by Jan Reid
Hance whooped with glee over an invitation to a “Bush Bash” at Texas Tech University that began “Dear Fellow Christians”—an ad for the same rally in the Tech newspaper promised free beer. Hance also scored with a letter castigating Bush for importing as campaign workers “Rockefeller-type Republicans like Karl Rove.” It forced an exasperated Bush to protest to the Midland Reporter-Telegram that Rove was “a twenty-seven-year-old guy who works in my dad’s office in Houston. He has nothing to do with my campaign. I doubt if he even supports Rockefeller.” Hance defeated Bush with 53 percent of the vote, and the rout seemed worse than that. Bush’s recent marriage to Laura Welch, a grade-school teacher and librarian from Midland, helped put the shambles of that race behind him. And Rove never forgot the first impression that Bush, who was then a graduate student at Harvard, had made upon him: “Huge amounts of charisma, swagger, cowboy boots, flight jacket, wonderful smile, just charisma—you know, wow.”
The young politico’s luck changed when he moved to Austin and caught on with Bill Clements. Rove, whose specialty was to raise money by writing direct-mail broadsides to fervent members of the GOP base, revered old-timers like Clements and another Dallas oilman, H. R. “Bum” Bright, who poured money into the Texas Aggie football program but was oddly indifferent to his acquisition of the Dallas Cowboys. Still, Rove thought they had no real sense of the opportunity for Republicans in Texas. They gave him a list of 5,000 donors from the 1978 campaign and said they wanted him to raise $200,000 in a couple of years. Rove expanded the list to 44,000 friendly names and raised $1 million for the Clements campaign during his first year on the job.
Despite the Republicans’ hold on two of the top three political offices in Texas and confidence that the future belonged to the GOP, Democrats weren’t acting as if 1982 was going to be a losing year. They were lucky to have Lloyd Bentsen running for reelection. Bentsen was hardly the liberal that Phil Gramm made him out to be in a failed race for the Senate as a Democrat. James Baker, who was Reagan’s first chief of staff and George H. W. Bush’s tennis partner in Houston, would have laughed at the notion. They knew Bentsen was of the same stripe. In 1970, Bentsen was the one, after all, who had retired Ralph Yarborough from the Senate with television ads that associated him with anti–Vietnam War protests and blazing chaos in American streets. That fall, Bentsen turned back George Bush, who was then a star GOP congressman from Houston; he had been licking his chops at the prospect of taking the Senate seat away from Yarborough. In 1976, the year Bentsen won his second Senate term, he felt he embarrassed himself with a feeble race for the Democratic presidential nomination. He never dreamed that Georgia governor Jimmy Carter could take him out so easily. As a politician, Bentsen was no LBJ, but he was smooth and urbane, and as he ran for his third term in 1982, his rough handling of Yarborough was forgiven, though not forgotten, by the liberals; he was the accepted leader of Texas Democrats.
In Austin, Jack Martin, a political consultant and public relations strategist, was closely aligned with Bentsen. Martin brought young computer wizards into the race on behalf of Bentsen and the rest of the ticket, and the Democrats campaigned with an uncommon air of discipline and a resolve not to repeat mistakes of the past.
And Bentsen drew a gift of an opponent in the ultraconservative Dallas congressman Jim Collins. After an irreverent and somewhat rocky ride with the New York Times, Molly Ivins had returned to Texas as a columnist for the Dallas Times Herald, and she lampooned Collins, no doubt to Bentsen’s delight, with the line: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.”
In the governor’s race, the Texas attorney general, Mark White, from Houston, had risen through the organization of the conservative rancher and governor Dolph Briscoe. His political adversaries scoffed that he had been a lame Houston lawyer and an inert attorney general, but to win that office, White had defeated James Baker, one of the most skillful and prominent Republicans of his generation. To get the chance to challenge Clements, White had to get past both railroad commissioner Buddy Temple, the son of the East Texas timber baron Arthur Temple, and the liberals’ favorite, Texas land commissioner Bob Armstrong.
Defeating Clements would be an uphill climb for any of them, but the governor had liabilities. Despite being a successful oilman, Clements got little credit for an economic boom in Texas that had been triggered by a sharp rise in oil prices in the seventies. And his popularity was not enhanced when his offshore drilling company Sedco, at one time the largest in the world, suffered a blowout in the Gulf of Mexico in 1979 in a partnership project with Mexico’s oil monopoly, Pemex. It was at the time the worst oil spill the world had experienced. Clements’s response was a shrug: “There’s no use crying over spilled milk,” the governor of Texas said. “Let’s don’t get excited about this thing.”
In other top races in which Democrats were the incumbents, Bill Hobby and Bob Bullock had plenty of money and large, well-schooled organizations. Ann was closest personally to Hobby and Armstrong, but despite the occasional rancor between them, in that period of her life she really had the most in common with Bullock, who seemed to be on a tear of self-destruction. He had survived an early heart attack and the removal of a lung but went right on smoking. His love life was so tangled that he once tried to cook Thanksgiving dinners for his wife and an ex-wife on the sly. Since the summer of 1980, news reports in Austin had dwelled on FBI agents’ seizures of typewriter ribbons from the office of an executive secretary who had worked for Bullock at the comptroller’s office. He turned those stories into a public tirade over how long Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle and his Public Integrity Unit had known about the FBI’s activity. Bullock flung out a contemptuous press release that read: “Pretty boy Ronnie is caught with his pants down and his rear showing. It’s long past time for little Ronnie to put up or shut up. His abuse of his law license is unforgivable.”
A disenchanted aide had gone to the press with a description of booze-happy parties on state-owned airplanes. The comptroller all but dared the Travis County grand jury to indict him. “Yeah, I’m a crook,” he blustered, “but I’m the best comptroller this state ever had.” Later, after the statute of limitations had run, he admitted to Earle that he had been guilty as hell.
He was arrested for DWI one night, a marriage he cherished ended in divorce, and he talked about getting out of government and opening a car dealership. His reason: the people of Texas did not deserve him. Ann made some attempts to tease Bullock out of his funk, but he did not want her pity or help. He was holed up in a house out in the country, grieving over the loss of his wife, Amelia, when the climax came. It was alleged but not proved that he went off with a gun to rescue his son, whom he believed had run afoul of Austin’s drug culture in the person, to make it worse, of a man who had gotten busted for dealing marijuana while employed as one of Bullock’s Raiders. The Austin police officers who had been tipped off and subsequently intercepted Bullock said they found no guns in his car, and they discreetly gave him a ride back to his office.
The defense attorney Roy Minton was one of the friends who arranged for Bullock’s admission to “drunk school.” During the fall of 1981, Bullock appeared one night at the press’s annual Boneheadliners show, in which he was given a Friendship Award. Mocking the reporters’ assertion of his friendlessness, he said he could count many bartenders who were loyal friends, and he also had good friends named Remington, Colt, and Smith & Wesson.
Hours later, he got on a plane to Orange County, California, where he checked into the Care Manor Hospital, which was renowned for its treatment of Betty Ford. “The last day I drank was when I went into that treatment center,” he told Patrick Beach, an Austin American-Statesman reporter. “They told Minton, ‘He can drink all he wants until he gets here.’ Sure enough, I did just that. The first time I ever had the DTs was when I landed in Orange, California. I felt like I had snakes all over me.”
That was the Austin milieu as Ann settled into her private life o
f solitude and sobriety. She recalled in her book that one Saturday morning in January 1982 when she was sleeping late, the telephone rang, she picked it up, and a completely unforeseen development gave a recharge to her political career. Her friend Bob Armstrong, the Democratic land commissioner, asked her whether she had seen the American-Statesman. She told him she was still in bed. Bob said, “Go get your morning paper and call me back.”
She called him back a few minutes later and said, “Well, I have the newspaper but I don’t know why you wanted me to get it.”
“Do you see the front page?”
“Yes.”
“Warren Harding is in trouble,” Armstrong said.
Harding, who enjoyed the odd political advantage of having the same name as one of the country’s worst and most corrupt presidents, was the state treasurer. He had been a veteran insider in Dallas politics and local government when Ann and David lived there. Ann read the story and agreed that Harding had a problem. Ronnie Earle’s Public Integrity Unit had seized a large file of documents from the Treasury, and Harding and ten of his employees had been subpoenaed to testify before the Travis County grand jury.
“I see the story,” Ann said. “So, what’s up?”
“I want you to run for state treasurer.”
She said, “Bob, you’re crazy.” For another thing, she told him, she had no idea what the treasurer did.
“Listen,” he argued, “if Warren Harding has been treasurer, you can be treasurer. We’re going to be in a fix if Warren Harding really is in serious trouble and is indicted; it will be an embarrassment to have him on the Democratic ticket.” A corruption scandal involving a Democratic statewide officeholder would hardly boost his chances in the governor’s race. “And,” he went on cheerfully, “I think it’s time for a woman to run statewide.”
After the call, Ann spent a few moments thinking this was the dumbest thing she had ever heard of. But then the calls from old friends started coming. Armstrong was a good politician, and he had been working the telephones hard. “You’ve just got to do this,” cried Liz Carpenter, Lady Bird Johnson’s former press secretary and LBJ’s executive assistant. “What a great idea. What a great thing for women.”
“Look, Liz, forget the great thing for women. Whatever I do, it has to be a job that I can do.”
“Oh, Ann, you can do anything. Don’t worry about that.” That was easy for her to say.
There were two immediate and daunting obstacles. The deadline for filing for statewide offices was just two days away. And a Texas law held that an elected county official had to resign that position in order to run for a state office. Ann’s separation from David hardly meant she was thriving on her own. Despite the large house in West Lake Hills, the acreage along the San Gabriel River, and her comfortable lifestyle, she relied on her paycheck from Travis County, which most months was $642.79. She didn’t have a credit card in her own name. She was not wealthy.
But soon she was on the telephone conferring with Bob Bullock, Bill Hobby, Jane Hickie, Mary Beth Rogers, other feminist friends and tacticians, the Texas AFL-CIO chief, a prominent lobbyist for bankers, and David Richards: “If I made this race and had to resign as county commissioner, David would have to support me through nine months of campaigning, one whole pregnancy.” She still framed time in the practiced rhythms of her life as a mother.
Clark Richards reflected on the upgrade of his mother’s political career:
A large part of Mom’s story is that she learned as a child that through force of will she could get to do what she wanted to do. She was encouraged to think that. But obviously some contextual opportunity had to be there. If she had married someone else in Waco, she might have had a completely different life. Dad’s family was wealthy. Mom grew up poor—all those stories about her mother strangling and boiling chickens. And when Dad took her out the first time, she barely knew how to order off a menu.
In order for Mom to have that opportunity and access to politics, she had to have the financial platform Dad brought her. I always had the impression our lifestyle was enabled by Dad’s family wealth. It wasn’t like he was working at Vinson and Elkins and billing banks a hundred hours a week. He was representing the Rag [an anarchist student newspaper handed out on the University of Texas campus] before the U.S. Supreme Court, and his fee was a lifetime subscription to the Rag. Mom was a force of nature in her own right, and no doubt could have done amazing things in another context. But without Dad’s financial security, it’s very unlikely she would have had the chance to run for anything. She might have been chasing children around—and she did plenty of that. But we had a maid.
Mary Beth Rogers’s husband, John, hatched the idea of calling all friendly hands and saying that if Ann could raise $200,000 in twenty-four hours, she would run. Liz Carpenter later tweaked the story, claiming that amount was raised entirely by women. But a subsequent memo from Jane Hickie, Ann’s campaign manager, broke down the debt of $205,576.36 in this way: David Richards, $94,281.10; $6,250 from each of their four children; Hickie, $75,000; John Wooley, $70,710.83; and Gary Bradley, $23,570.28. Wooley and Bradley, recall, were partners in controversial Austin real estate speculations at the time. Wooley was Ann’s campaign treasurer. And Bradley was the man that Austin environmentalists loved to hate.
Despite the contributions of David Richards, Dan Richards, Bob Armstrong, Bill Hobby, Bob Bullock, John Rogers, John Wooley, Gary Bradley, and many other men, Ann’s campaign became a crusade for Texas feminists: it was their mission, their cause. Jane Hickie said that they were all “keenly aware of the importance of recording one’s own history to find the . . .” She paused for a moment, searching for the right word. Then she said, “The foremothers.”
In Ann’s campaign office, no one knew then what a gifted speechwriter Suzanne Coleman would become—at that point, she was writing very detailed research memos, often with a polite request that Ann and others on the team take the time to read them. Pat Cole, who did fund-raising, had a doctorate in health and social-services policy and a rich, smoky, deep-voiced chuckle; she hoped they were looking down the road at prizes other than the treasurer’s office. Lena Guerrero, a young House member from Austin on fire with her own political ambitions, recognized how important it was to make a strong impression as the Hispanic feminist protégée of Ann Richards.
Ann and Hickie got Suzanne to conduct some research on the Texas Treasury. She learned that the agency was small, never employing more than 300 people, but had a colorful history. In June 1865, as Texas Confederate officials fled to Mexico, Union troops arrived in Austin amid chaos and mob rule and found about fifty men sacking the Treasury. A few shots were exchanged, leaving one of the desperados dead, but the rest of them got away into the hills with more than half the gold and silver that belonged to the state, worth about $17,000. In the haste of making his escape, one of the robbers lost his hold on his valise, spilling across the floor coupons clipped from United States bonds that were worth $25,000.
After that, for more than a century the Treasury was run out of a tiny office in the Capitol that looked like a frontier bank lobby. From 1941 until 1977, the state treasurer was a man named Jesse James. With that name, he never had any trouble getting reelected. When the old man died, Governor Dolph Briscoe had appointed Warren G. Harding to fill out his term. On the odd strength of his name, the obscurity of the agency, and his connections in the conservative wing of the Democratic Party, Harding won reelection in his own right for one term. A hundred seventeen years after the shootout, everything at the Treasury seemed redolent of those origins. Clerks were still taking care of the state’s banking business with hand-pull adding machines.
They discovered that Harding and his staff put a minimum of $5,000 in all the 1,400 approved depository banks in Texas. In most cases, those accounts drew no interest. Movers and shakers in the towns were supposed to raise money for Harding in direct proportion to the amount of state money deposited in the towns’ banks. “This was on paper,�
�� Ann said. “Stupid. Really stupid. There may not have been anything illegal about it, but it was really dumb.”
At the start of the race, Hickie sent around a memo on campaign letterhead with the shrill heading: “Important Facts About Contributions and Expenses: Read This Before You Do Anything!!!!!” The campaign finance law was tricky and full of nuance, though Hickie attempted to make it clear. But down the stretch, some worker sent in a note wondering whether Ann would have a problem accepting $500 from Rex Cauble, a horse rancher who had just been convicted of running a large drug-smuggling operation. The story would not be pretty if the press got wind of that. They sent the check back.
Questions arose of what exactly the reformer was trying to reform. “One of the challenges you have to realize,” Hickie later said in an interview conducted by members of Ann’s team, “is that if you’re running for state treasurer, it’s not what you’d call terribly exciting. I mean, if I talk to you about unclaimed property” —state-issued checks or other monetary credits that the recipients never came forward to accept—“your eyes are going to glaze over, and you just don’t care. Only bankers and accountants and taxpayers who are really sophisticated love the hot issues associated with the Treasury.”
For the ad campaign, they hired Roy Spence, a former Brownwood High School quarterback who was now the hottest creative advertising man in Texas. Hickie described their collaborations: “The jazziest thing that Roy and his company could think of to symbolize what Ann meant as an elected official was that she would bring a high standard of excellence and a new kind of management approach to the office—a new day, that Texas was really ready for a woman. . . . And the past practices of the offices in the state were antiquated, at the very best.”