Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The first draft of “Meet the Real Clayton Williams” read: “Over the next several weeks, the Ann Richards campaign will begin a series of public service press releases to introduce the public to Clayton Williams.

  “These releases will introduce the real Clayton Williams, the man behind the $6 million television campaign, the junk bond wheeler-dealer whose big grin shows that he thinks he can do what has never been done before: the leveraged buyout of the State of Texas.”

  It was a joke that the attacks were “public service announcements,” and many of the accusations were too wonky to catch on with voters. But some of them stuck. Private property rights are sacrosanct in rural Texas; the Richards campaign found a 1981 Houston Chronicle article in which Williams spoke in heavy-handed fashion about using eminent domain—or condemnation law—to force his oil and gas pipelines across anyone’s land: “They can protest as to what we pay them, but we have a right to lay our pipelines across anybody’s property at any time.”

  Paul Williams found that in 1984, the Texas Railroad Commission reported that one of Clayton Williams’s oil companies and a contractor called Bulldog Construction Company had been cited for intentionally dumping 25,000 barrels of waste mud and oil into a tributary creek of a lake that provided drinking water for the small town of Brenham. Partners and competitors in the oil and gas industry had sued his companies more than 300 times. Two large federal suits, which alleged fraud, deception, restraint of trade, and illegal fixing of natural gas prices in order to cheat royalty owners, had been settled by Williams’s lawyers. The most recent lawsuit involved his long-distance telephone company, ClayDesta. One of his first employees claimed Williams lifted his business plan, promised him 30 percent equity in the company, and then fired him two years later. Williams bristled in the deposition, “I fired him and gave him fifty thousand dollars because he wasn’t doing his job. That’s more than the man deserved.”

  Ann released all her income tax returns and challenged Williams to do the same. He bragged that it would take an eighteen-wheeler to haul all his personal and business tax returns. A young member of Richards’s campaign team, John Hatch, had friends in the trucking business, and they arranged to haul an eighteen-wheeler to Williams’s campaign headquarters. A Williams spokesman responded haughtily, “Ann Richards is a liberal elitist who is comfortable hobnobbing in the boutiques of San Francisco and Greenwich Village with the likes of Jane Fonda and Michael Dukakis.” But the counter did not line up with the gibe—boutique liberals were not often acquainted with people who knew how to park an eighteen-wheeler.

  None of the charges could have overcome Williams’s lead in the polls and huge advantage in funding. But the accusations about his business practices angered him. In September, he bragged that he was going to “head and hoof her and drag her through the dirt.” That is a reference to roping cattle, which did not play well among women who were already put off by his roundup rape joke.

  Inexperienced aides in the campaign office responded with a colorful non sequitur. Mark Strama, whom Ann would later help win a seat in the legislature, was then a twenty-two-year-old, fresh out of college in Rhode Island; his job at the campaign was to run errands. Strama and some pals came up with a top ten list of silly characterizations of the Republican and posted it around the office. Chuck McDonald had joined the team as a press aide; he later became a sought-after public relations consultant, but he got the campaign job in part because his mother was a prominent Democratic legislator from El Paso. When Williams made the crack about Ann falling off the wagon, reporters started calling for a response. McDonald was caught off guard, and both Bill Cryer and Margaret Justus, the seasoned campaign press aides, were out of the office. His gaze fell on the top ten insults the young staffers had compiled. Reading the first one, he told a reporter from Amarillo, “Clayton Williams is a fraudulent honking goose.” The odd rejoinder sped around newsrooms all over the state. “Ann and Bill Cryer were driving in Nacogdoches and heard this on the radio,” recalled Mark Strama. “Bill said he literally had to pull the car over so she could stomp around. Oh, she was pissed!”

  Williams had declined to participate in any debates with Ann. He didn’t need to. But they scheduled a joint appearance before the Dallas Crime Commission in early October. Williams’s handlers had publicly distanced themselves from their candidate’s blunders a number of times, but according to the Dallas Times Herald’s Ross Ramsey, while the rape joke and other sexist cracks were totally consistent with who he was, the handlers put him up to a stunt that was out of character. Although Williams bragged about his fistfights with men, his code of honor demanded chivalry in encounters with women. But with cameras all around them, he punched a friend’s shoulder and said, “Watch this.” He walked up to her and declared, “Ann, I’m here to call you a liar today. That’s what you are. You lied about me. You lied about Mark White. You lied about Jim Mattox. I’m going to finish this deal, and you can count on it.”

  “Well,” she drawled. “I’m sorry you feel that way about it, Clayton.” She had extended her arm for the ritual handshake and was so surprised that she just left her hand out there. He turned away and snapped, “I don’t want to shake your hand.”

  Chris Hughes, the young travel aide and carrier of Ann’s purse, had seen her in emotional and psychological despair following the screaming press gantlet she had to run at the Dallas primary debate. Now he and McDonald were in the van riding away from this episode. Chris was shocked when she looked back over the seat and said, “Boys, this sucker is over. He must have lost his mind.”

  To Ann, the turning point wasn’t the joke about the rape, or the story about getting serviced in whorehouses, or the boast about roping her and dragging her in the dirt. It was that image that could never be erased of a grown man aggressively refusing to shake a woman’s hand.

  Bill Kenyon, a Williams spokesman, had told the New York Times the candidate was aware of the damage he was doing to himself, well before the handshake incident—an indication that he was getting conflicting advice. “He’s going through this inward-looking process of saying to himself for the first time that politicking is a ton of grief. . . . Instead of sliding around in the muck the way we have been lately, we decided to take a break, start over, and try to come out like in the good old days.”

  But that was a hard pivot to make. Ann had claimed that she was closing in the polls, and on camera Williams was shown giggling, “I hope she hasn’t started drinking again.” Then Richards put up a negative campaign ad that showed him saying that over and over. Molly Ivins provided her completely biased view of the race in a Dallas Times Herald column that later appeared in her book Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She? (1991).

  But the polls still showed Williams ten points ahead, then seven points ahead. The Richards campaign was praying for Williams to screw up again, and he cheerfully obliged. Williams’s people had to sagely dodge all requests for a debate, since Williams knew almost zip about state government, but two Dallas television stations, KERA and WFAA, managed to rope him in to “in-depth” interviews. He gave a shaky performance, his ignorance more visible than usual. Then one interviewer asked, almost as a throwaway, “What’s your stand on Proposition One?”

  “Which one is that?” Williams inquired.

  “The only one on the ballot.”

  He was still lost, so the interviewer told him what the proposition was about—concerning the governor’s power to make late-term “midnight” appointments. Williams still didn’t know if he was for it or against it.

  “But haven’t you already voted?” inquired the interviewer. “You told us you voted absentee. Don’t you remember how you voted?”

  “I just voted on that the way my wife told me to; she knew what it was,” Williams explained.

  He was so clearly a candidate in a world of trouble, the clip made the national news. The polls showed her within three points.

  Ann’s crowds were enormous now, and the rallies had taken on the
air and tone that this was a cause, not just another race. Almost too late, Ann had become the campaigner that people had envisioned when she made that speech in Atlanta. In her speeches, she kept going back to an image that had inspired her since 1982, in her first race for treasurer. She had gone to the Rio Grande hamlet of La Joya and a gathering for old folks called Amigos del Valle. Put on by her friend Billy Leo, who owned the general store, the occasions resembled Meals on Wheels, except the old friends and kinfolks gathered for fellowship as well as food. They played dominos and did needlework. Ann had made the scene the endnote of Straight from the Heart. She compressed it in her speeches, but it always came out more or less the same.

  Holding a cup of coffee and an issue of the local newspaper, Ann is greeted by Democratic supporters in the Big Thicket town of Kountze, 1990.

  It was late afternoon by the time we were going to leave, kind of dusky on the highway. And as we were pulling away I saw a little woman, she couldn’t have been over four and a half feet tall, probably in her early eighties, standing by the highway waiting for her ride. She was a frail woman, in a cotton print dress that hung straight to her ankles.

  I really thought, looking out that window, that that little woman is what our business of public service is all about. She has faith in us to do right by her and by the place where she lives. She will never know the intricacies, the machinations, the pull and tug and hardness of politics, and it doesn’t matter. What she does need to know is that there are people serving in public office who care about her and her community. That’s all she needs to know. And it’s important that we be true to her . . .

  She had a mask. She was standing in front of Billy Leo’s store wearing my face. I waved at her. She waved back.

  Bud Shrake’s coauthored book with Barry Switzer, Bootlegger’s Boy, had spent nine weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. But a sportswriter who covered Switzer’s career for the Dallas Times Herald and Oklahoma City’s Daily Oklahoman took sharp exception to a chapter alleging that the reporter had participated in an attempt to entrap an Oklahoma Sooner in a cocaine sting. Calling the chapter “vindictive fiction,” he sued Switzer, Bud, and their publisher for libel, slander, invasion of privacy, emotional stress, and loss of consortium. Bud was irked at having to sit for depositions in the suit, which was eventually settled, as they waited for the election.

  My dear Bud,

  I hate the answering service and don’t leave messages because I’m not here enough to get a return call.

  Polls are even. I’m in a snit. I can handle real crisis but good news threatens me.

  The only thing I have worth reporting was a press conference in the metropolis of Fannett.

  It took place in a feed store and they built a podium out of eight sacks of mule feed.

  I’ll miss Jap and Phyllis’s party. I’m in South Texas with Henry Cisneros.

  Light candles. Say mantras.

  Love, Ann

  On the last weekend of the race, a bombshell burst. The Williams team had arranged an old-style whistle-stop train tour, and in his beloved Aggie town of College Station, Williams was pestered by reporters with questions about his tax returns. “I’ll tell you when I didn’t pay any income taxes was in 1986,” he volunteered. “When the whole economy collapsed.” He was being honest, as he often was in making big mistakes. He went on about how the oil bust cratered the entire Texas economy that year, forcing him to sell off companies and fight to stay out of bankruptcy. It was true that his losses far exceeded his income, so he owed no income taxes when his accountants got through with that year’s return. But that was not how the story was bound to play in the press.

  Reggie Bashur, a publicist for the campaign, said that one of their efforts at damage control was to open the bar early for the reporters on the train, which was racing toward the Mexican border. They wanted to get those folks good and drunk and out of the reach of their editors. According to Molly Ivins, they even went so far as to cancel the reporters’ Laredo hotel reservations and put them up in Nuevo Laredo, where they would have no telephone service to the United States. “Oh, my God,” Mary Beth Rogers giggled to Dorothy and me the night the story broke. Cathy Bonner put together a campaign spot, Monte Williams provided the voice-over, and aides all over the state were racing to hand deliver the tapes to station managers and get them on the air.

  Bud knew that now was the time he needed to come out of hiding and join her. In a fax, he proposed that he accompany her to another event hosted by Willie Nelson. She replied:

  Bud m’dear. Don’t know if we will connect by phone. I would love to have you take me to the Willie event tomorrow night. . . . Clayton Williams lost his cool today—big time. You’re still #1. Ann

  Then almost in the next breath, it seemed, she sent him a fax full of weariness, hesitation, and uncertainty. She was laying herself wide open.

  Nose to nose: Ann Richards and Clayton Williams did not have a formal debate in their race for governor in 1990, but in Plainview that May Ann challenged the rancher and oilman and told him to pull down radio ads that questioned her patriotism.

  Dear Bud,

  It is almost midnight. Long day. Texarkana, Longview, Nacogdoches, Richmond, Angleton and Houston. Pay dirt today—Williams says he didn’t pay income tax in ’86. We’ll see if it plays big . . .

  It would be a treat for me to have you in the mayhem of election night. I’ll be home in the afternoon on election day. Call and we’ll plan.

  Some of the kids and I are going to Padre Island after the election. Depending on the outcome I’ve been thinking about asking you to come for some part of the time and have feared that we might not like each other with constant exposure. Does that make sense?

  I know that the root of it lies in the lingering anxiety I have about rejection. . . . The fatigue is invading my brain and this probably makes little sense but there won’t be time to write from here on. I’ll be home again Sunday night late.

  It’s great to come home to your fax notes.

  Fondly, Ann

  Bud later told her that he would be glad to join them at the beach, and would bring his sleeping bag, but for now, with a metaphor that mixed Texas hooey with a line from the Beatles, he emphasized that she had really scored this time.

  Dear Guv:

  Great going! I’m proud of you!

  Keep pounding the little cowboy with that big Silver Hammer.

  Don’t let him get away with confusing his business losses with his personal income.

  I was surprised to see you paid such a high percentage of income tax in ’86.

  I wonder how many billionaires paid 30 percent taxes?

  None, I’m sure.

  I could have fixed you up with my CPA and he would have saved you from paying the IRS anything in ’86. Of course, you would now be a fugitive.

  I’m praying harder than ever . . .

  I’ll see you Tuesday. Get someone to tell me when to show up and where.

  Love, Bud

  On election night, the Democrats’ coordinated campaign made the Hyatt Hotel in Austin its headquarters. In one large ballroom, anxious faces and gulps of booze prevailed as the returns came in. Handsome Rick Perry, who proved to be no upstart, was edging ahead in the race for agriculture commissioner. With 99 percent of the precincts reported, Perry had 49.1 percent to 47.9 for Jim Hightower, ending the colorful populist’s career in electoral politics. The office they sought had little relevance in the lives of most Texans. It was a historic race because one liberal Democrat’s downfall was matched by the ascent of a conservative, newborn Republican who would never lose an election in Texas, and with much initial fanfare and subsequent flameout he would one day seek the presidency. Karl Rove had schooled Perry in his breakout campaign. He also guided Kay Bailey Hutchison to a win in the treasurer’s race. The time would come when his two protégés couldn’t stand each other.

  In the lieutenant governor’s race, Bob Bullock had bluffed, bullied, and out-hustled two att
ractive, younger opponents. McNeely and Henderson wrote that for almost three years he had run like a man possessed. The first credible challenger was a Democratic state senator, Chet Edwards. Mark McKinnon had worked for Edwards before signing on with Ann Richards. Bullock raised nearly twice as much money as Edwards did, and lined up an intimidating list of endorsements of elected officials. At the last moment, Edwards decided to run for a vacant seat in the U.S. House, which he won. “Thank God,” McKinnon joked to McNeely. “It saved us from having Bullock tear off our heads.”

  George Christian, the veteran consultant who had been Lyndon Johnson’s press secretary, was close to Bullock, and he feared the comptroller might underestimate the GOP’s Rob Mosbacher, Jr., who grew up close to the Bush family; to burnish his governmental credentials, Bill Clements had appointed him chair of the Texas Department of Human Services. Christian urged Bullock to hire Jack Martin to run his campaign. He argued that bringing in Martin, who had run Lloyd Bentsen’s campaigns, would signal Bullock’s alignment with the party establishment. Bullock consented to a meeting, and then, to Christian’s astonishment, he tore into Martin. Christian said Bullock “chewed Martin out worse than I ever heard a man chew out another man.” Consider for a moment: that came from a man who had witnessed LBJ’s tantrums.

  But that was often Bullock’s perverse way of measuring a new acquaintance. He hired Martin to run the campaign. Geared up for a vicious fight, Mosbacher ran an ad with a photo of “old Bob Bullock,” who wore a hearing aid, with his hand cupped behind his ear. Bullock countered with taunts of “Little Lord Fauntleroy” and an ad with a soft-looking child moving to knock down a sand castle as a voice-over blamed Mosbacher for a $340 million budget shortfall at the agency he chaired. Bullock’s ads blamed Mosbacher for oil spills in the Gulf; the only basis for that was a barge company owned by the Republican’s father. In the end, Bullock won the heated duel by 260,000 votes, a majority of 51.7 percent—and 75,000 more votes than Ann Richards received. Everyone said the lieutenant governor in Texas had more power than the governor. And Bullock had the votes to start proving it.