Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  Bud Shrake may or may not have helped her with the speech, but it contained inside-the-sport material not many women would have known.

  “I love Earl Campbell,” she teased the great runner. “He’s been teaching me how to be a good old boy. We’ve had sessions where he’s teaching me how to do Skoal. What you do is put a pinch between your lip and gum.” She pantomimed the ritual, poking her tongue through her cheek. “Isn’t that right, Skoal Brother?”

  Laughter erupted. She went on: “I love football. It’s a great sport. Horse racing is the sport of kings, baseball is America’s pastime, but football is the sport of good old boys—you know, weekends where they’re bonding with their buddies, when they might be outdoors killing something, but watching football lets them live vicariously without all that sweat.

  “You know, men and women react to football in completely different ways. Women react to a big play, but you watch a man, and you can see the drama—watch his eyes bulge and he licks his lips and leans forward in his La-Z-Boy recliner, and clamps his hands on his Miller Lite, and he tenses up like a cheetah ready to spring. . . . Now I have heard the complexity of football compared to chess, but you know, you don’t see a lot of deep thinkers on the football field. Like Bum says, ‘If he can count to four, he can play for me.’”

  The whoops grew louder. “After long days and weeks of practice, running through all those used tires, they finally get to play somebody. They get to the stadium early, because it takes forever to get dressed. They shave their legs, and they wrap tape around them, and they put on these corsets—the kind of thing women wore when I grew up years ago—and they smear mascara under their eyes, and they put on the shoulder pads and helmets and color-coordinated arm bands, and they put on shoes that will keep them from slipping on the AstroTurf, and they wrap more tape over the shoes to make sure their ankles are protected.

  “Well, they get all this rigging on, and they start making themselves into a state, and it’s called psyching yourself, and it’s all about convincing yourself that you’re going to be involved with people who commit felonious assault for a living, and you like it. And when they’re good and ready, they run out on the field, and the boys slap each other on the fanny two or three times, which produces an adrenaline rush. . . . To me, it seems kind of strange that they have a penalty called unsportsmanlike conduct. The uniform alone would make a normal person surly. What would you expect?

  “Now, all I can say, Bum, is that it’s a hell of a way to make a living. And I know you’re glad to be out of it, and into something where you can deal with the front end of horses.”

  Instead of human horses’ asses—she didn’t have to spell it out. She was making fun of their manhood, nothing less. She had these men laughing too hard to take immediate offense, but she walked a fine line. Parody easily begets insult. She pivoted out of any trouble by borrowing a 1967 line from Senator Eugene McCarthy. “But I understand why you loved it,” she told Bum. “Because you know what they say, politics is a lot like football—you have to be smart enough to play the game and dumb enough to think it’s important.”

  Two years had raced past since Ann’s friend and mentor Bill Hobby bowed out of the governor’s race and said he would not seek reelection as lieutenant governor. The perception of Ann and her Treasury staff was that any function of state government financed by the taxpayers was fair game for them as a policy issue. That led Ann and Dorothy one day to the women’s death row in the prison at Gatesville. Steel and concrete and a thick Plexiglas plate did not then separate condemned prisoners from certain visitors. Dorothy was a nervous wreck in anticipation of what awaited them. There were three women on death row at the time. One was Karla Faye Tucker, a former teen groupie of the Allman Brothers who, in the course of a boyfriend’s amphetamine-fueled burglary, had murdered a woman, a total stranger, with a pickaxe. What got her the death sentence was her statement, admitted as evidence, that every time she struck with the heavy spiked tool, she had an orgasm. The other women had been convicted of equally ghastly crimes.

  But Ann and Dorothy were stunned to find that the women’s surreal, lacy cells were decorated with dolls they had sewn. They resembled Cabbage Patch dolls, which were in vogue at the time, but these were Parole Pals—attached to every one was an imitation sheaf of parole papers. The treasurer began, “My name’s Ann Richards, and I am an alcoholic.” The ritual greeting of Alcoholics Anonymous dissolved the tension. The condemned women, who would all eventually be executed, knew about AA, and they were able to chat with this politician as if they were all just women grateful for the chance to talk about what had gone wrong in their lives and what they were doing to try to make it right.

  Ann’s keynote speech had made her a national sensation, but she had to decide what she would be running for next. She called her closest staffers together and asked them what they thought, and then she talked it over with Austin feminists who had been her core supporters since her time as a county commissioner. She told them about her love of the legislative process, and that she was inclined to run for lieutenant governor. But the women spoke up strongly.

  No, Ann, governor. It is our time, and you are the one who can do it. You have to run for governor.

  Sheer luck and talent had put her on a trajectory that might be hell-bent. In public, she could put on a completely self-assured performance like the one at the Bum Phillips roast, but some people who saw her every day sensed a deep, brooding fear.

  The speechwriting team: from left, Ann, Jane Hickie, Suzanne Coleman, and an unidentified fourth member (on the floor) craft a campaign address in a Fort Worth hotel during Ann’s first race for governor, 1990.

  “Goddamn Suzanne” had become an inner-office cliché that spoke to Ann’s impatience and exasperation with Suzanne Coleman, the speechwriter on whom she relied so much. “I love Suzanne,” Mary Beth Rogers told me. “At the Treasury, we’d have these meetings about all the things that Ann had lined up, and she’d say, ‘Suzanne, where’s my speech?’ Suzanne would say, ‘It’s comin’ along, I’m workin’ on it.’ And she would do some research, make some calls. But then Ann would just be reaming her out. ‘God damn it, Suzanne, this is dull! It has to have a beginning, and it has to have a middle, and it has to have an ending! It has to tell a story.’”

  Suzanne Coleman became one of the best speechwriters of her generation, and surely one of the most abused by her boss. But her tormentor was also her hero and friend. As Ann’s anxiety increased about her prospects and options in 1990, Suzanne wrote her a deeply felt personal memo.

  I may be out of line here but I am concerned about you. I pondered over our discussion about your political future last Friday . . . and, as is so frequently the case, it later occurred to me that I was not listening to you very well. On reflection, it dawned on me that what I was taking for road-weariness and understandable rebellion might be something more.

  I have never known you to step back from a challenge or risk that you thought was do-able. I have never seen anyone else who comes as close to being a natural politician and who just honestly enjoys everything involved in the game. I cannot imagine anything to which you are better suited or at which you are more gifted than the holding of high public office. (God, that was a sentence. I think what I am trying to say here is that your career gives you more than pleasure and income—it almost seems to help you breathe.)

  Given all of that, I was stunned to hear the deep equivocation you expressed. . . . So naturally, I have thought really hard—just about as hard as my meager mind will work. I asked if it was organization or money, but you said no. I mentioned that you did not have to drive yourself as hard as you have been; you agreed. I thought through the possibility that you might be getting bullshit from some of the players. But even if these things are screwed up, they are fixable—so that can’t be it.

  I thought, well, she figured out somehow that she has erred in her judgment of her chances—but I don’t see anything on the horizon that would make me t
hink that. If anything, the opposition is looking weaker all the time. . . . Then I thought . . . well, maybe she is truly sick of politics—always a possibility in a sane person. But, nooo—she gets too big a charge out of it. . . . At any rate, having reviewed all of these unlikely possibilities, I’ve got only one left . . . privacy over politics. I cannot figure anything else that would make you look as miserable as you do. Did I get it? Since I think I did get it, I’m going to stop being cute right here.

  If I have hit on the right problem, I am a pretty sorry person to advise you. My concerns about how conventional society relates to me have limited me in so many ways. I try not to think about it much. I am a chicken at heart, but I am trying to outgrow it. . . . I have known you and Jane [Hickie] long enough to know that you could be worrying that 1982 could be small potatoes in comparison to what might come your way later. You told me once that I could not fuck up anything so bad, you could not fix it. . . . I honestly do not believe you could have done anything that cannot be mended politically. You have the best excuse in the world, you know: you took the cure and came out a better person . . .

  All I know to say is this: after a certain age, your life is your own. You are always eager to tell me that you can only assume responsibility for your own existence, not everyone else’s. (Don’t you love having your own words thrown back at you?) You can take responsibility for others through love, but I do not think you can make yourself perfect for them or shield them from reality. . . . Is the burden of Texas women a fear of disappointing them? I doubt you can do that. They have known you long enough to know better—and forgive most things short of ax murder. And, they are a burden you have taken on pretty eagerly.

  I trust your judgment—it is the main reason I asked to work for you. . . . I very much want my employer to run for higher office . . . because I think she would be good and that she would like it—a lot.

  Even more, I want my friend to be happy—not just content (better than fine, as an old friend of mine used to say). And I am more than a little concerned that my friend will not be happy wondering if she could have pulled the big one off.

  Before Ann could be certain about her plans, she had to be certain about Henry Cisneros. They didn’t know each other well at that point. George Shipley, the Austin consultant called “Dr. Dirt,” knew San Antonio’s Hispanic politicians well, and he earned the task of arranging the meeting. “I drove her down there,” George told me. “It was Henry’s annual Christmas party, a big crowd. I managed to get them off together, and they had a good talk, really connected with each other. Henry told her that he wasn’t going to run, and he was going to campaign for her. He actually made a couple of TV spots. We sent them up to Bob Squier, but they never ran.” He stretched his mouth with some disdain. “That happened because of Lena Guerrero. She was going to make sure that if any Hispanic got to be on the same TV screen with Ann, it was going to be Lena.”

  Even if her campaign team was free of pettiness and backbiting, a governor’s race in Texas was not going to resemble the Democratic outburst of hosannas that had greeted her speech that summer night in Atlanta in 1988. The first all-out attack against Ann was anonymous. Mailed in Fort Worth, one batch of letters went out to small-town newspaper editors and heads of select television and radio stations. Also bearing a Fort Worth postmark, a slightly revised version went out a few days later to Baptist preachers throughout the state. A minister in the town of South Plains forwarded his copy to Ann and her team.

  Dear Pastor:

  As a preacher of the Gospel and the leader of your congregation, you must be made aware of what I fear could be one of the greatest tragedies which could befall our state and nation lest you take action to prevent it.

  Unless the truth comes forward, I fear that a person who has no business in a leadership role might have a chance of becoming governor of Texas.

  The polls show Ann Richards leading her Democrat Party rivals. I never believed this could happen. But because she is clever and because secular humanists control the news media, she has fooled many people and could actually win her party’s nomination and possibly even the election. This would be a tragedy for Texas because as an atheist, an admitted drug abuser and alcoholic, and as a homosexual, this woman has been an unfit wife and mother, and she is certainly unfit to hold the highest office in our state.

  Dorothy Ann has a continuing history of drug and alcohol dependence and has been a practicing “bi-sexual” for many years. She masks herself as one who promotes strong family values, but her life and her beliefs are the opposite.

  I must speak to you because I have known Dorothy Ann since she was a teenager in Waco. She and I attended old Waco High together. Ann now proudly talks about her debating in high school and how that taught her to be a public speaker. She learned a lot of other things in high school as well. Ann learned to drink, smoke, and curse in high school and hasn’t broken those habits today. In fact she’s refined them.

  The Ann Richards of today is not the girl Cecil and Iona Willis tried to raise. But Dorothy Ann was always rebellious. She was always wanting to live out roles. At first it didn’t seem odd that she should dress up in men’s clothing. She was always hanging out with the guys and acting the Tom Boy. But after she got into her drinking state I understood what it could be leading to.

  I don’t know if it was the alcohol and drugs that led to the permissive lifestyle, but I do know that her contempt for the Lord did little to add to the quality of her life. I surely don’t blame the Willises—they tried to raise her right, taking her to church and making sure she went to Sunday school. But Dorothy Ann was always running down the church and God himself. Using the Lord’s name in vain was the mildest of her invective. She mocked God, His church and those who believe in eternal salvation. It was then I realized that Ann was an atheist who had nothing but contempt for God and God’s people. I confess I ran with Dorothy Ann and her crowd when I was in high school. But I am now a born-again Christian and my sins are forgiven. I laughed at the filthy jokes that Ann told, but I never mocked the Lord the way she did.

  I’ve kept up with Ann through the years. She’s only changed for the worst. Over the years she’s mocked Christianity. For a number of years she and her husband were members of the Unitarian church, if you want to call that a church. She recently became a member of a Methodist church in Austin, but only to hypocritically promote her political career. Her beliefs, I feel, should be well known and are known by many in Austin. One of her strongest supporters and friends is Madelyn Murray O’Hare. [i.e., Madalyn Murray O’Hair; the atheist was never close to Ann.]

  I went to the Lord in prayer and was convinced to write this letter to you after reading in a newspaper what Ann said about her drug dependency. In the September 24, 1989 Dallas Morning News Ann said that “I have not had any form of mood-altering chemicals since I left treatment in 1980.” First of all, that’s a lie. I know from friends that she’s a prisoner of the bottle to this day. She’s even had to be sent out of the state to dry out at clinics because she’s appeared in public drunk or high on drugs.

  But even if her statement were true, should children have as an example as the state’s highest leader a woman who abandoned her husband for the bed of another woman? A woman who abandoned her children for the pursuit of drug highs and deviant sexual gratification? Do we want a governor who would espouse radically liberal views and appoint fellow homosexuals and liberals to state boards and commissions as such? Should homosexuals set policy on the public education of our children?

  The Lord says that none but the righteous should lead, yet we are risking the possibility of allowing a degenerate cocaine and marijuana addict to lead our state and our people. The governor’s office is a public pulpit—shouldn’t the person there be at least required to be of sound moral and spiritual character? Ann and her people (most of her key staff, both at the Treasury office and on her campaign, are radical feminists and homosexuals) would liberalize drug laws and laws regarding sexual c
onduct, as well as liberalize abortion laws and weaken the criminal justice system.

  I’ve known this woman for many years. I can’t understand how she is able to pull the wool over so many eyes. Most Bible-believing Christians in Austin, Texas are familiar with her behavior or the behavior of the people she associates with, yet no preacher has yet to speak out. Why?

  A Concerned Texan

  The attacks were vile and unbridled, and every accusation that would be made against her in the next several months was laid out in those letters. In the one to the small-town editors, the writer identified himself or herself as a Republican. The second one, to the Baptist preachers, sounded like it could have been written by a zealot in the Inquisition: “I pray daily she accepts Jesus as her Lord and Savior. But I also pray daily that her sin is exposed and that she is defeated spiritually. . . . I pray for your leadership in your congregation to fight the evil she stands for.” It was as if Ann commanded a coven, and she was the bitch witch. The preacher in South Plains found his letter in the mail on January 1, 1990. Officially, the race had not yet begun.