Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Ann signed on as Weddington’s campaign manager, working with Yontz and Ron Weddington. Once the kids were off to school, she went to the candidate’s law office, where they ran the campaign; she went home before sundown and resumed her life as a wife and mom. The Weddington campaign raised little money, and the candidate had no political experience. But she was running for an open seat, and she was a natural at thinking on her feet and framing short, quick answers to questions. Also, she looked good on television.

  Within the Weddington campaign, Ann renewed her acquaintance with a volunteer who would become the most important strategist in her own political life. Mary Beth Rogers was the daughter of Anita Coniglio, one of Ann’s friends from the Dallas years. A gifted writer, Mary Beth regarded people with a slanting, knowing smile and an exceptionally quick mind. Her husband, John, was one of the state’s top labor organizers. For Ann and Mary Beth, it was easy enough to find out that the largest group of employees in Austin was the University of Texas’s nonteaching staff. Mary Beth designed a striking purple postcard that reached all those employees they could find. “You have not been treated fairly,” it read. “You haven’t had a raise in years. Vote for Sarah Weddington.” There was almost nothing Sarah Weddington, if elected, would be able to do to force the University of Texas to pay those workers higher wages. But Ann and her candidate knew that mobilizing constituencies ignored by everyone else was one of the ways underfunded long shots gained ground.

  Weddington fired the imagination of Austin voters the same way that Sissy Farenthold did. The difference was that in the capital, a candidate like that could win. The Democrat who made the runoff against Weddington kept saying that one day she would wear her hair up, and one day she would wear it down. It was supposed to be a laugh line, but his stubborn theme was that no woman could serve effectively in the Texas Legislature. He played into the hands of Weddington and her campaign manager and team; she won her race handily. One of the great satisfactions of that race, Ann said, was that it was a campaign run by women. Always before, she had gotten behind a candidate because David spoke up for him first. This time, he followed her lead.

  Ann’s political instincts were not foolproof, and she often fired from the hip and from the lip. She took a position on one race in 1972 that she later didn’t tell many people about. Bill Hobby was the scion of a family that was near royalty in Texas politics. Hobby’s grandfather had served in the state Senate in the 1870s, and his father, the senior William P. Hobby, was a newspaper editor and publisher who acquired a controlling interest in the Houston Post in 1939 and brought the city its first radio station. Elected to terms as lieutenant governor in 1914 and 1916, the elder Hobby became the state’s youngest governor, at thirty-nine, when James “Pa” Ferguson was impeached, and he governed impressively during World War I. His first wife died in 1929; President Eisenhower appointed his second wife, Oveta Culp Hobby, to his cabinet as the nation’s first secretary of health, education, and welfare.

  The younger Bill Hobby, whose mother was Oveta Culp Hobby, followed the same career track as his father, rising to edit the Houston Post, though a managing editor contended he was rarely seen in the newsroom. In Texas’s fragmented environmental regulatory structure, he was an appointee on the Texas Air Control Board when, in 1971, he resigned to run for lieutenant governor, the office Ben Barnes gave up to run for governor. Rich and pedigreed, Bill Hobby wore bow ties, played polo, and fought all his life to overcome a stutter, which he covered when making speeches by continually clearing his throat. Though it took him a decade to assert his control over the state Senate, he eventually became the most powerful official in Texas government. In the coming years, he would do as much as any politician to tutor and help Ann. But at first she had a poor opinion of him. She supported Joe Christie, an El Paso senator whom she had admired since her first canoe trip on the Rio Grande.

  In April 1972, she received a letter from their San Antonio friend Maury Maverick, Jr. Maury had his own pedigree. His family had arrived in Texas in the 1830s; the word “maverick” derives from the patriarch Samuel Maverick’s aggressive roundups of unbranded cattle during the days of the unfenced free range. The elder Maury Maverick was one of Franklin Roosevelt’s most loyal congressmen during passage of the New Deal legislation. Later, as San Antonio’s mayor, he blocked developers’ plans to demolish the city’s colorful and historic old town and make its spring-fed river an underground sewer. Maury, Jr., was in turn a hero of Texas liberals; as a legislator in the fifties, he heaped scorn on the Red-baiting zealots who lionized Joseph McCarthy, and he energetically but unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate seat that Lyndon Johnson gave up when he was elected vice president. Retiring from political life to his San Antonio law practice, Maury wrote tart and entertaining columns for the San Antonio Express-News—sometimes conversing with the ghost of his favorite dead bartender. Mention of an essay that Maury wrote for the Texas Observer had set off the blistering tirade that Johnson unloaded on David Richards at the birthday party in Washington ten years earlier. Maverick doted on the Richards children, sending them tree saplings to plant and signing his letters “Major Maury.” But in 1972, Maury had a bone to pick with Ann, and as usual he spoke his mind.

  Dear Ann:

  I’m delighted you liked the wine. What follows is a reply to the rest of your card wherein you attacked me for being for Bill Hobby. You are a stunning, brilliant, and good-looking young woman, fine wife, and first-rate mother living on top of a modern Mount Olympus, [married to] a fairly wealthy man and one of the best men in Texas. It is too bad you are prone to flip remarks because it detracts from your otherwise many fine qualities.

  I never heard of your candidate in my life. I doubt if he is as good as you say he is or if Bill is as bad as you think he is. . . . Is there really a clear choice, is it really that important?

  Hobby is an old social friend—not close but we have close mutual friends. . . . Hobby gave me more space than any other newspaperman in Texas when I ran for the Senate 15 years ago, and at the time I said things like Red China ought to be in the U.N. He helped me more than you did.

  Suppose he does turn out bad? Have you ever known anything else in that job? Bill has a high sense of duty to country. He may not do any good with it, but I think on a comparative basis he will please you more than anyone you have known in your life in the same job. He has a private hell of his own: Mother. That mother makes my mother, yours, and David’s, rolled into one, look like a simpering worm. He desperately wants to escape.

  No one knows I’m for Hobby except you and Bill. He is worried someone will find out about it. So what difference does it make? I hear in Austin circles that you’re lukewarm for Sissy, and I haven’t attacked you for that.

  We both love David—so let us try to reason together.

  Maury

  The upheaval in Texas politics in 1972 and 1973 and the election of Sarah Weddington spun her life in a new direction. But events that had played out over decades on stages far from Austin instilled the philosophy of politics that drove and inspired her the rest of her life.

  The American birth control movement essentially began with the suffragist Margaret Sanger. Sanger and her husband were members of the bohemian social community in Greenwich Village before World War I that included John Reed, Upton Sinclair, and Emma Goldman. Sanger wrote in her first pamphlet: “Stop bringing to birth those children whose inheritance cannot be one of health or intelligence. Stop bringing into the world children whose parents cannot provide for them. Herein lie the keys to civilization.” Sanger coined the expression “birth control.” She was the pioneer of an American women’s movement that carried on for the next hundred years.

  Haunted by the death from a second self-induced abortion of a woman she had encountered while doing volunteer social work in the slums of New York’s Lower East Side, in 1914 Sanger started publishing a newsletter called The Woman Rebel, which advocated contraception under the slogan “No Gods and No Masters.” Indi
cted for violating U.S. postal obscenity laws that year, she jumped bail and fled to Great Britain under an alias. Allowed to return to America the next year, she defiantly opened the country’s first family planning and birth control clinic, in Brooklyn; for that, she served thirty days in jail.

  Sanger was no advocate of abortion, but she called for the invention of an oral contraceptive, and in the 1920s her Clinical Research Bureau received generous anonymous grants from the foundation of John D. Rockefeller. Following a separation and divorce from her husband, she was reputed to have had affairs with the psychologist Havelock Ellis and the novelist H. G. Wells. If she was in the vanguard of free love, she had racially toxic views on who ought to be allowed to participate: “The lower down in the scale of human development we go, the less sexual control we find,” she wrote in 1920. “It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone keeps him from obtaining sexual satisfaction in the streets.”

  In 1952, she and allies convinced a reproductive physiologist, Gregory Pincus, and a Harvard clinical gynecologist, John Rock, to increase research funding of birth control by as much as fifty times. Meanwhile, a Polish immigrant and research fellow for the Mayo Foundation named Frank Colton had discovered an improved way to synthesize cortisone, the first commercially available oral contraceptive. Sales of Enovid, first made available in 1960, netted G. D. Searle and Company profits of $24 million in the first five years. But the chemist credited for inventing “the Pill” was a Jewish man named Carl Djerassi, who was born in Vienna, Austria. His parents, both physicians, fled to Bulgaria to escape the Nazis. In 1939, he and his mother, though penniless, immigrated to the United States. Djerassi became an American citizen in 1945, and in 1950 he was an associate director of research at Syntex, a company in Mexico City.

  Along with the Mexican researcher Luis Miramontes and the Hungarian George Rosenkranz, Djerassi first worked on a synthetic cortisone derived from a sweet potato that grows wild in Mexico. Later they synthesized a hormone called norethindrone, which could be taken as an oral contraceptive and proved to be more than 90 percent effective. It tricked a woman’s body into believing she was already pregnant, so she released no new eggs for ovulation. About 100 million women worldwide came to rely on the pill. In the 1950s, American women had an average of four children. After the invention and legalization of the pill, the average steadily dropped to two. Produced and marketed under many brand names, the oral contraceptive pill was hailed by the philosopher Ashley Montagu: “In its effects I believe that the pill ranks in importance with the discovery of fire.”

  Still, the question remained whether all this fire would continue burning in American courts. Though Ann directed Sarah Weddington’s campaign for the Texas House out of her law office, she was not directly involved in the historic lawsuit that consumed much of her candidate’s time. But from that vantage point, she observed with fascination as the feminist attorney with the cherubic face took on the case of a lifetime.

  In a landmark case in 1965, Griswold v. Connecticut, by a 7–2 vote the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that a state law that prohibited the use of contraceptives violated “a right to marital privacy.” Then in the fall of 1969, Texas became the focal point of debate and litigation surrounding reproduction.

  A young woman named Norma McCorvey had been working as an itinerant carnival barker when she learned she was pregnant. Friends in Dallas advised her to claim she had been raped: Texas law ruled that abortion was legal if the pregnancy was caused by rape or incest. McCorvey never filed charges on the bogus rape allegation, but she went to a Dallas clinic known to provide illegal abortions. She found that the police had shut the place down.

  Referrals led her to a Dallas attorney, Linda Coffee, and Austin’s Sarah Weddington. They filed a lawsuit in federal district court on behalf of McCorvey, hiding her identity behind the alias “Jane Roe,” and named Dallas district attorney Henry Wade as the defendant. Seeking to allow McCorvey to obtain an abortion in the absence of rape or incest, they won in federal district court, whose judges cited the vagueness of the Texas law as well as guarantees of the Ninth Amendment, an article of the Bill of Rights that preserves, in James Madison’s words, a “great residuum” of individual liberties that cannot be “thrown into the hands of the government.” But the judges declined to grant an injunction that would enable McCorvey to have an abortion. She gave birth to the baby, gave it up for adoption, and years later completely changed her mind on the issue, becoming a pro-life activist who claims that she was a pawn duped by overly ambitious attorneys. But at the time, she told them to appeal the decision: “Let’s do it for other women.”

  Ann was amazed by the way Weddington kept her poise and rolled with the punches. In a highly controversial ruling, Chief Justice Warren Burger declared in October 1972—right before the national and state elections—that Roe v. Wade had to be reargued for the benefit of the new Nixon appointees, William Rehnquist and Lewis F. Powell, Jr. Weddington flew back to Washington and calmly stated her case again. On January 22, 1973, the Court threw out the Texas law by a 7–2 vote. In his majority opinion, Justice Harry Blackmun did not emphasize the arguments of the lower court; he wrote instead that abortion in the first trimester of pregnancy was covered by an individual right of privacy guaranteed by the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

  Two developments galvanized the sexual liberation of American women during the sixties and seventies—ready and safe access to birth control pills, and, thanks to the work of those two young attorneys from Texas, a law that prevented governments from criminalizing abortion.

  After Sarah Weddington’s successful campaign, Ann went back to her life of buying groceries, cooking supper, overseeing her children’s educations, playing bridge with her friends, and hosting parties for Mad Dogs and Yellow Dog Democrats. But soon Charles Miles, a black friend who had worked on the Weddington campaign, asked Ann to help Wilhelmina Delco in her 1974 race for the legislature. Delco, who had grown up in a Chicago housing project, was a member of the Austin school board and an experienced campaigner with a strong local organization. Ann said that Delco’s campaign didn’t need much of her help or time. But Delco recalled: “Ann Richards walked into my small office and said, ‘Get your comfortable shoes on, we’ve got to raise some money,’ and she did.” It was a heady role for Ann to play in seeing the first African American, a woman, elected to the legislature from Travis County. Delco served with distinction for the next twenty years.

  In that 1974 election, two Hispanic candidates were fighting for political footholds in Austin and Travis County. Gonzalo Barrientos had lost a previous race for the state legislature but was running again. Richard Moya had won a first term on the county commissioners court and was trying to defend it. “We rented a building over on the east side,” Moya told me with a chuckle. “Gonzalo’s sign marked the front door, and mine was above a side door. But inside, that operation was all mixed together. That was how I first got to know Ann. She and Claire Korioth and a couple of other women showed up to help, and they were good at it. They raised us some money.” Both candidates won their elections, and Moya went on to become one of Ann’s most important allies and followers.

  Caryl Yontz, who had arranged Ann’s introductory lunch with Weddington, took a job as the latter’s chief of staff in the House of Representatives, but then got a job with the Carter administration in Washington. When Weddington asked Ann to take her place, she accepted. Offices in the House were very small; the representative and a chief of staff had a couple of assistants and perhaps a few student interns. During a legislative session, most staffers arrived early in the morning and continued long into the night. But Ann negotiated an agreement with Weddington that allowed her to go home early enough to cook supper for her family and to help, if needed, with her children’s homework.

  She loved the work of d
rafting bills, directing them to committees, and seeing them reach the House floor for a vote. There was plenty of social and working interaction among the members and staffs of the two chambers, so even though Bill Hobby presided over the Senate, Ann first came to know him during that session. And she changed her mind about the man she had blithely written off in the letter to Maury Maverick. Hobby became one of her mentors: “He was the first man outside my immediate circle of friends who ever talked to me as if we were on equal footing. . . . I was really taken with his easy manner and extraordinary kindness.”

  She was diligent about the work she did for Weddington during those months, and she was fully aware that they were part of a sea change in Texas politics. But she was still an irreverent and ribald character. This was before e-mail and the widespread use of fax machines; the legislative process in the Capitol lurched along with communications hand delivered by messengers. David and Ann had become friends of a young man from Iowa named Doug Zabel, who had come to Dallas and SMU in 1965. After graduation, he was about to accept a reporter’s job with a newspaper in Karachi, Pakistan, when he received a tip that Ron Clower, a liberal state senator from the Dallas suburb of Garland, needed a press aide. Before long, Ann and Zabel had messengers galloping between Weddington’s office in the House and Clower’s in the Senate. Ann had some stationery printed up that read: “Memo from the desk of Ann Richards, Problem Lady.”