by Jan Reid
He offered one cautionary note involving his daughter. He urged Ann not to let her eyes tear up or her voice waver in expressing those sentiments about the little girl. And on the crucial ending: “Because you have no large established group in the crowd that will insure a standing ovation at the end, the windup must gradually build that final applause. The language is great; the trick is to have people already on their feet before the end of the speech, rather than forcing them to get up after the speech is over. It is an emotional ending. I even got misty!”
Recalling Ann’s experience in San Francisco in 1984, when she made a speech seconding the vice presidential nomination of Geraldine Ferraro, she and her logistics manager, Gordon Wynne, got in a strenuous dispute with the convention manager. Ann insisted that she was not going to walk onstage until his crew dimmed the lights.
Ann was running for a second term as state treasurer when she met Lily Tomlin in 1986. The former star of Laugh-In, who by then had a successful film career, became one of Ann’s closest friends and a dedicated political supporter.
“I want to tell you,” he argued, “the networks are going to give us fits.”
“I can’t help it. It’s going to be a worse fit for you if I stop talking.”
Mario Cuomo came by that morning and gave her a beautiful sculpture of a good luck apple molded from Steuben glass. She made an appearance on The Today Show, then looked up Walter Cronkite in the convention hall and told him that she was going to be “talking Texan.” She met at midday with Lloyd Bentsen and Fort Worth’s Jim Wright, who had succeeded Tip O’Neill as Speaker of the House and was chair of the convention. She went back to the hotel at midafternoon and rested, listening to the soundtrack of Chariots of Fire. She dwelled on the Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous: “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” She saw Diane Sawyer in the rehearsal room and promised her that she would get to ask the first question after the speech.
Her hair was done up in a masterly silver pompadour, and she wore a simply cut, three-piece silk dress designed by the famous Adele Simpson; the remarkable thing was not the dress itself but the way its shade of blue exploded on a television screen. The climax of her performance came with three paragraphs that slammed the outgoing president, Ronald Reagan, and finished with comic ridicule of George Bush. She pulled off the last line with a slight tilt of her head, a gorgeous grin, all the right pauses, and an outward sweep of her arms.
The greatest nation of the free world has had a leader for eight straight years that has pretended that he cannot hear our questions over the noise of the helicopters. And we know he doesn’t want to answer. But we have a lot of questions. And when we get our questions asked, or there is a leak, or an investigation, the only answer we get is “I don’t know” or “I forgot.”
But you wouldn’t accept that answer from your children. I wouldn’t.
Don’t tell me you “don’t know” or you “forgot.” We’re not going to have the America that we want until we elect leaders who are going to tell the truth: not most days but every day—leaders who don’t forget what they don’t want to remember.
And for eight years George Bush hasn’t displayed the slightest interest in anything we care about. And now that he’s after a job that he can’t get appointed to, he’s like Columbus discovering America. He’s found child care. He’s found education. Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth.
Ann broke her promise to Diane Sawyer and asked the first question herself. In the wings, she saw Wayne Slater, a Dallas Morning News reporter, and asked him, “How’d I do?” There were many reviews of just how well she had done, none gushier than the New Yorker’s imperiously phrased “Talk of the Town.” A star is born.
When Ms. Richards lit into George Bush in her flat Texas twang, we tore ourself loose from the screen and climbed the stairs to the curtain behind the podium, about twenty feet from her, and we could feel the heat. She was out there cooking. She had a hot crowd and a good piece of material, and she was playing it big and letting the crowd go wild. She got to the line “Poor George. He can’t help it. He was born with a silver foot in his mouth”—and the roar of the crowd came in like breakers on the shore. You could hear the wave rise as she unreeled her line, and then it crashed on her and drenched her, and as it receded she paddled straight ahead . . .
“I’m a grandmother now. I have one nearly perfect granddaughter named Lily,” said Ms. Richards. “And when I hold that grandbaby I feel the continuity of life that unites us.” We thought, What a great finish, and then felt a little dry heat in our eyes, then a tear in the corner. At the end, the crowd stood up and threw all the noise at her that it could make.
That night, Ann swept onward in an adrenaline rush to the Nightline booth of Ted Koppel, an experience that rattled her because in the earphones as she tried to keep up with what he was asking, unknown persons, editors, and directors of some kind were talking through every question and answer. She managed to say that she thought the audience needed to have a little fun with George Bush. Then it was on to all the night’s parties. The next morning, she was besieged with requests for interviews and appearances: Reuters, Business Week, a newspaper called India Abroad, Larry King, Lesley Stahl, Diane Sawyer again, an invitation to sit between Michael Kinsley and Pat Buchanan on CNN’s Crossfire. On the last one, Ann scrawled an emphatic “no.”
Buoying her along the way was a wonderful fax of congratulations from Bud. Liz Carpenter barked directions from a seat in the second row at the press conference. Ann was holding her blond, ruddy-cheeked granddaughter, truly a beautiful child, who gazed about from that perch of love and safety with fascination. “Tell them how to spell her name,” Carpenter hollered.
“Adams, as in Abigail. Lily, as in Tomlin,” Ann replied. (Abigail Adams, the wife of President John Adams, was one of the earliest and strongest proponents of women’s property rights in the newborn country and a fierce opponent of slavery.) In her newspaper column, Ann’s friend Erma Bombeck related her quizzing of Carpenter on the exotic use of English in the speech.
”What about ‘He smells meat cookin’ on the stove?’”
“He’s hungry for the job,” Liz said. “Do I have to explain to you, ‘You can’t return ’em damp and hungry to the stable?’”
“I think I figured that one out, but what’s ‘The cow ate the cabbage?’”
“C’mon, you’re kidding. It means those are real facts.”
“Oh. And ‘I can still hear men laughin’ about Mama puttin’ Clorox in the well when the frog fell in.’”
There was silence. “I haven’t the foggiest idea what that means. But I do like “putting down a Baptist pallet.’”
“Spell it.”
“B-A-P-T—”
“No, I mean pallet.”
“‘P-A-L-L-E-T.’ It’s a bedroll. The one that’s really meaningful was used by LBJ.”
What? There was some lusty secret about Lyndon Johnson’s sleeping bag? Everyone seemed to be having a blast except Jim Mattox and George Bush, his family, and his advisers. Ann’s instant celebrity had repercussions in the nation’s media capitals, New York and Washington. Bud’s literary agent, Esther Newberg, caught up with him on a movie location. “Dear Bud, I forgot you were with Dennis Hopper. I’ve been trying to reach you because I think Ann Richards should do a book and I want you to call her for me. By the way, it might even be a book for you to write—The Wit and Wisdom of a Down-Home Lady—you know the kind of thing I mean. So call me when you return from the set.”
Back home, Texas Monthly’s Patricia Kilday Hart visualized Ann in a race that had been a remote possibility one month earlier.
As Richards enjoyed her big moment, her chief rival for governor, Attorney General Jim Mattox, was sulking in the thunderous ovation rocking the Omni Center. With no official reason to be at the Omni, he had nevertheless cajoled sta
te party officials into giving him a floor pass. Then he sat petulantly in the front row, glaring at delegates waving “Ann Richards” signs, applauding weakly, and sitting glumly through her best lines. He spent the next day telling interviewers that the speech had been okay but no big deal . . .
Though it projected her personality brilliantly, the speech itself cannot answer the most intriguing question about Ann Richards: Can she broaden her appeal enough to become Texas’ first woman governor in half a century?
She is certainly trying. Just as Michael Dukakis chose Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, Ann Richards has embraced the Bentsen wing of the Texas Democratic party, even tapping Bentsen confidant Jack Martin as her campaign treasurer. Already some members of Richards’ core constituency are uneasy. One Austin feminist even quibbled with her keynote speech, protesting that Richards had come off as a “clever grandmother,” belittling her own importance. In coming months other ideologues will be watching Richards closely for signs of compromise and tarnished principles.
When Kilday Hart’s story appeared, Ann was still uncertain what she was going to run for in 1990. Yes, she was a phenomenon. Esther Newberg was a force in both publishing and politics, and Simon and Schuster quickly offered a handsome contract and dispatched an as-told-to veteran, Peter Knobler, to help churn out her memoir Straight from the Heart. (Bud and Ann knew that his working on the book was not a good idea.) A Republican spokesman in Texas wondered just what the treasurer had accomplished to be worthy of writing a book for a big New York publisher. In the Democrats’ camp, the jeering that Jim Mattox received over his appearance in Atlanta stoked the enmity of a man whose most abiding passion was fury.
And the uproar over Ann’s speech produced an unintended victim. After the speech, Bill Cryer was besieged with press demands to know who this woman in Lorena, Texas, was. He doggedly replied that Ann had promised her anonymity. Okay, then—a horde of television trucks and block-walking reporters descended overnight on the little town of Lorena. Reporters and pundits accused Ann and her speechwriters of inventing the woman and her story—it must have been fiction. Ann, Bill, and the rest of the team realized they had no choice. Cryer had to call Alexander and tell her that the promise had to be broken; her identity and private life were about to be thrown into the hungry public maw. Adam Pertman of the Boston Globe wrote a profile under the headline “Thrust into the Limelight,” which portrayed a naïve woman who had, at best, been used, and perhaps betrayed.
Waco, Texas—Donna Alexander is smiling, but the corners of her lips are quivering, just slightly. Behind the cheerful glint in her eyes is a hint of sadness. Last Monday night, words written by Alexander touched millions of Americans; she knows she should feel flattered, probably even thrilled. Instead, she is overwhelmed, confused, worried.
Will the reporters’ phone calls ever end? Will her neighbors resent her? When will she and her husband resume the quiet lives they always cherished? For a week now, her mind has been teeming with questions . . .
Alexander was wrapping up a Tupperware party in her home in nearby Lorena when she and a few friends heard their town (pop. 1,100) being mentioned. Richards, at Alexander’s request, did not reveal her name, but the impact was still intense.
“Whooooooosh. It just came at me like a force through a wind tunnel,” Alexander recalls, sweeping her hands toward her face. “Everything just stopped and we all listened. When they asked me about using the letter, I expected her to just use a sentence or two. It was a shock, let me tell you. It was so weird.”
At first, Alexander was thrilled because Richards is “a personal hero” and because she was allowed to remain anonymous. The next day, though, reporters swept through tiny Lorena, asking everyone in sight if they knew who the author of the letter was. . . . So, last Wednesday, Alexander reluctantly agreed to release her name, and the calls began to pour in, mainly from the local television, radio, and newspaper people. That night, about 10:30, she unplugged her phone.
Alexander is recounting all this as she sips iced tea and lights an occasional, anxious cigarette at a Waco restaurant. . . . She insists this will be her last interview with a reporter, though she wonders aloud whether she is being too dramatic, too sensitive about all the attention she and her family are receiving. Her words are accented with a pleasant Texas twang, she uses her hands to punctuate almost every sentence, and she is so ingenuous as to be disarming.
“I am not a political person, I’m really not,” she says. . . . As she warms to the conversation, Alexander slowly, hesitantly decides that she can talk about the major cause of her discomfort since she became a minor phenomenon in her community. The intrusion on her family’s privacy is at the root, she says, but there is a more specific reason.
On a local radio talk show the other day, people were calling in to criticize her for complaining about making it on $50,000 a year. Alexander is afraid such talk may be prevalent; she’s apprehensive about picking up the newspaper and seeing a letter to the editor ridiculing her, too.
“I know I’m lucky compared to a lot of people,” she says. “The exact amount of money wasn’t the point at all. . . . I am so sorry, because I feel in a way that I’ve alienated the people I was talking about. . . . All I want is to get back to what my grandmother used to call the rat’s belly—you know, back to regular life.”
Donna Alexander’s marriage was shaken by the unwanted scrutiny. She was made to feel guilty for sharing something that had come, as Ann Richards put it in the title of her book, straight from her heart. But she didn’t give up her admiration of the orator. In a photocopy of the story that found its way into Ann’s archives, Alexander added in a handwritten note that Pertman had misquoted her in that last odd sentence. “Actually,” Alexander wrote, “I said ‘get back to rat killing.’”
For Ann, those were tremendous moments, days, and weeks. Her political career was like a NASA rocket given another boost into outer space. But the launch was supposed to fire up a winning presidential campaign. Dukakis enjoyed a fair bump in the polls after the convention highlighted by Ann’s speech, but at the Republican convention weeks later, Peggy Noonan wrote Bush a polished and elegant speech—the speech of his life. Nobody knew exactly what Bush meant by “a thousand points of light,” but it sounded good.
During the vice presidential debate, Democrats whooped with approval when Bush’s running mate, Dan Quayle, flattered himself with a self-comparison to a president and set himself up for the devastating rejoinder of Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas: “Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy. I knew Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you’re no Jack Kennedy.” By the end of the race, Democrats were wishing Bentsen had been the presidential nominee.
While Bush took pains to present himself as taking the high road, his young media and message adviser, Lee Atwater, destroyed Michael Dukakis. Atwater introduced the fearsome specter of the paroled murderer Willie Horton in television ads and captured a video that made Dukakis look like a fool. Riding a tank and wearing a combat helmet much too large for his head, the governor looked like a turtle with eyebrows. The governor spent the last part of the race looking dazed and numb. Perhaps he thought he was maintaining his dignity, that voters would respond to that.
After introducing Ann Richards at the national convention and then putting her on the road on the campaign’s behalf, Dukakis had an occasion to join her on a short flight. In his reserved manner, he asked her how she thought the campaign was going. She leaned toward him and said, “What campaign?” Then she tore into him over his listless performance until the wheels touched down. She spoke her mind, and she wasn’t invited back.
But of course she campaigned onward—for Bentsen, for congressional and legislative candidates, for principles that Democrats believed in, and not least of all, for herself. In those days before e-mail, Bud and Ann had discovered that faxes enabled them to communicate in real time. She sent him this report from the road and the North Texas town of Bowie.
&nbs
p; Dear Bud,
When we pulled into the parking lot of the Western Sizzler in Bowie, I was surprised to see so many law enforcement cars complete with officers. Sheriff, a deputy, Bowie police, a constable. Cy Young [not the ghost of the great pitcher] was really nervous but I attributed it to his advanced years—maybe his hearing aids were on the fritz. It turned out that we met at the Sizzler not because the event was to be held there but so we could be properly escorted into Bowie by all the aforementioned, whirling lights and all. Traffic is not all that heavy in Bowie at three o’clock in the afternoon, and the four cars and the pickup that we encountered got right out of the way.
A big crowd—three hundred or so—was waiting outside Bowie Senior High and the junior high band (first time they had played together) playing a specially purchased rendition of “The Yellow Rose of Texas.” A piece of red carpet was rolled across the sidewalk and a contestant in this year’s Miss Texas pageant handed me the bouquet. Then I saw the source of Mr. Young’s nervousness. Two kids were holding a six-by-eight-foot sign that read, “Ann Richards—These dogs will hunt.”
About eight or ten good old boys were lined up against a wall holding the chains and leashes on more than a dozen coon hounds. They had obviously been standing there in the hot sun a long time if the tongues hanging out of the dogs’ mouths were any evidence. I made a commitment on the spot to come back and go coon hunting as soon as the campaign is over. After the mayor presented me with a Bowie knife mounted on a board, I made a stirring speech to the Montague County Retired Teachers Association. And you think I’m not having fun?
I’d like to see you.
Ann
CHAPTER 15
Dispatches