in a chilling way—and they were also borrowed. Henry Wallace, the leftist secretary of agriculture and unhappy one-term vice president of Franklin Roosevelt, had written a book titled The New Frontier in 1934, and in 1936 the slogan was tested in a speech by Alf Landon, the Kansas governor and GOP presidential candidate whom FDR crushed that year.
Inspired by the charisma and apparent idealism of Kennedy, Ann did everything she could to contribute to the campaign. Babysitters enabled her to go to the local precinct headquarters one or two days a week and work the desk, handing out bumper stickers and arranging the distribution of yard signs. She lived with the fact that her assignments were menial, that she was the help. And in Dallas, it was hard to believe Kennedy had much chance of beating Nixon. On November 4, four days before the election, a crowd estimated at a million and a half cheered Kennedy in Chicago; that day in Dallas, Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson were mobbed, jeered, and swatted with a protest sign in the lobby of the Adolphus Hotel.
But the alliance of convenience between JFK and LBJ delivered. Kennedy carried Texas by 46,000 votes, which he could not have done without Johnson. Republicans alleged brazen fraud in places like Fannin County, the home of Sam Rayburn, the powerful Speaker of the House. That county on the Oklahoma border had 4,895 registered voters, but 6,138 ballots were reported cast and counted, and three-fourths of them went for Kennedy. The Nixon camp raised howls about similar irregularities in Chicago, where the totals helped Kennedy come from behind and claim Illinois. The electoral votes of Illinois and Texas made JFK president.
Although David was doing well in his law practice by 1961, on track to making partner, he and Ann were uplifted by Kennedy’s election and worn out by Dallas. With the help of Johnson’s aide Harry McPherson, who had been a good friend in law school, David got a job as a staff lawyer with the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. He gave up his position at the law firm, they sold their house, and within a month of the inauguration, they moved into a house on Capitol Hill. Ann loved Washington at first. During the day, she bundled up Cecile and Dan and explored the matchless art in the National Gallery. They watched a parade honoring Alan Shepard, America’s first astronaut to soar above the earth’s atmosphere. A babysitter came once a week, and on many of those days, Ann went to the Senate gallery and listened in fascination to the debates. She was particularly taken by the Minnesota Democrat Hubert Hump
hrey because he seemed passionate about everything that came to mind, and by the Illinois Republican Everett Dirksen, who one day made a long speech about how the noble marigold ought to be named the national flower. (The rose was awarded that honor during the Reagan administration.)
At the Civil Rights Commission, David was happy enough at first. His office looked out over Lafayette Square. But Eisenhower had created the commission as a fact-finding entity, not one invested with real power. A major push on civil rights was not a bear that Kennedy and his New Frontiersmen longed to wrestle in the first months of the administration. But Bobby Kennedy, the attorney general, was keen on taking down corrupt union officials. In one investigation, David was assigned the task of going to Atlanta to survey any evidence there of racial discrimination in organized labor. On that assignment, he relearned a primary rule in the legal profession—never ask a question whose answer you are not prepared for. “While interviewing the business manager of the electricians local in Atlanta,” he recalled, “I asked why there were no Negro electricians in the union. The answer was straightforward: ‘All niggers are afraid of electricity.’”