Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The third day was a long haul up the Intracoastal Waterway, which took on aspects of a large irrigation ditch. But then we came back into a lagoon, and a local official showed us how the erosion of one strip of dunes at a place called Sargent Beach was so severe that a direct hit by one storm could breach the waterway—which would be a commercial disaster, for the barges that used it could not navigate in heavy open seas. Fascinating as this exposure to a little-known side of Texas was to me, I had noticed something about the reporters onboard. Ann ran the briefings well, but as the talk about policy issues went on, the reporters’ eyes glazed over. Their beat was politics for the state’s major newspapers. Some of them had committed to accompany Ann all the way to Port Arthur, and the length of the voyage and relative pokiness of the yacht had begun to register. They had editors expecting them to file, and there was no story.

  During one of the breaks midway through that afternoon, the reporters who had previously been such a close bunch of brethren started looking for places along the rails where they could speak with privacy. They had shoe telephones in those days, and they leaned far out with the clunky-looking things as if a few more inches would give them better reception and an edge over their competitors. Monte Williams walked the deck with a forced smile, trying to overhear snatches of what was going on. “There’s something wrong with the boat,” he came back muttering, no longer such a happy fellow.

  The waterway ranged inland once more. In traffic, our captain would aim the yacht slightly right, and a barge bearing skull-and-crossbones signs would skate left, making just enough room for the two to pass. The skulls and crossbones indicated that the cargo had come from one of the many petrochemical plants along the way. A young lobbyist from the Chemical Council was onboard when we passed several of those barges. It was late in the day, everyone was loose, and the reporters merrily jumped all over him. It started with questions about how lethal those chemicals were, and in response to his claims that they were scientifically tested and perfectly safe, someone asked whether he would stir a couple of spoonfuls of them into a glass of water and gulp it down. “Yeah, I’d drink it!” he exclaimed. The ribbing got much worse after that.

  Ann listens to coastal environmental activists on the controversial boat trip that launched her first campaign for governor. Galveston Bay, 1990.

  The owner of the yacht, a burly man, was polite but kept his distance. He seemed to regard Ann with suspicion, but he had warmed to the task of manning the wheel and mugging for the television cameras. It turned out that the owner and his son, who piloted the yacht some of the time, did not have their licenses in order and could not legally operate the boat. That night in our cabin, as the boat rocked lightly in a slip near Freeport, Dorothy and I witnessed a campaign descend into jabbering panic. Total meltdown. Clad in his boxer shorts, Monte was jumping up and down on our mattress, yelling through his shoe telephone at Glenn Smith. The Mattox people were all over this! The Coast Guard was rumored to be searching for us! What if they boarded the yacht and arrested the captain?

  Late that night, another young man with the campaign came around and announced that we were all jumping ship. The newborn Richards campaign was going to chug up the Houston Ship Channel the next day on a shrimp boat with no air-conditioning. While Dorothy and I slept on this alarming prospect, cooler heads prevailed. The owner and his son would leave the boat, and the tour would continue with the boat’s properly licensed first mate at the helm. The sun was not up yet when Ann summoned me for my counsel. I said I thought the shrimp boat was a terrible idea, and then offered, “I just feel bad about the old man.”

  “What?” Ann said.

  “Well, he’s been enjoying this, and it is his boat.”

  The set of her mouth let me know that in politics I was a rank amateur. Here I was, sentimentalizing over a man who was being paid well for providing that charter, as if he were a child with hurt feelings. “Jan,” she scolded me. “I didn’t take him to raise.”

  The boat reached Galveston, and I caught a ride to the Hobby Airport in Houston. The driver was a young man named Chris Hughes. He had a sense of humor about it all, and wore a stylish, low-crowned western hat. His job, which he had lobbied hard to get, was to be with her wherever she went and never let go of her purse. On an impulse that was prescient at the time, he once shaved his head; she took one look at him and declared, “You’re not going anywhere with me,” and parked him at a desk until his hair grew out. Chris went on to have a fine career as a lawyer, but veterans of the ’90 race forever typecast him as “the guy carrying Ann’s purse.”

  I was on the last flight to Austin, as were the Democrats’ comptroller candidate, John Sharp, and attorney general candidate, Dan Morales. The politicians and their entourages didn’t mix with each other, it was a crowded flight, and I wound up seated right in front of Morales and a Hispanic aide. Morales was a small dapper man who wore glasses and kept his black hair very short. He and the aide chattered continually about their campaign. At one point, the aide chortled and said, “Now we’ll see who’s got the cojones,” the Spanish word for balls, testicles. Somehow I knew Ann and these folks were not going to be one big happy family. I leaned my chair back, bumping someone’s knees, and did my best to go to sleep.

  The next day, the yacht made its way up the Houston Ship Channel without incident, except that it had to stop and refuel. Ann had some sharp words about that; it made her late to an appointment with some of Houston’s most important leaders and contributors. But they arrived at the end of the week with Port Arthur television reporters hastening to wish her happy birthday, her fifty-sixth, at a campaign rally. She grinned and expounded on what a joy it was, just being alive and getting to know all these Texans. A television-news veteran in Houston editorialized one night that the boat tour was indeed a matter of little substance, but he ended by chiding Jim Mattox for his bluster. “The attorney general’s problem is that he has a heck of a fight on his hands, one that he ought to be winning hands-down.”

  When Ann was back at the Treasury, she wrote Bud not about state business or politics, but about their time together on Dennis Hopper’s movie set.

  Dear Bud,

  Okay, I’m a groupie. I had such a super time on Saturday. Everything that was supposed to happen in movies did happen. Someone out of sight shouted, “Rolling,” and then Dennis would bark, “Action.” If he wanted something different, he talked to the actors in a coaxing way. Seeing scenes shot in sequence gave me a real sense of the film itself. I ate lunch with a charming movie star and his winsome bride—and best of all, I got to listen to you tell me things that I don’t know.

  Love, Ann

  Accompanied by her travel aide Chris Hughes, upper right, Ann observes a quiet moment at the announcement of her candidacy for governor. Austin, 1990.

  CHAPTER 17

  Answer the Question

  A few weeks after the boat trip, Ann and her team had to go to a crucial AFL-CIO convention, where they found that the Mattox crew had people all over the crowded hall with walkie-talkies. “It was a disaster in the making,” Glenn said. “We absolutely had to block a Mattox endorsement. We saw all those walkie-talkies, and his people were picking off delegate votes with them. I got Chris Hughes and Fred Ellis to go to a store and buy some models that covered all the bands. I put them up in a hotel room, and we monitored what the Mattox people were saying. They’d be saying, ‘Go get Joe Blow, he’s weak and we can sign him now.’ And we’d get there before they did.”

  Some people thought Lena Guerrero had carried the day, though she was so aggressive that reporters wondered whether a Mattox staffer or the attorney general himself might punch her out. Irma Rangel, her House colleague, said emphatically, “Lena Guerrero won the primary for Ann Richards. Pues, así es.” Well, so it is, the phrase means. Maybe it was. But Glenn Smith said cryptically, “Lena kind of froze up,” and maintained that Cecile Richards had been the heroic one working the floor. “I’d covered labor conventions before,”
said Glenn, “but these old pros were saying, ‘At what point do we call for a vote?’ It was pretty daunting. I finally said, ‘What the hell, call it,’ and we did, and we did block Mattox—labor chose not to endorse either candidate. Whatever momentum Mattox had then was gone.”

  Ann agreed with Glenn’s assessment of her most important fighter on the convention floor. She wrote to Bud, sympathizing about an accident that had hobbled him, but it also allowed her to needle him a bit about the distance in their relationship.

  Bud,

  I suppose breaking a toe is better than breaking your nose. At least it is a real excuse for staying at home.

  I just fought the battle of the state AFL-CIO convention where Mattox pressed hard, but we outdid him and the no-neck, gold-nugget-watch-wearing Teamsters. Cecile was the mainstay and did a fabulous job. What a job it is to fight a battle with one of your children. . . . I miss talking to you.

  Ann

  While that was an important triumph for Ann, it did not mean she was closer to winning the election. In June 1989, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled in a trio of 5–4 decisions that states could carry out executions of murderers who were sixteen to seventeen years old when they committed their crimes, as well as of killers who were mentally retarded. McKinnon advised her on the politics of the rulings in a memo that was a model of bland caution. “The death penalty is, of course, an extremely emotional and volatile issue. I recommend that your response to any questions regarding this issue should be that as governor you would uphold the death of juveniles and mentally retarded killers. I believe you can safely, however, support . . . the Supreme Court in allowing consideration of a defendant’s mental capacity by a jury.” How did she really feel about the death penalty? She didn’t like it, but if she wanted to be governor of Texas she had to be for it.

  Ann’s opponents perceived no nuance in the issue. White aired a startling ad in which he walked past a lineup of photographs of men who had been executed under his watch. “As governor,” he promised sternly, “I made sure they got the ultimate penalty—death.” Not to be outdone, Mattox came out saying, “I’ve carried out the death penalty thirty-two times.” No, he had watched that many executions, rather creepily, was what he had done. But someone on death row published a newspaper for his fellow prisoners, and presented with the alternatives, the editorial of the condemned endorsed Ann.

  Mattox seized on that with relish. He had been fuming about Ann’s campaign ever since the keynote speech, and then the first major poll had him twenty-seven points behind her. Impossible! He had seen those anonymous letters to the small-town editors and Baptist preachers, and he thundered at one rally, “I just don’t know if I can control my Baptist preacher friends any longer from attacking Ann about her drinking. I have many clients and many friends who have been on the wagon and then have fallen off. The statistics would show that a relapse occurs in a high percentage of cases.” That torched any possibility of comity between the two camps—even though the candidates basically agreed on the major issues confronting Texas government. Mattox challenged reporters to confirm rumors that Ann had frolicked in a hot tub with Lily Tomlin.

  Mattox could afford the help of heavy hitters. James Carville was advising him, and while the Louisiana native could get as down and dirty as anyone in American politics, he pressed Mattox to offer a panacea. He should promise that instituting a lottery would solve the ever-present problem of funding public education and other needs of state government, and people buying beer and Marlboros at the convenience store would gladly shell out a few dollars to try to beat the odds of a game that was all chance. Mattox was gaining ground with that.

  “That early poll reflected the positive impression she made with the keynote and gave her a much bigger lead than she had,” Glenn Smith told me. “What we saw from internal polling was that it was always tight, but when anybody got a lead it was usually Ann. A few times she got up to 35 or 36 percent, with everybody else in the high twenties. Mostly they were bunched up tight. I remember one poll that had Mattox ahead by a point or two. The press called us for a response, and Monte went out and photocopied a front page of a National Enquirer with a headline that read, ‘Sixty Percent of Americans Believe Elvis Lives.’ We faxed that to the press. None of us said anything else, so they had to go with that.

  “But Mattox was a very savvy guy. I think he sensed Ann’s fragility. I can’t overstate the extent that Ann got into her own head. She had a lot of friends who were movers and shakers, big Democratic contributors. They had encouraged her. Celebrated her, almost. But they didn’t think she was going to win, and now they weren’t there. A lot of phone calls from her weren’t returned, and these were to people she thought were going to help her. It hurt her feelings personally. ‘These people told me they were going to be with me. What’s going on?’

  “Because she was in that frame of mind, she was full of self-doubt, and full of doubt about us. She was always bringing in new people to critique what we were doing. I had no idea how to navigate the ex-officio people she brought into the campaign. My reaction was to close the door and try to get stuff done. That campaign could have spun way out of control. We could have easily become a sort of giant therapy group.

  “When I had known her as a reporter, she was a lot of fun to be around. During the primary, she wasn’t that way anymore. She and I went round and round about her being so tough on the campaign staff. One day she came in and beat up on the people answering letters. They were working in just as intense a circumstance as she was. She was demoralizing people. So I talked to her in my office one day before a staff meeting, and I said, ‘Look, Ann, you give them the pep talk, then I’ll hammer them about the things that are falling through the cracks.’ So we did that, she pumped them up and praised them, and I started in on the other, then Ann couldn’t take it anymore. She jumped in and started calling people names.

  “I always thought it was because Ann had the soul of a performer. She would project fears about herself onto people around her. I don’t know how Suzanne Coleman took it. Ann could do some petty things, but she was never mean to me like she was to Suzanne. Ann knew what her race meant to Texas. She knew of its importance symbolically. She got it. It might have been easier if she hadn’t got it so much. She was so afraid of failing, especially in the primary. All those young women around the state, she knew she was their hero. She saw it everywhere she went. She was terribly afraid of disappointing them; she didn’t know how she was going to face them again if she did. It was very human of her. You have to wonder if someone with that much soul belongs in politics. Those are the people you want. But God, it’s a soul-crushing machine.”

  Sometimes they all got caught up in the pressure, weariness, and conflict. Dan Richards told me, “I saw her light into plenty of people, but I was a protected class. Just once, during the governor’s race, she did that to me. I’m not very combative—I think I got it from my father. I just went silent, and we didn’t talk about it. But I knew what my plan was. ‘When we get back to Austin, I’m done.’ I think she must have known that, because before we got back to the airport she said, ‘I’m sorry. I apologize. That was uncalled for. It’ll never happen again.’”

  It was ironic that Ann, the state champion debater who won a scholarship to Baylor for that feat, almost destroyed her campaign with her performances in debates. In the first one, she fielded a question about abortion—there was no issue she cared or knew more about. She said, “No legislator, no judge, and no bureaucrat has any business in determining whether a white woman has an abortion or not.” After the audience gasps that night and her opponents’ whoops over the gaffe, she remarked to Dan that she was having trouble talking with her new dental implants; her handlers tried to spin it that she didn’t really say that—the imperfect audio made it sound that way. But she admitted that it happened, and apologized. It was a stock reply in which she said “whether or why a woman,” not “whether a white woman.” It was a slip of the tongue, but now she found
herself fighting off charges that she was an elitist and a racist.

  As Dan recalled: “It was almost a relief, dealing with the white woman remark, because of all the emphasis on drugs. Both the Mattox and White people had been peppering her with that for a while. There were ten or fifteen people in meetings we had with people about what to do. Someone would say, ‘Here’s what she should say,’ and someone else would make a different suggestion, then Mom told them what she wanted to say, and everybody said, ‘That’s great, let’s do it.’ I was thinking, ‘Here are all these people who are supposed to know how to do this, and the candidate is the one who’s coming up with all the answers.’ I think that’s why she was so nervous.”

  At the second debate, in the studio of a Dallas public-television station, she may have been misguided by memory of her first race for treasurer, when an assault against her over her alcoholism and treatment had boomeranged against her opponent. She couched her answer in language that a member of Alcoholics Anonymous would recognize at once. But relatively few people belong to AA, and 1990 was not the same race as 1982, nor was it the same question. When a panelist asked the candidates whether they had ever used illegal drugs, Mattox and White said proudly that they had not.

  Jim Mattox, holding pencil at left, challenges former governor Mark White and Ann Richards during the first debate of the Democratic primary campaign for governor, 1990.

  Ann began her carefully rehearsed reply. “I want to address my answer to all of you out there who have had problems in your life.” She said she wanted to assure them they could seek help for their problems without fearing the mistakes would be brought up to them again and again. Paul Burka, the panelist from Texas Monthly, later wrote, “I have never been in a place where silence was such a presence, except for her voice. A small audience was in the studio, and not even a cough broke the stillness. I thought we were watching Ann self-destruct on statewide television and that she had lost the race by dodging the question.”