Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  On the way out, she had to run a gantlet of screaming reporters. “Answer the question! Answer the question!” they yowled. Some of the most aggressive ones were the Houston Chronicle veteran Jane Ely, Robert Shogan of the Los Angeles Times, and Cinny Kennard, a reporter with WFAA-TV in Dallas who always seemed to show up wearing a bright red dress. (Kennard would become known in the Richards campaign as the “Red Dress”; Ely later apologized to Ann for her behavior.) “After that debate,” said Glenn, “they got around her in an absolute lynch-mob mentality. ‘You can’t not answer the question!’ It was just awful—emotionally wrenching. Ann thought the press was going to be her champion, that the reporters were going to lie down for her. She could not figure out why they were doing this to her. That was just a terrible night. We didn’t know if Ann’s race could survive it. We had no overnight polls or anything, but she hadn’t done well in the debate, and that frenzy was just so bad.”

  On a hotel elevator with the young man carrying her purse, she said in a very shaken voice, “Chris, I am a good person,” as if everything about her character had been cast in doubt. Meanwhile Glenn, Mark, Bob Squier, the pollster Harrison Hickman, and George Shipley were in a state of gloom. “It wasn’t so much the way it was reported the next day,” said Glenn, “it was that intense mean-spiritedness by the press. It seemed like just a total meltdown.” Dan Richards told me, “Yes, yes, she had fears. One night we were in a hotel room, I’m not sure where it was. She said, ‘This is over. I’m going to be out of this deal in a week.’ It was a low, low point.”

  “There were a lot of people around Ann Richards who didn’t like Bob Squier,” Glenn said. “But he helped—it’s a quality-of-mind thing. I don’t know about catastrophes, you know what I mean? I was pretty sad after that deal with the press, but I didn’t think the world was coming to an end. Ann later accused me of being too laid-back. But I also wasn’t panicking, and Squier wasn’t either. A lot of what he brought to Ann was a real fighting spirit. All he was going to do was throw the next punch. He wasn’t going to stop a minute. It really helped her psychologically to have someone like that around her.”

  In the final debate, Mattox taunted her: “Ann, you look awfully sober tonight. If you’re not off the wagon after what you’ve been through the last two weeks, then you’re cured. But Ann, both Mark and I have known you too long, and we can understand why you don’t want to answer the question. The Republicans won’t be as gentle, regardless of how much you think it’ll hurt you to answer the drug question.”

  Compounding the grim political outlook, an anonymous person called the Austin Police Department and Southwestern Bell and said Richards was going to be shot. Police traced the call to an Austin apartment complex but were not able to identify the person. The threat was judged serious enough that a Texas Ranger met Ann at the airport when she returned from the debate.

  Ann’s team knew that their hopes were fleeting and that they had better turn things around fast. One day when I was in the campaign office with Pat Cole, her close friend and adviser on health and human services, I said, “Pat, she’s not going to make the runoff.” She blew a stream of cigarette smoke and just shook her head.

  The campaign had been stressing that Mattox had been indicted for a felony as attorney general, and that he had taken $200,000 from a man later convicted of racketeering. But the scoring punch targeted both Mattox and White. Ann had quipped that White’s term as governor had been “like a B movie that you didn’t want to walk out on, but you wouldn’t want to see it again.” But she hadn’t really gone after him. Then they found out that when he had been governor, a large amount of the state’s bond business had gone to a law firm in Houston, and after he lost to Bill Clements in 1986, he joined that firm with a high salary. Squier offered the stinger that White had “lined his pockets” as governor. The resulting ad had the condemning clause “White and Mattox, the best resumés money can buy.” While Ann was reeling from the drug inquisition, her friend Jane Hickie reentered the fray. Hickie pushed hard for using the attack ad. “I said we ought to do it, and we did it,” she told Brian McCall, the Republican chronicler. “And I do feel responsible for it. I don’t regret it for a second. It caused us to win.”

  “That was a great weekend for the campaign,” Glenn Smith agreed. “We managed to change the subject. Ann had used the line in a speech at an affair Willie Nelson put on for her, and we had all that research put together. We developed it to get to the press, we made the spot, the story ran, we put the headline on the spot, and got the ad on the air. We did it all really fast. Back then, you couldn’t edit as quickly; it just took more time to do everything. We pulled it off, and it worked. Then she had a change of heart. I was in San Antonio when she called me and said, ‘Look, I really don’t want to attack Governor White like that.’ But the ad had already shipped. I had to say, ‘Ann, you already did.’ That’s the only time she ever yelled at me. She was really distraught. It was some time before Monte Williams could get her to leave the little holding room where she was and go out there and make her speech.”

  White called a press conference and exploded. “The true principle she’s abiding by is to use anything to attack in order to save her failing campaign. That shocks me. I did not believe she had this in her. . . . I’ve never seen anyone dip to this low a level in making a scurrilous attack.” One press account said he accused her of “tactics like those of the Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler.”

  Ann responded mildly that she was surprised Governor White would call her a Nazi. But Jane Hickie said that Ann regretted running that ad for the rest of her life. For his part, White had the bitter rationalization for why he was going to lose. He later told Brian McCall, “That tape ran for about a week. I fell from thirty-three or thirty-four points in the polls to twenty in one week.”

  It is doubtful that White was ever in as strong a position as he claimed, and in the end it turned out that he had raised insufficient money to match the ad buys of his rivals. Ann led Mattox in the primary by 40,000 votes and a little more than two percentage points. White was embarrassed in his last campaign, getting just 19 percent of the vote.

  To this day, Ross Ramsey, now an editor and analyst for the Texas Tribune, maintains with glee that the boat trip was exemplary of a foolish impulse that could have sunk Ann’s campaign just as it was getting started. “Well,” Glenn said, “we generated seventy-five free television stories of more than a minute”—claiming that they were worth $3 million in ad buys. “I would never do that today,” he acknowledged. “It was too risky. But that really helped her. Those were beautiful pictures. And one thing I’m proud of—we earned our margins from those coastal counties where we’d done the boat trip. It surprised the heck out of Mattox, because he thought he had the southern coast sewn up. On election night when we saw the Nueces County numbers, that’s when I was told to go tell Ann that she would finish first.

  “There’s another thing I never would have done if I had been a more sophisticated guy. We were pretty sure we were going to be in a runoff, and we’d be in a runoff with Mattox. So I took three hundred thousand dollars and hid it from everybody. Within a couple of days of the first race, we were back up on television. Mattox had spent his money. I got in a lot of trouble over that. The woman who wrote the checks got fired over it. Ann never said anything to me about it, but Jane Hickie thought the woman had a responsibility to tell her about it. Which I always thought was pretty weird, because that’s how we won the runoff. They were saying, ‘If we hadn’t spent that money and come in third, what were you going to do then?’ I don’t know, I probably would have left Texas. But there was no way Mattox could outperform Ann in a Democratic Party runoff. She was going to have such an advantage with female and repeat voters. There were places where it was even, but there was no place where he had her outflanked.”

  James Carville kept trying to steer Mattox back to the lottery issue, which he thought was a winner. But Mattox’s ads grew even more strident, stating flat
ly that Ann had used marijuana and cocaine. He claimed to know sources who had seen Ann use drugs when she was a forty-six-year-old county commissioner, but that he was not free to identify them. Ann called him “the garbage man of Texas politics.”

  Then it was his turn to be surrounded by a swarm of shouting reporters: the Dallas Morning News had published a sworn affidavit by a former Dallas vice officer and a Houston lawyer who claimed they had seen Mattox smoking pot on two occasions. In the four-week slugfest, Ann increased her lead over the attorney general to nearly 158,000 votes. In a headline about the outcome, the Los Angeles Times called the race and spectacle “lurid.” The Dallas Times Herald ran its story under the headline “Richards Wins in Mudslide.”

  Mark White refused to take Ann’s telephone calls in the aftermath of the lining-his-pockets television ad and the continuing election, but his temper cooled, and the time would come when he and his wife were Ann’s guests at a reception in the Governor’s Mansion. The bitterness and hurt of Jim Mattox did not heal so easily. He ran twice more as a candidate in Texas—once for the U.S. Senate in 1994, losing a Democratic primary to Richard Fisher, a wealthy and conservative Dallas businessman, and then in a 1998 bid to regain his office as attorney general. He lost that race to the Republican John Cornyn, who was later elected one of Texas’s U.S. senators.

  By all accounts, Mattox never quite got over losing that race to Ann in 1990. He was stung because he felt his long record as a progressive had been ignored, and the press was never his friend. After he died in his sleep in 2008, at sixty-five, he got what was probably the best press he ever received from the man caught in the middle of that furious strife eighteen years earlier—David Richards.

  The Texas Observer titled his essay “Junkyard Jim,” but David took pains to delineate what the man had accomplished in elective office. Their relationship began, he wrote, in 1972, when they successfully challenged the existing scheme to elect state representatives from at-large districts. Their lawsuit resulted in single-member districts that made it possible for black candidates to win; in addition, their “election guru,” a man named Dan Weiser, drew up plans that were adopted by the federal court, and as a by-product they also created a district where Mattox could run in conservative Dallas and win. In two terms in the Texas House in the wake of the Sharpstown scandal, he battled for open-meetings legislation and more transparent campaign-finance rules, and when the aftermath of Watergate swept Jimmy Carter into the presidency in 1976, Mattox caught that wind in his sail and won a seat in Congress, defeating Tom Pauken, a Republican, in two extremely heated contests. “These races,” David wrote, “became legendary for their vitriol and assured Jim’s well-deserved reputation as a take-no-prisoners campaigner.”

  Bill Clements, he continued in the essay, was determined to get rid of the GOP’s most loathed Democrat, and under the “utterly bogus cover of wanting to create a black congressional district in Dallas (the population wasn’t sufficient at the time),” Clements proposed a district that would make Mattox’s reelection impossible. “The battle continued through two special sessions of the Legislature, but the Clements plan was blocked in the Texas Senate. Then tragedy struck: Mickey Leland was killed in a plane crash, creating a vacancy in his Houston congressional seat. Craig Washington, the ablest member of the state Senate at the time, was elected to fill the vacancy. His election removed the blocking eleventh vote in the Texas Senate, and Clements’s redistricting plan was shoved through in the closing days of 1981.”

  David wrote that Mattox persuaded him to file a suit challenging the Republican redistricting plan, but as the filing deadline for candidates approached, Mattox wanted a guarantee that the suit would be successful. David couldn’t promise that, so Mattox quit his congressional seat and ran for and won the 1982 race for attorney general in another vicious battle, this time in the Democratic primary against John Hannah and Max Sherman.

  So David once more answered the call of governmental service and became Mattox’s chief of litigation, recruiting some of the brightest young lawyers in the state. At the end of Mark White’s term as governor, a federal court in Dallas declared Texas’s sodomy statute unconstitutional. Taking the side of gay-rights activists, Mattox filed a motion to dismiss the appeal that had been filed by Mark White when he was attorney general. That set off a furious legal fight in which Mattox’s argument prevailed and the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated the Texas law.

  “Perhaps even more controversial, though ludicrous,” David wrote, “was the issue of women in the Texas A&M band.” A federal court had ordered the university to accept women in the Aggie marching band, and in the ensuing uproar, Mattox said he agreed with the court’s decision and was not going to appeal it. “A&M’s regents went nuts, bombarding the office with threats and complaints. They even hired a lawyer to pursue an independent appeal. Mattox successfully scotched that effort, the court’s order was implemented, and the band does not seem to have suffered.”

  On and on the wild eight-year run went, with the consumer protection cases, Mattox’s feuds with Fulbright & Jaworski and Ronnie Earle, and his indictment and acquittal for commercial bribery. “Finally, in 1990,” David wrote, cutting his personal feelings about that election to the quick, “Jim ran a deplorable campaign against my former wife, Ann Richards, for governor, which I am sad to say ultimately caused him, and many others, a world of grief.”

  David had certainly learned to be a master of understatement. He didn’t have to elaborate on why so many of his colleagues and friends believed Mattox deserved to be the governor and thought the wrong person had won. David wrote that not long after the 1990 race, he and his new wife, Sandy, ran into Mattox, and the defeated candidate told her that he didn’t know what to do with his life anymore. “She wisely suggested that the most rewarding thing he could do would be to get married and have children. As we know, he did, and family life seemed to soothe him, even as it gave him many opportunities, as Texas had in earlier years, to express his fierce loyalty and stubborn determination.”

  As the 1998 races approached, Attorney General Dan Morales, soon to be a guest of the Texas Department of Corrections, announced, just before the filing deadline, that he was not running for reelection, throwing Democratic plans up in the air. Mattox announced his candidacy at once, cutting off his ’82 classmate Garry Mauro, who might have liked to try for attorney general, but not wanting to run against Mattox, instead soldiered on in a doomed race for governor against George W. Bush. Mattox lost his race to John Cornyn by more than 1.6 million votes. He practiced law in Austin for the rest of his life and remained a force behind the scenes of the Texas Democratic Party. Mauro put his occasionally bruising relationship with the man behind them and, on his passing, said Mattox was always “pounding on the table for the people. Anybody that thinks of Jim Mattox and doesn’t think of the ‘people’s lawyer’ really didn’t know him. He never saw a fight he’d walk away from.” To me, David Richards said the most about his perplexing friend and onetime boss at the beginning of his Texas Observer farewell.

  The least peaceful person I have ever known has died peacefully. May he rest in peace.

  Jim Mattox was restless, irrepressible, and combative on plenty of occasions. He was never one to let sleeping dogs lie. As a kid, I feel certain, he never passed a wasp nest without poking it with a stick just to watch the chaos. He was also, to my mind, the best Texas attorney general of my lifetime.

  CHAPTER 18

  Bustin’ Rocks

  Clayton Williams’s aura of inevitability in the general election was partly a measure of how soiled in reputation the Democratic primary fight had left Ann Richards. It also stemmed from a television ad in which the Republican on horseback chased some heifers out of a draw, vaulted off his horse, and swaggered up to the camera wearing a Stetson, long-sleeved plaid shirt, and chaps that flapped over his jeans and boots. It didn’t much matter what he said—it just looked so good.

  In the months leading up to the 1990 race,
the Midland-based oilman and rancher had not been perceived as a politician at all. Two years older than Ann, Williams was the consummate West Texas rich guy. His Harvard-educated grandfather had come to Texas from Illinois in 1877 on the advice of doctors who told him he had tuberculosis and needed a more arid climate. Oscar Waldo Williams and his wife settled in Fort Stockton, where he worked as a surveyor of public land. He was twice elected county judge in Pecos County, once being voted out because he favored Prohibition. That man’s son, the elder Clayton Wheat Williams, was educated as an engineer and was an artillery officer in France in World War I. Though he had no formal schooling in geology, he discovered large oil and gas fields in the Permian Basin, in 1926 convincing the Texas Oil and Land Company to drill what was then the world’s deepest oil well. He served as a Pecos County commissioner and as a trustee on the Fort Stockton school board. But for all his business, civic, and scholarly contributions—he was a regional historian—the elder Clayton Williams was not entirely popular out there.

  The Republican gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams displays his trademark grin and cowboy hat at a political rally in Floydada, May 1990.

  The greater Big Bend area—everything west of the Pecos River—averages just eight to eighteen inches of rain a year. It is part of the Chihuahuan Desert with some handsome small mountain ranges and stretches of highland prairie. But it has groundwater, and ever since a Texas Supreme Court ruling in 1904, “the rule of capture” has, with few exceptions, granted landowners the legal right to use or sell all the water they can extract from their property. The elder Clayton Williams took brazen advantage of this descendant of English common law in order to irrigate his crops. Williams was blamed for extinguishing Fort Stockton’s Comanche Springs, a fabled swimming hole and camping ground on one of the nomadic warriors’ raiding trails to Mexico. In 1856, a traveler reported that cold clear water gushed from the earth and rock “like a sea monster.” By 1961, the spring was bone dry.