by Jan Reid
Clayton Wheat Williams, Jr., knew all about the Comanche Springs controversy. It was one of many things he declined to apologize for. Born in Alpine in 1931, he grew up on the family’s ranch outside Fort Stockton. As a rich and successful man, Williams reminisced that his dad gave him responsibility for running a cotton farm when he was fourteen years old. “The soil wasn’t holding water, and boll weevils were attacking my cotton. The hail came and I couldn’t collect crop insurance, then my hands quit and I was working around the clock. So when I went to college, I went to learn how to be a problem solver.”
Williams was a proud Texas Aggie who graduated with a degree in animal husbandry and an army commission as a second lieutenant. He said that he invested his $2,000 in savings in an oil and gas company in 1957, following in the footsteps of his dad. He drilled his first successful well in 1959, and in 1961 he founded Clajon, which became the largest individually owned natural gas company in the state. Over the next twenty years, he established eight other energy companies and bought up more than 350,000 acres of oil and gas leases. In the mid-1980s, he branched out into long-distance telephone service with ClayDesta Communications. (His wife is named Modesta.) Unable to afford a professional actor, he starred in commercials that won trade advertising awards. He established the ClayDesta National Bank in Midland and backed a 186-acre commercial real estate development there. He bought large cattle ranches in Big Bend and started to farm alfalfa, a very thirsty crop, outside Fort Stockton.
The desert of West Texas and eastern New Mexico is given to sand, stunted mesquite, creosote bush, and tatters of trash impaled on the thorns by the ceaseless wind. Midland and Odessa began as railroad depots where cattle could be loaded and watered. Midland did not incorporate until 1906, and Odessa had only 750 residents in 1925. But a large sedimentary stratum called the Permian Basin had by the mid-1960s produced 11.3 billion barrels of oil. The twin cities of Odessa and Midland would scarcely have existed otherwise. Much of Odessa is a hodgepodge of pipe yards and wind-battered frame houses occupied by oil-field laborers. But Midland, the domain of landmen and wildcatters, has tall buildings and groomed neighborhoods with swimming pools and golf courses. In boom years following World War II, the iconic wildcatter of Midland was the heroic bomber pilot and transplanted Connecticut aristocrat, George Herbert Walker Bush. He later moved his business empire to Houston and launched his political career there. Clayton Williams, Jr., subsequently made a success of his exploration companies with innovative horizontal drilling and three-dimensional seismic technology. He founded the Chihuahuan Desert Research Institute for the work of biologists and botanists, and he put up half the money to build an alumni center at Texas A&M—the structure bears his name.
In 1973, OPEC embargoed oil sales to the United States and other Western nations that had supported Israel’s rout of Egypt and Syria in the Yom Kippur, or Ramadan, War. (The non-Muslim OPEC members at the time—Venezuela and Nigeria—went along with the embargo under pressure from the rest of the cartel.) The embargo lasted just a year, but America’s attempt to lessen its reliance on foreign-supplied fossil fuels sparked a boom of production in the oil and gas fields of Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. Williams’s corporate domain never flew higher than during that boom. But then the Saudis broke with OPEC and put the world awash in oil. Overproduction by American companies also contributed to the glut. The price of benchmark West Texas crude plummeted in a free fall that didn’t stop until the price hit eight dollars a barrel. The oil bust plunged Texas into its very own depression. No longer did one see those bumper stickers urging the state to “Freeze a Yankee in the Dark.”
Williams had to fight off creditors calling in loans that totaled $500 million. He was forced to sell Clajon, and during this time, he and Modesta realized that their fifteen-year-old son, Clayton Wade, was addicted to alcohol and drugs. They enrolled the youth in a Dallas rehab called Straight and flew out to visit and counsel him every other week.
The bright spot for Clayton Williams in those years was his success as a cattle rancher. In the lovely Davis Mountains and surrounding highland prairie, Williams bought the Henderson Flat Ranch and proceeded to alienate his neighbors. Long before Gary Cartwright had any inkling that Clayton Williams would get crosswise with his friend Ann Richards, he wrote about the ranching dispute in a 1985 Texas Monthly story, “The Last Roundup.” Williams’s horseshoe-shaped ranch enclosed the storied Kokernot 06 ranch on three sides. The Kokernot’s young heir and his cowhands resented Williams’s padlocking gates and denying them access to their own pastures. Traditionalists disliked him for plowing up native prairie and planting exotic hybrid strains from Texas A&M; they even bitched about his introducing Brangus cattle into a region long known for its Herefords (which were, after all, English exotics that had replaced the longhorns after barbed-wire fences closed the open range).
But the matter that caused Williams the most local grief was an outlook on water rights and use that he seemed to have inherited from his father. The Williamses and their landscapers kept a sprinkler system going continually around the big ranch house, keeping the grass as lush as the green on a country club golf course in Midland. When “Claytie,” as friends called him, and Modesta planned one of their big cattle-sale parties, he sent trucks to spray water on his twelve miles of dirt roads and keep the dust tamped down, sparing the limos, pickups, and trailers hauling bulls and cows worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Williams was not a politician in 1985, and he spoke to Cartwright as if the possibility had never crossed his mind. At one point, he bragged about how a drought that ruined some of his neighbors was a blessing to him.
Williams was an eternal optimist, but this was where his oil fortune came into play. While nature compelled the less fortunate to sell, it was inspiring him to buy. “A lot of ranchers around Austin and San Antonio were forced to quit or sell when the market was way down,” he told me. “I bought a lot of heifers and some steers and sent them north, where a heavy snowfall made grass plentiful. I bought another fourteen thousand yearlings in South Texas and seven thousand in Mexico. I sent some to the Colorado cornfields and some to the Arizona desert and some more to Wyoming. Cattle cycles are supply and demand, pure and simple. When prices go up again, ranchers will be buying heifers to replenish their stock. I’ll be selling heifers back to some of the same people that sold them to me. I usually make about seven dollars an acre here, triple what most cow-calf operations make. This year I estimate I’ll make twenty dollars an acre. Next year, who knows? I might decide to let the grass grow.”
In little cafés where old-school ranchers gathered to drink their morning coffee, Clayton Williams was the enemy—a man who made money off their failures and bad luck. But in politics far removed from the jealousies of a handful of ranchers in West Texas, he became an overnight sensation. Brushing aside the Republicans’ longing for only high-profile conservatives to run—former Dallas Cowboy quarterback Roger Staubach and George W. Bush were among the names that came up—Williams jumped in the 1990 governor’s race and spent $6 million introducing Texans to his big nose and even-toothed grin. He loved to ride his prancing horse in Main Street parades and wave his Stetson overhead like Gene Autry, using his fingertips to wobble the brim. That image was hard to beat on local television stations’ six o’clock news.
He entered the Republican primary as a political novice facing a formidable lineup of opponents. Tom Luce was a handsome, intellectual Dallas attorney, the lawyer for Ross Perot and an expert on public education. Jack Rains had been Bill Clements’s secretary of state. But the front-runner was Kent Hance. The former congressman and senatorial and gubernatorial contender now had an appointed seat on the Texas Railroad Commission, and against that strong field of Republican opponents, a poll in September 1989 showed him with an excellent 33 percent. Hance’s impressive poll numbers were met by Williams’s anemic 12 percent. But that same September, Williams launched his “Joys of Bustin’ Rocks” anticrime ad campaign, who
se buys soon reached $3 million. By February 1990, the polls were showing him with 33 percent and Hance, fading to a poor second, with 19 percent.
Then that same February, icing on one of his company plane’s wings sent several of his employees and closest friends to their deaths in a crash near Abilene. Williams’s show of grief for his friends during the suspended campaign made him an even more endearing figure to Texans. Friends said he came close to quitting the race. But when he decided to continue, he established himself as a character as much as a politician. He joked about himself in ways that resonated with some people: “Everybody always knows I’m an Aggie when they see my class ring while I’m picking my nose.” He had millions of his own dollars he was willing to spend, and he hired a team of first-rate politicos. They provided the candidate with a twenty-five-point plan that included $1.6 billion for a war on drugs. Proposing budget cuts, privatization of many government programs, and a hiring freeze of state workers, he claimed he could balance the budget without raising taxes.
In the seventies, he had described himself as “an anti-environmentalist” to the Midland Reporter-Telegram, but in 1990 his eighteen-point plan for the environment was quite smooth. He was fond of the nostrum “We have to manage our state more efficiently, like the way we have been doing in the Texas oilfields.”
But nothing caught on like his promise to double the capacity of the prisons, give drug dealers the death penalty, and introduce young first offenders to “the joys of bustin’ rocks.” Neither he nor the press remarked that his own son might have been one of the offenders slinging sledgehammers until they collapsed. He did catch flak, though, for proposing to put this hard-time boot camp for drug offenders in the state’s largest nature preserve, Big Bend Ranch State Park. But Williams punched other favorite GOP buttons in offbeat ways. One day he spoke effusively of welfare reform: “One of the ladies on the Governor’s Task Force—I probably shouldn’t mention her name, but she’s a very neat black lady—came up with this thought. It’s not my idea, but I endorse it. A lot of the welfare parents are doing drugs. Her idea was that we should be sending anti-drug propaganda . . . anti-drug indoctrination, with the welfare. Second—now hold your hat on this—that we should have drug tests for welfare recipients, and if they test positive, no welfare check. Pow! No welfare check. If that’s not a strong signal, I don’t know what is.”
Williams’s accomplished opponents thought he would embarrass himself in debates, but he didn’t. The younger George Bush was moderating one when someone brought up Williams’s reputation for fistfights. “Dang right,” he said quickly—he would fight for what was right. The audience guffawed. He elaborated another night when pressed on the number of his recent brawls. “Tell you about one,” he volunteered. “It was this guy I’d fired from one of my companies. He kept coming around, harassing my employees, so I decked him. It was apparently an effective management technique, because he stopped coming around.”
Williams said he would limit abortion in unspecified ways, protect Texans’ right to bear arms, and support an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban flag burning. GOP operatives in rival camps passed on rumors that he held “honey hunts” at his big ranch—hookers made available to his high-rolling male guests. Nothing worked. Williams grinned, rode his horse in parades, and crushed his able opponents, carrying 60 percent and winning without a runoff. A Democrat who was friendly with Hance called on him after the rout. The Lubbock politician smiled and said, “He bought it fair and square.”
Texas Monthly assigned Mimi Swartz and Jan Jarboe to write profiles of the candidates, planning to run them in tandem in October 1990. Jarboe’s story was titled “Clayton Williams: Onward to the Past.” It began: “Ten thousand feet above the state he wants to govern, Clayton Williams suddenly bursts into tears. A moment before, I had asked him if it was true, as I had heard, that he cries every time he hears ‘The Aggie War Hymn.’ The answer is swift and anatomical: The mere mention of the War Hymn triggers a fountain of tears. Here sits the Republican nominee for governor—the very man who is traveling around Texas representing himself as the last true cowboy—crouched on the edge of his cushy airplane seat, with his craggy face so wet with tears that it glistens in the bright August light.
“The 58-year-old oilman, rancher, and banker is a bundle of emotion. In the course of a 25-minute flight in his maroon-and-white King Air, Williams’ vivid hazel eyes fill with tears three separate times—once over the War Hymn, again when he recalls his father’s desk, and a third time when he talks about his grandfather. . . .
“Why does Clayton Williams cry so much? In every case what sets him off is a deep, personal sense of loss that carries over into politics—loss of his ancestors, of the Texas they knew that is no more, of the simpler, purer life he led at Texas A&M. It was while Williams was a student at A&M in the fifties that he learned the essential lessons of his life: Country folks are better than city folks. . . . Old values triumph over new ones. . . . Life is war. Most politicians can be heard to make glib references to the future, but Clayton Williams’ heart is firmly fixed in the past.”
Jarboe (now Jarboe Russell) asked whether “Williams’ attitude about women raises the larger questions of whether he is too tied to the old codes and formulas to lead a modern state. Williams, of course, disagrees. ‘Tom Luce got kind of stern with me during one of the debates,’ says Williams. ‘He questioned whether Texas can ride horseback into the twenty-first century. Well, my answer to that is you can if you have a good horse.’”
She finished her article with another telling quotation: “‘I’m not going to force anybody to wear cowboy hats, jeans, and act like I do,’ said Williams. ‘But I’ve noticed that most people who hang around me long enough wind up owning a pair of boots.’”
Following his impressive primary victory, Williams made a triumphant swoop through Washington that brought him to the White House of the elder George Bush. The president was pleased to squire this new Republican star to church and introduce him to top congressmen. Williams declined to say that he hoped Jim Mattox would win the Democrats’ runoff, but he did offer that he came from “the male world” and feared he really “wouldn’t be comfortable battling with a woman.” He elaborated for the Dallas Morning News: “I’ve never been in an adversarial position with a woman except once way back when I had a divorce, and I lost.”
Ann replied, “I don’t want to be his mother, I want to be governor of Texas.”
A week later, Williams invited the press and his campaign aides to a genuine roundup on his ranch in the Davis Mountains. The late-March weather turned wet, foggy, and cold, just miserable, and beside a campfire he told a joke that likened their situation to a woman enduring a rape: “If it’s inevitable, just relax and enjoy it.” Then he didn’t have the sense to let it go. Later in the day, at the urging of his aides, he offered an apology to anyone who might have been offended, but he continued, “That’s not a Republican women’s club that we had this morning. It’s a working cow camp, a tough world where you can get kicked in the testicles if you’re not careful.” Oh, that helped. The reporters persisted, and he fired back, “I’m not going to give you a serious answer. It wasn’t a serious deal. It wasn’t a serious statement.”
Women’s groups jumped all over him, but Governor Clements quickly defended him, and Barbara Bush said the uproar wouldn’t affect the president’s support for Williams in any way. The polls still showed him handily beating either Richards or Mattox. Then, one month later, Williams was reminiscing about the tradition of Aggies “getting serviced” by prostitutes at the Chicken Ranch in La Grange and the Boys Town brothels in Mexican border towns. A reporter asked whether he personally had taken part in that. “Why, of course,” he said. It was just “part of growing up in West Texas.”
That May, his campaign received a questionnaire about the pros and cons of six legislative proposals related to crimes of sexual assault. After four days, he and his team had not yet responded, and a Dallas Morning
News reporter pestered him about it at a press conference. “I don’t get my paycheck from you,” he snapped, and stormed out of the room. A couple of months later, a reporter with U.S. News & World Report questioned him gently about his choice of verbs in describing young men’s coming of age. “I was trying to find a nice, polite term for fucking,” he said.
What the hell—that was Clayton.
As Glenn Smith predicted, with White out of the race, Ann drubbed the attorney general in the runoff. In the general-election campaign, Williams and his team left the drug-use issue alone, at least in public statements. Maybe they did that out of their candidate’s courtly instincts, or maybe they figured Mattox had identified her that way and done all the mauling of her required. But in midsummer, they came out blasting with radio ads claiming that Ann sympathized with death row inmates, harbored desires to raise taxes and take away Texans’ guns, and was allied with gay-rights activists and the traitor Jane Fonda.
The Republicans hoped to put the race away that summer, and it appeared they might. U.S. senator Phil Gramm was challenged at the top of the ballot only by an unexciting state senator who had no money. Running for the lieutenant governor post vacated by Bill Hobby, Bob Bullock had his hands full trying to fend off young Rob Mosbacher, Jr., whose dad was a Houston oilman, yacht-racing champion, past U.S. secretary of commerce, and close friend of President Bush. And Karl Rove was guiding two future GOP stars and combatants, Kay Bailey Hutchison and Rick Perry, in hot contention for state treasurer and agriculture commissioner. Of the Democrats’ ballyhooed Class of ’82, only land commissioner Garry Mauro seemed a reasonably safe bet to still be in elected office after 1990.