Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The novelty of voting for herself: en route to an electoral triumph, Ann walks away from Austin polls accompanied by her children Dan and Cecile, early 1980s.

  Barbara Jordan, the Houston native and member of Congress, was the keynote speaker. Jordan brought the delegates roaring to their feet with her almost Shakespearean diction: “Human rights apply equally to Soviet dissidents, Chilean peasants, and American women! Women are human. We know our rights are limited. We know our rights are violated. We need a domestic human rights program. This conference should be the beginning of such an effort, an effort that would be enhanced if we would not allow ourselves to be brainwashed by people who predict chaos and failure for us.

  “Tell them they lie—and move on.”

  After the Houston conference, Ann began to get requests to make appearances all around the country. At a three-day Campaign Techniques Institute conference in the Dallas suburb of Irving, she was photographed showing an Oklahoma state legislator how to shake hands. “The secret,” Ann was quoted in the caption, “is to be quick on the thrust, get the space between your thumb and forefinger to touch your constituent’s thumb-forefinger first. Slow thrusters end up with crushed fingers.”

  On the home front, David and Ann and the family had gone down to San Antonio to tour the displays at the unveiling of the Institute of Texan Cultures. They saw a slide show that Ann thought was truly thrilling. But when it was over and they were lining up to walk through the exhibits, Ann’s youngest child, Ellen, tugged at her mother’s sleeve and asked, “Where were the women?”

  Ellen Richards’s question made Ann realize that the only women consistently mentioned in Texas history were Miriam “Ma” Ferguson, who served two terms as governor in the twenties and thirties; and Cynthia Ann Parker, the tragic nineteenth-century woman who was abducted as a child by Comanches and became one of them, only to be taken by force again and made to spend the rest of her life a captive of her Texan family. Ann served on the board of the Foundation for Women’s Resources with Hickie, Sarah Weddington, Cathy Bonner, Judith Guthrie, and Martha Smiley. They engaged Mary Beth Rogers, a skillful writer, to take on what became a four-year, $400,000 project that profiled other influential and important Texas women: the pilot Katherine Stinson, who made her first solo flight in 1912; nineteen-year-old Emma Tenayuca, who led a bitter strike of San Antonio pecan shellers in 1938; Clara Driscoll, a young heiress who kept the Alamo from being demolished; Bette Graham, the inventor of the correction fluid Liquid Paper; and Katherine Anne Porter, the novelist and short story writer who boasted, “I was the first native of Texas in its whole history to be a professional writer.”

  At home, Ann and David clung to their evening routines, but now the telephone rang almost constantly. “David and I had a game we played,” Ann reminisced. “The phone would ring and he would answer it, and if it was for me he would cup his hand over the receiver, point it toward me, and say, ‘Ann, it’s King Kong,’ or ‘Ann, it’s the governor.’” It was a signal that the caller was probably someone Ann didn’t want to talk to, at least not at martini hour. When the phone rang one night not long after a Democrat regained the presidency, David cupped his hand over the receiver and said “Ann, it’s Midge Costanza.”

  Ann didn’t believe it: Costanza was the highest-ranking woman in the Carter administration. As she later recalled, “I swept up the phone and said very cavalierly, ‘Hi, Midge, what do you want? I’m cooking David’s supper.’”

  There was a stunned pause, then the caller said, “Ann, President Jimmy Carter has asked me to call you to see if you would be willing to serve on his Advisory Committee for Women.”

  Ann stammered and started apologizing as fast as she could. “My God, Midge. . . . I had no idea it was really you. . . . Of course I accept.”

  The invitation ushered Ann into friendships with the actress Anne Ramsey and the syndicated columnist Erma Bombeck, and it was a thrilling experience—at first. Funded by the Department of Labor, the committee met in Washington, focusing on the suddenly clouded prospects of the proposed Equal Rights Amendment. At the outset it had seemed that the amendment could not fail. By late 1972, the year that Congress approved the Equal Rights Amendment and submitted it to the states, legislatures in thirty of the required thirty-eight states, including Texas, had ratified it. Richard Nixon supported it. Then Phyllis Schlafly entered the picture.

  Schlafly was a conservative attorney and activist from Missouri who had gained national footing with a self-published book called A Choice, Not an Echo (1964), which idealized Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign and offered dark intimations on why Lyndon Johnson won. Now she launched a grassroots campaign to stop the ERA, and her chiggers drew blood. She was pinning down state legislators with charges that the ERA would cause women to be drafted into the military, that they would have to use unisex bathrooms, that widows would lose their Social Security benefits as “dependent wives.” And always between the lines of that rhetoric was fierce opposition to abortion and the Supreme Court’s ruling in Roe v. Wade.

  The committee was not able to debunk Schlafly’s rhetoric or counter her organizing of conservative women. Ann was sick with the flu and unable to go to Washington when the committee imploded as a result. President Carter had grown suspicious that Abzug intended to embarrass him publicly, so his chief of staff, Hamilton Jordan, called Abzug aside and told her she was being relieved as the committee chair. More than half the women quit in protest. Members called Ann and urged her to resign as well. She listened to their complaints and reasoning, but she couldn’t do that. The ERA’s ox was in the ditch, as she often said in her speeches, and she felt obliged to try to help pull it out.

  Months passed while the committee had no chair. Ann and other members decided that Lynda Johnson Robb would be an ideal replacement. She was the respected daughter of Lyndon and Lady Bird Johnson, and her husband, Chuck Robb, at that time a candidate for lieutenant governor of Virginia, was perceived as a rising star of the Democratic Party. Also, no one would ever say Lynda Robb was as abrasive as Bella Abzug. In a meeting the next day, LBJ’s daughter began with a short statement, then turned to Ann. As Ann remembered it, she said, “Mr. President, it is our impression that you are willing to personally make some calls on behalf of our interests, and of central interest to us is the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. We feel that there are areas and people that you might contact who would be helpful in the individual states.”

  Carter cut her off with the stern look and tone of a U.S. Naval Academy graduate and a rainless Georgia peanut farmer. The president scolded them: “Frankly, ladies, I am very disappointed.” He said he thought they were going to tell him what they meant to do to get the amendment passed.

  Lynda Robb was so thunderstruck by the rebuke that she told Ann that she had to talk to the White House press corps. Suddenly, Ann was trying to put words and thoughts together while Sam Donaldson, the walrus of the group, yawped, “Well, what’s he gonna do?”

  “Who knows?” was about all she could say. Ann was dumbfounded, too. She was proud of her performance with the White House press corps, but it was clear that Carter was not going to spend his dwindling political capital trying to rescue the Equal Rights Amendment. Congress had stipulated that the states had to ratify the amendment by 1982, and the growing resistance in several states set off an alarm verging on panic. This time Barbara Jordan had it wrong. The ERA was stymied, and Schlafly’s forces were in a position to run out the clock. In its biggest test, the women’s movement floundered in chaos and failure.

  In the end, Ann’s experience with the Carter administration, though fairly extensive, was hardly positive. In 1978, one of the president’s aides, having heard of the Richardses’ great love for canoeing expeditions, arranged for Ann and David to test their whitewater mettle on the Chattooga River in Georgia. Several scenes in the movie Deliverance had been shot on the Chattooga’s fearsome rapids. David rented a Winnebago, and several Texas friends joined them in what w
as planned as a celebration of their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. David and Ann had barely put their paddles in the water when someone photographed their vertical plunge over a churning six-to-eight-foot waterfall. Though they came out of that one grinning, the Chattooga’s rapids far exceeded anything in their experience as well as their ability to navigate them. At one point, one of their most unflinching adventurer pals, the small-town lawyer and former legislator Bill Kugle, flopped on a rock and said he had had enough terror for one day.

  But fear of drowning was just one of the dreads gnawing at David. On the way to the Chattooga, in some town in Tennessee, Ann—who was not the only elected official in that canoe caravan, nor the most prominent—and another member of the gang had run down a main street like a pair of chimpanzees gone bonkers, howling and whooping and jumping up and down on cars. It was a wonder they got out of that town without all of them going to jail.

  David maintained his silence about the Chattooga River trip for more than twenty years, but he spoke up about it in his memoir:

  It struck me that Ann had fallen victim to the perennial risk of successful politicians—beginning to think they are bulletproof. The political life is full of hazards. The hours are long, the stress is high, and the temptations are great. Having a few drinks with colleagues becomes the norm, and before you know it, you’re sloshed. But everyone covers for you, because they like you or because you have power or because it’s our nature to look the other way. In any event, I did not step forward at the time and try to reverse the course, assuming I had the power to do so. I let the issue slide, and as a result, the gulf between us continued to widen as time passed.

  David wrote that the next year he was “lured” into letting his name go forward as a possible nominee to fill a vacancy on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. “I knew in my soul it was a mistake, but I wasn’t thinking very clearly.” He did note with gratitude that some friends brought a good deal more passion to the quest than he did. One of those friends was Jim Mattox.

  Initially, David and Ann had not been close to Mattox during the Dallas years. At that time, Mattox was a young assistant DA on the staff of Dallas County district attorney Henry Wade. But in 1973, with some help from David on a redistricting case that, as a by-product, created a favorable map for Mattox, he won a seat in the legislature representing part of Dallas’s blue-collar, multiethnic east side. He pushed an aggressive agenda of support for organized labor, ethics reform, open government, and consumer protection, and then, running in lockstep with the Jimmy Carter–Walter Mondale presidential campaign, he got elected to Congress in 1976. David was flattered and moved that Mattox kept up a continuing bombardment of the White House with calls and letters on his behalf. Also, Wilhelmina Delco told John White, the well-liked Democratic Party national chairman from Texas, that the civil rights movement wanted one thing from the Carter administration: David’s appointment to the federal judiciary. Her invoking the entirety of the civil rights movement was hyperbole, but David couldn’t complain.

  David Richards in a somber moment with Raw Deal co-owner Fletcher Boone (in glasses). Austin, 1980s.

  By then Ann had developed an enthusiasm for smoking pot, especially when she was drunk, and she enjoyed being the bad girl—it did not really matter what company she was in. David told me about an incident when the judicial appointments were pending. There was no discernible regret in his account. “One time we were in Washington, riding in a car with Midge Costanza, when Ann fired up. I figured my goose was cooked, to the extent it wasn’t cooked already.”

  But David conceded that one of the problems in their marriage was lack of communication. Ann believed she was doing all she could to help David get that appointment. She wrote Bud Shrake following an Austin fund-raiser that he had been unable to attend.

  Dear Bud,

  I got your check and I appreciate the help. The fund-raiser turned out to be one helluva party . . . and I paid off my debt to boot. It would have been more fun if you had been there. We started with chamber music, drink and food. Thinking that the older folks would enjoy themselves and leave before the disco show began. Ha! At one a.m. my mother was wildly waving her arms in the air with pulsating colored lights making her face a ghastly distortion. Gray heads outnumbered others . . .

  David has been interviewed by a citizen panel to elect nominees for the Fifth Circuit judgeship. He made the cut and is among fifteen nominees sent to the White House for consideration. There are five slots and it will be extremely difficult, but we have high hopes that he will make it. One slot will go to a Mexican, one a black, possibly one to a woman, which leaves only two for poor old white males. My work and association with Carter will not hurt a bit, and hopefully Sarah Weddington will do what she can.

  Jane Hickie and I had supper at the White House this week. An intimate little affair of the members of the President’s Committee on Women who did not resign following Bella’s firing. . . . Not much to drink though.

  We miss seeing you. Thanks again for being there with a check when your political hack friends need help.

  Love, Ann

  Though David did not win the federal judicial appointment, it is unlikely that Ann’s indiscreet tokes in that cab played any role in it. Midge Costanza had more pressing things to think about than marijuana smoked by the wife of a potential appellate judge appointee. She had been given a large office in the White House and the title assistant to the president for public liaison. But Carter had been in office only eight months when Costanza summoned thirty female presidential appointees to the White House for a show of protest against his opposition to federal financing of abortions for impoverished women. Months later, Costanza became the first member of the administration to call for the resignation of Bert Lance, the president’s ethically challenged and embattled friend and director of the Office of Management and Budget. Costanza’s goose was the one cooked. The Carter team stripped her of her staff and reassigned her to a basement office, where she quipped, “At least it’s hard to commit suicide down here.” She resigned from Carter’s staff not long after that. Carter appointed Sarah Weddington as her replacement.

  Ann and David were in the grip of a longtime marriage that was fast going wrong. Her qualms about what would happen if she went into politics had an element of self-fulfilling prophecy. In her book, she elaborates in a way that is both anguished and condescending.

  I had been so admiring of David because of how much he knew; the richness of his schooling and his background was far beyond anything that I would ever know. I could have started studying that day and I would have never caught up to him. David was so bright and quick. And here all of a sudden there were situations in which he was dead wrong. I was stunned.

  We had traveled along the same road for twenty-some-odd years and then suddenly my life just went straight up like a skyrocket. New experiences, new people, new ideas, new activities, and David was still doing the same thing he had always done. He was very good at it, but it was hard for him and a terror on me. I started thinking about it all the time, and what I saw happening was that my most valued relationship was beginning to spin out of my control. And the harder I reached for it, the more elusive it became.

  David maintained that one side of his personality was dark and gloomy, but that wasn’t how he was perceived as he walked about his office or the courtroom with his long stride, rubbing his hand over his bald scalp as if for luck. David and Sam Houston Clinton, who would soon be elected to the Texas Court of Criminal Appeals, had bought a large yellow-brick house on West Seventh Street and divided it into offices that housed the dominant forces in Texas liberal politics in the 1970s. One of the tenants in the building was the Texas Observer. For most of the seventies, that office was a place for the interviews, visitors, and contrasting styles of small, quiet Kaye Northcott and large, boisterous Molly Ivins, who was followed about by the devoted mongrel she named Shit. The other tenant in the building was the Texas chapter of the American Civil Liberties Uni
on. The director, John Duncan, was a former academic economist who would lose his patience at a public forum in Amarillo in the early 1980s and delight reporters by erupting, “Ross Perot is a dumbshit.” The staff lawyer was the California native Mary Keller, and the associate director was Dorothy Browne, who had watched her husband, Billy Lee Brammer, squander his writing talent and succumb to the drug culture—he died of an accidental amphetamine overdose when he was just forty-eight. David had not been close to Billy Lee, but he understood the lingering sadness of Dorothy and the writer’s friends and admirers. The Gay Place captured the soul and style of Austin politics in the fifties and, better than any of the history and journalism at the time, the enigma of LBJ.

  Some of David’s most rewarding and important cases were undertaken pro bono for the Texas Civil Liberties Union, and whether they had an active case working or not, he liked to climb the stairs, lounge on the porch swings, and shoot the breeze with the drawling activist and two smart, pretty women. There were less inviting ways to spend the time. Such as going home.

  In 1979, Eddie Wilson sold his little beer joint and greasy spoon, the Raw Deal, to two of Austin’s great characters. Fletcher Boone and Jim “Lopez” Smitham had grown up together in Wichita Falls. Fletcher was a painter and sculptor whose boosters in New York included the influential writer George Plimpton, but Fletcher knew he would never be disciplined and productive enough to prosper as an artist. He ran an art gallery for a while in a rental property of Bud Shrake’s. A street number on the door, 600, was hard to make out, and the place became known as Gallery Goo. Lopez, who had no Hispanic relatives, wore a hipster’s goatee, dark glasses, and sometimes an ascot. He kept in his wallet a photograph of his profligate hero, Egypt’s King Farouk.