Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  A native of Galveston, Kay Bailey had been a cheerleader at the University of Texas who went on to earn a law degree there. She claimed that because she was a woman, she had received no offers for employment as an attorney. She turned to journalism, working for four years as a political reporter for a Houston television station. That led her to a job as press secretary for Anne Armstrong, an heiress of a prominent ranching family and cochair of the Republican National Committee. From a district in Houston, Hutchison then won election to the Texas House, serving from 1972 to 1976. One liberal Democratic representative, Arthur Vance, told me that colleagues of all ideologies liked to see her in a bikini at Barton Springs. During her time in the legislature, she worked with Sarah Weddington and her chief of staff, Ann Richards, to pass legislation prohibiting publication of the names of rape victims. She witnessed Weddington’s triumph in Roe v. Wade and at the time generally supported a woman’s right to an abortion, though not if financed by federal funds.

  Her second marriage was to Ray Hutchison, a wealthy Dallas Republican. She ran for a Dallas seat in Congress in 1982 and lost. When a Dallas newspaper ran a story that she had bought a candy manufacturer and was focusing on a new career as an entrepreneur and investor, Ann sent her a teasing letter about how much she loved the idea of Kay as a candy magnate. She changed her mind and set her sights on the office that had been a springboard for Ann.

  Raised on a farm near the West Texas hamlet of Paint Creek, Perry, an Aggie and air force pilot, was elected to the Texas House in 1984. One of his best friends in the chamber was Lena Guerrero, and he supported Al Gore for president in 1988. But Karl Rove sensed he was primed to switch parties. He talked Perry into a race against the media star Jim Hightower and helped raise $3 million to make him a formidable GOP threat. For several months, Hightower had talked about challenging Senator Phil Gramm in his race for reelection, but Hightower was too skillful a politician to believe he could win that. He announced that he believed he could accomplish more working nationally at the grassroots level, and that he would seek a third term as agriculture commissioner. But the most entertaining candidate of 1982 was a listless campaigner this time.

  Perry said he wouldn’t be surprised if Hightower’s emphasis on crop diversification had “encouraged the spread of marijuana in this state.” The FBI agent Greg Rampton would succeed in putting two of Hightower’s aides in federal prison for misuse of public funds; Hightower had to be nervous that the crosshairs were on him. Television ads highlighted the FBI investigation and forced Hightower to deny Karl Rove’s remark to the press that he would soon be indicted. Perry aired an ad that showed Hightower shaking hands with Jesse Jackson, and another superimposed the incumbent’s face over video of a man burning a flag. Another attack displayed a mean streak that would often be seen in Perry’s races. When Hightower sliced off the tip of one finger with his lawn mower, Perry put out a gleeful press release that read: “It’s probably a good thing Hightower is not a farmer, because there are machines much more dangerous than lawn mowers on the farm.” Hightower had had a rare talent, but now he was putting up only radio ads in a feeble defense of his character and record. Perhaps he was overconfident. Perry painted him as a 1960s elitist who knew almost nothing about agriculture. Perry also demonstrated his gift for the biting, thoughtless turn of phrase. One night in Houston, he tossed out a story that could not have set well with a family named Bush.

  Perry claimed he had made a speech about the state’s vital stake in agriculture when George W. Bush tugged on his jacket sleeve and asked in all seriousness, “Rick, what’s a mohair?” The Houston Post described Bush as “a worker on Perry’s campaign.” The candidate went off on how amazing it was that a son of a Texan president was not aware that mohair is the fleece of an Angora goat! A fleece harvest that Perry claimed was worth $11 billion a year to the Texas economy! There was never much love lost between those two.

  George W. Bush quit drinking in the throes of a terrible hangover the morning after he turned forty. He attributed his becoming a devout Christian to a talk he had one day with the Reverend Billy Graham at the Bush family’s compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, but he also credited Bible-study sessions that he had started attending during his time in Midland. The younger Bush was glad to be removed from the business setbacks that had hounded him in Midland. When he and his wife, Laura, and their twin daughters moved to Dallas, he borrowed $500,000 to purchase a small share of the Texas Rangers baseball team, and he emerged with the title of managing general partner. Bush knew his baseball, and he was proud of his active role in the Rangers’ front office. He was in his element out there, spitting tobacco juice in a cup and calling the players by name.

  He also played an active backstage role in the presidential politics of his father—he was the one who fired the elder Bush’s first White House chief of staff, John Sununu. President Bush’s father, Prescott Bush, had been a GOP senator from Connecticut and a staunch ally of the Eisenhower administration. With President Bush’s approval ratings soaring toward 90 percent in response to America’s triumph in the First Gulf War, thought naturally gravitated toward a dynasty in the persons of George W. in Texas and his younger brother Jeb in Florida. But for several reasons, it was deemed too soon for both of them. George W. moderated the Dallas debate in which the GOP candidates failed to yank Clayton Williams off his high horse over his record of fistfights. Then the Williams campaign released a direct-mail appeal from the oldest presidential son.

  Dear Fellow Texan,

  When Colonel Travis drew the line in the sand at the Alamo, he discovered immediately who had the courage to stand and fight for the Texas Republic. That line has been drawn again for the 1990 gubernatorial elections. On which side of the line do you stand? . . .

  [Williams] wants to build more prisons and boot camps for first-time offenders. Bustin’ rocks, as Claytie says, will set young offenders straight before setting out on a life of crime.

  Ann Richards isn’t sure about capital punishment, and just like Mike Dukakis she talks about “programs” for criminals rather than punishing them and protecting victims. . . . [Williams] shares the Main Street, mainstream views of the working men and women of Texas. . . .

  Frankly, who could ever forget the outrageous attack she launched against my father, George Bush, at the 1988 Democratic National Convention?

  Karl Rove, who handled direct-mail fund-raising for the Texas GOP at the time, may well have written the letter. But the presidential son signed it. Despite the silver-foot pendant, the notes of goodwill, and the peace offering, the last line in that letter left no doubt that the president and his family still had a serious bone to pick with Ann Richards.

  CHAPTER 19

  The Rodeo

  For the rest of their lives, Ann and Bud explained their relationship with the high school expression “going steady.” In April 1990, when she was struggling to put away Mattox in the runoff, Bud wrote, “My prayers are with you (and also my cosmic powers which are better left undefined, sort of like Mad Dog). I can’t even imagine how tired you must be, and how in need of . . . I started to say solace, but that’s not the word. Maybe a good hug is all I mean.”

  “So far, so bueno” was Bud’s droll, semioptimistic maxim of life. But even he acknowledged how bleak the situation appeared that summer. Amid reflections on the press’s tepid response to her environmental policy plan—the one I wrote—and Saddam Hussein’s provocative comparison of Britain’s creation of Kuwait to a nipple carved from the breast of Mother Iraq, Bud offered an anecdotal detour and parable.

  Dear Ann,

  . . . I was kind of tired and my ankle hurt this morning, so I gave myself a day off. The dogs jumped in the car and I went to a long breakfast at Maudie’s Cafe, where I read the Dallas Morning News and listened to Ab, Maudie’s husband, the cook on Saturday mornings, as he would occasionally come out of the kitchen and make pronouncements. Once after he had been making a racket he came out and said, “No problem, folks. I’m j
ust communicating with my ancestors.”

  Later Ab sat down and said, “It’s a beautiful day in Chicago.”

  I looked up from the paper to listen.

  “Back on the farm at four in the morning, doing the chores and freezing to death, milking the cows and slopping the hogs, I would be listening to this old radio in the barn, and every morning a man came on the air and said, ‘It’s a beautiful day in Chicago.’ That’s always stuck in my mind. No matter how bad it looks to me, it’s always a beautiful day in Chicago.”

  Ann had been in the race for a year now, and like a long-distance runner, somehow she had to find the kick, the sprint to the finish. Bud’s days of trying to overcome his crises had not all been beautiful, either, and she helped guide him toward AA. In those days, movies and AA meetings were how they often dated. In late June, she wrote him:

  I’d love to go AA-ing with you but I am off to Washington, New York, and Miami this week. Home on Friday. I had such a good time listening to the saga of your father at the nursing home that I can’t wait to hear chapters 2-3-4. . . . I’ll call when I can play. Hope you’ll go to AA without me—great people.

  Love, Ann

  Late that summer, Bud accompanied Ann to a benefit that Willie Nelson put on for her at the Austin Opry House. There was a good deal of laughter and much good music that night, but we had the air of people bunched up under siege. Glenn Smith told me that after the primary and runoff: “The first poll we got back showed her seventeen points down to Clayton. But that’s a strange thing: Ann was way scared of losing the primary to Mattox—she just didn’t know how she could face all of those people who believed in her—but she wasn’t so afraid of losing to Williams. Those seventeen points didn’t daunt her. She didn’t think she had much of a chance of overcoming that, but she was much more relaxed. From the beginning, she just had a more happily aggressive attitude about it. That was a role Ann was very comfortable in—the liberal fighting an uphill fight against powerful good old boys. Her attitude was so much better in the general election. Even in those early days.”

  Glenn and the rest of the original team had reason to be proud. The primary had been a brutal contest in which they were backed to the edge of an abyss, yet they fought back and won. Still, Ann wanted Mary Beth Rogers to take over as campaign manager, with major help to come from Jane Hickie and Jack Martin. Mary Beth did not share Glenn’s belief in the upbeat morale of the campaign team. And in her recollection, on the night of Willie’s benefit at the Opry House, Ann was twenty-seven points down.

  Several women who worked for Ann have said the campaign shake-up was necessitated by need to get rid of “the guys.” But the dysfunction was not that simple, Mary Beth told me. “In the first part of the primary, the campaign was pretty much run by Glenn and Mark and Monte Williams and Lena Guerrero. And people wound up at each other’s throats. Boy, that was a low point, even though Ann managed to squeak it out.” Some of Ann’s team thought that Bob Squier’s ads had not measured up to his national reputation. Mark McKinnon was then in a short-lived partnership with the Austin politico Dean Rindy. The Richards team decided to give Rindy and McKinnon a chance to brainstorm and produce the ads for the general election. Before anything got on the air, half of that partnership departed when Rindy intimated to Ann that she dressed like hell; there were no more sightings of Rindy on the campaign team after that.

  But Mark had been close to Ann for a few years; he had been one of the trusted readers of the manuscript of her book. “Harrison Hickman had conducted a poll about the general election,” Mary Beth said. “It was about two weeks after Ann had won the primary. Mark in his innocent bouncy way just kind of blurted out how far behind she was in the polls, and how awful it was. Ann gave him this look—I thought she was going to start crying, I think she held it back. She got so mad at Mark, after that meeting she didn’t want to have anything more to do with him. That’s when she got Jane and Jack and me to come in and take over.”

  Ann, conservationist and movie star Robert Redford, and Jim Hightower at a joint campaign event in 1990. Ann edged Clayton Williams in the race for governor, but Hightower’s popularity with the media and figures in the entertainment industries was not enough to get him past State Representative Rick Perry in the race for agriculture commissioner.

  George Shipley recalled a campaign ad that Cathy Bonner produced during that period of flux. “It had rodeo footage, and the theme of it was that Ann was going to put Texas back on top. They ran it for two or three days. But the sexual innuendo that Ann was going to be ‘on top’ was offensive to a large number of white men.” Squier came back aboard to do the advertising, while Glenn and Monte started a consulting team and continued to play a role in the campaign. “I was a lot happier,” Glenn said. “I was exhausted, and there was nothing I could do to recast the way Ann thought of me. She didn’t really think badly of me, to my knowledge. It was more like, ‘Where are all the people who said they were going to be with us? I thought this guy was going to be a figurehead, and here he’s been making real decisions.’ I didn’t feel any resentment when Mary Beth came in. She took a lot of pressure off me. Also, I wanted Ann to win.”

  Glenn smiled, remembering a debate prep that turned out to be one of his favorite moments in the campaign: “Somebody had given us use of one of the big houses above Town Lake. I was sitting on a sofa with Ann, and she said, ‘You know, Glenn, I don’t know how to deal with you because you’re not obsessive-compulsive enough.’ I had a pen in my hand, and I leaped up and threw it against the wall and said, ‘Fuck you, bitch!’ Then I sat back down and said, ‘How was that?’ She doubled over laughing, but nobody else knew what was going on.”

  Mary Beth recalled that evening quite another way. “The situation was real delicate,” Mary Beth said of handoff from the primary team. “To his credit, Glenn made it easy, and we’ve been friends to this day. But we also had to get Lena out of there. There was going to be a coordinated campaign for all the candidates under the direction of the party. I was being given the role of having to do all the dirty work for Ann, and I had to convince Lena she would be more effective, and play a greater leadership role, if she headed up the coordinated campaign. And then we had to convince everybody else on the coordinated campaign that Lena could do it, and that took a month. During the primary there had been a debate preparation in which a developer had loaned us his big house. I’d never seen anything like it—such out-and-out animosity on Lena’s part. It was one of those things where you’re thinking, ‘I don’t want to be in this room.’”

  My wife, Dorothy, had vivid memories of that evening as well. Bob Squier had flown down from Washington for the debate prep. Perched on a steep hillside, the borrowed mansion had a deck where people could enjoy the view—also a sturdy railing to keep them from toppling off if they had had too many. Dorothy looked up at one point and saw Squier out there in his solitude, walking the railing like a gymnast on a high wire. The Richards campaign had been a circus up to that point, and the big-name pro from Washington was an oddly perfect fit.

  “Clayton had beaten a big field of opponents,” Mary Beth said. “He was just so arrogant, so contemptuous of Ann. He was on track, and he would have beaten her. The demographics in the state, the number of self-identified Republicans, were changing fast. And Clayton was doing very well until we began to pressure him.” One of those times, they believed, came in July. The press had carried stories of Williams saying that Ann was sympathetic to traitors, followed by a former prisoner of war questioning her patriotism on Williams’s behalf. Then came a barrage of attack ads in that vein on radio. At a joint appearance in Plainview, Ann walked up to him and said, “You’ve got to get this stuff off the air.” His adversaries in the primary had not confronted him that way, and it seemed to rattle him.

  Two events in the Gulf of Mexico worked to Ann’s advantage that summer. First the Mega Borg tanker exploded, releasing around 4.6 million gallons of oil, then a tanker-barge collision sent 500,000 more g
allons into the wetlands of Galveston’s Seawolf Park. The state had no workable plan in place to deal with calamities of that scale. Ann raced down to Galveston to view the muck and said, “I am horrified that Bill Clements has failed to act to protect our fragile environment. Clayton Williams brags that he is cut from the same cloth as Bill Clements. Right now that cloth is soaked in oil and is wearing mighty thin.”

  Mary Beth said, “We came up with this seven-point strategy for the campaign. We had to tell Clayton’s story. We had to tell Ann’s story. We had to galvanize women voters. Especially suburban women. We had to raise six million dollars. We had to turn out our Democratic base in East Texas, the inner cities, and along the border. And we had to have some good luck.

  “We started doing crash research about Clayton Williams’s businesses. Paul Williams was discovering things that had never been out in the open before. And people couldn’t believe it. At the start of our focus groups, voters would start out being for Clayton Williams. But when we laid out facts about his career, they’d switch. So we knew that if we could get the money to put that on television, we’d have a shot. We started targeting big donors. Fred Ellis and I went down to see Walter Umphrey [a personal injury lawyer in Beaumont]. I told him, ‘Look, we have poll results and we have focus group results. If we can put this argument on television, we can knock this guy down. But we’ve got to get on TV.’”

  There were about six Democrats with that kind of wealth that they called on. A pariah to Republicans, who loathed all “trial lawyers,” unless of course they gave money to Republicans, Beaumont’s Walter Umphrey contributed a little more than $100,000 and lent her campaign $200,000.