Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  The morning of Election Day, a former county judge from West Texas named Bill Young was holding down his job in the veterans programs division of the General Land Office. The judge and others liked to hang out in the speechwriters’ office, because we closed the door when we wanted and we didn’t mind them smoking in there. Dorothy was pretty confident that she would be on the governor’s staff if Ann won, but she would be jobless if her boss lost. Young told us he always consulted a favorite barber on the morning of important elections, and in the course of our jitters during those hours when nothing about an election is known for sure, he walked in, took off his cowboy hat, and told us the unscientific polling result was in. Jim Hightower and the Democrats’ treasurer candidate were in trouble, the barber figured, but he said that when he got in the voting booth and started to vote in the governor’s race: “I looked at that ballot, and the face of that ignorant son of a bitch just swum up at me.”

  Clayton Williams’s election-night affair was by invitation only, and when he came down to concede, a torrent of catcalls and slurs erupted when he spoke Ann’s name. It angered him, and he snapped, “Now . . . now . . . you owe me that courtesy!” The rich old-boy establishment in Texas was coming apart on live television; the candidate was having to shout down his own supporters.

  A short time later, Ann climbed on a stage and in exultation jammed her fist high in the air. She grinned and held up a T-shirt with an illustration of the Texas Capitol with the caption “A Woman’s Place Is In the Dome.” The explosion of noise was deafening. On the floor beneath the new governor, I saw Cinny Kennard, who had been one of the leaders at the mauling of Ann after the Dallas debate—the reporter we called the Red Dress. For the occasion, she again wore red. She looked forlorn and lost.

  From left, Richards aide Don Temples, Bud Shrake, Ann Richards, and her son Clark Richards watch the returns in the race against Clayton Williams. Austin, 1990.

  The newly elected governor of Texas holds up for her joyous supporters a T-shirt that became ubiquitous in the final days of her 1990 campaign.

  The next morning, the Dallas Times Herald headline declared, “Ann Whups Him!” True enough, but it was no landslide. A Libertarian candidate denied her a majority; she finished with 49.6 percent of the vote. But 99,239 more Texans believed the liberal grandmother from Austin made a lot more sense than the conservative Midland oilman and cowboy. Many of her voters were middle-class women who couldn’t wait to get to the polls and send that perceived yahoo back out to his pipelines, whirlwinds of dust, and creosote bushes. Ann had come from a long way back and run a stellar finish, but she also benefited from one of the most spectacular self-destructions in Texas political history. Williams had spent approximately $22 million, including $8 million of his own money. He was no ignorant fool—he was just out of his element. “I’d shoot myself in the foot,” he later reflected, still with that infectious grin. “Then I’d load ’er up and blast away again.”

  Jim Hightower’s concession in the Capitol the morning after the election was short and sad but good-natured. He described his feelings sagely: “One day you’re a peacock, and the next you’re a feather duster.”

  When Bob Bullock made his appearance in the Senate chamber, John Sharp, the new comptroller, and Dan Morales, the new attorney general, were eager to stand close to his side. Sharp presumed to give the smaller man a friendly hug. Bullock’s expression went ice cold.

  Ann also held her press conference in the Senate chamber. The room was packed as she slowly made her way through the applauding crowd. It was a cold day, and most of the people were bundled up in coats. The crowd of reporters around the microphone tried to back up and give her room, as if in recognition of her revised status. In the front of the pack was the Houston Chronicle’s dark-haired, mustachioed R. G. Ratcliffe. He had been laughing with us as hard as Ann and Monte Williams and everyone else that first night at the beer and fish joint on the boat trip, but he had gone after Ann and other elected officials with skill and doggedness that was unmatched by his colleagues in the Capitol press corps. Ann threw her head back on seeing him, they traded smiles, and she said, “O ye of little faith, R. G.”

  That week, Bud Shrake had promised to attend a Fort Worth reunion at his alma mater, TCU. Once more at an important time he was away from her. Ann’s fax read:

  Dear Bud,

  The crown got heavy today. No list of things that must be done. No hourly frenzy. I tried some Christmas and inaugural shopping for the family but I could not get much done for shaking hands. I feel trapped in the house and outside too. All of this will take some getting used to—and I am a little frightened.

  Just got back from the Claus and Sunny von Bülow movie and it was surprisingly good. I went with my friend Pat Cole—another manifestation of my weird state of mind is that I don’t feel like I have anything to say—even to old friends. I’m tired of talking about the race. Transition talk spurs gossip or breaks confidences and I think I am tired of being entertaining.

  I’d love to go to the movie Sunday. What time shall I expect you? I only wish it was not such a long time until then.

  Maybe I’ll clean out some closets.

  Love, Ann

  PART FOUR

  The Parabola

  Accompanied by her children, Governor Ann Richards exchanges grins of delight with Texas Supreme Court Chief Justice Thomas Phillips immediately after voicing the oath of office.

  CHAPTER 20

  The New Texas

  Spirits ran exceptionally high in the days after the election. Unfortunately, for those of us who still drank, the last of Austin’s Raw Deal saloons and chophouses had run its course during Texas’s economic bust of the 1980s. It would have been so fitting if Ann’s electoral career had come full circle in the joint where she was sworn in as county commissioner. One of the Raw Deal partners, the ribald sometime artist Fletcher Boone, had found needed work in the treasurer’s mailroom. Bud suggested that as governor, perhaps Ann could offer him other options. “Dear Gov,” he wrote. “Good morning to the Renaissance! Now that we’ve got one, I’m going to learn how to spell it. . . . How about Fletcher for Wrestling Commission?”

  Ann faxed him back: “Fletcher would be dynamite on the Board of Barber Examiners. No work, some pay. Wrestling Commission, [he] might become embroiled in the dwarf tossing controversy.”

  A week after the election, Ann sent Bud a note remarking that her longtime hairdresser Gail Hewitt had been besieged by requests for interviews and by the scramble for access to the new governor. Asked how she made Ann’s big hair stand up so well, Gail had told Ave Bonar, a photographer, “I rat the tar out of it. Then spray the hell out of it. We defy gravity.” Other calls to the beauty parlor required evasive activity.

  Bud initially accepted the invitation to join Ann and her family at the beach retreat, but then didn’t make it, and she made him pay for it in small ways: “Hi Bud—I found someone to go to the movies. I’ll be home tonight about 8 p.m. or in the morning. The gulls missed you. A.”

  Bud was getting enough intrusions on his routine to make him testy. He was asked to line up Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Johnny Cash, Asleep at the Wheel, and many more musicians for the big blast of an inaugural party; the political folks who passed on these requests obviously knew very little about the minds and habits of musicians. Back in Austin after traveling, he was delivered another order, this one from the comely wife of Jerry Jeff Walker, or Jackie Jack, as Bud nicknamed him. He complained about it amiably to Ann:

  Dear Gov:

  When I returned home I found another assignment from Susan Walker. You know how I love assignments.

  This one is to get you to a boot shop to have your feet measured for some fancy custom-made cowboy boots that are a gift to you from Susan and JJ, Jap and Phyllis, Sally and Bill Wittliff, and Jody [Gent] and me.

  I said, “The one in the boots lost.”

  Susan said, “Don’t be so stupid, the Governor of Texas must have cowboy boots r
eady by inaugural time.” I said I had never seen you wear cowboy boots and doubted if you would want them, though you would no doubt gracefully accept them.

  She said, “Well, these are great boots,” and that I had better ask you, or else. . . . JJ is going to design the boots himself.

  Maybe they’re protection during our dancing things—in case I nail you with a spiked heel.

  On the other hand, what do I know? Except I’m accepting no more assignments, regardless.

  Love, Bud

  Bud was correct; the polite reply went back that Ann would not wear the boots if she had them. (Then again, when she practiced firing a handgun under FBI tutelage, she wore a tight pair of blue jeans and bright red cowboy boots.)

  Days later she got a reasonable request from Bud, and a present, and she began to let go of small squabbles and her insecurity. She addressed her letter to him as if to George Bernard Shaw and signed it “Mrs. Patrick Campbell,” referring to the actress with whom Shaw conducted a forty-year correspondence.

  Dear Mr. G. B. Shaw—

  Who felt safer in print than in person. Of course I’ll call your aged friend—he will go into the teetering stack, and I am wise enough to know that he won’t be the last to get to me through you.

  The mailbox got so full during my absence that they took my mail back to the post office and now delivered it in a huge box. Your silver chain was amongst. I like it better and will give the other back.

  If you will call me, we will discuss Thanksgiving, [going to the play] Greater Tuna, AA, etc. I don’t have time to keep writing.

  Mrs. Patrick Campbell

  During the holidays Gary and Phyllis Cartwright invited Dorothy and me over one evening. As demonstrated by his performance with Willie Nelson on their wedding night, Jap was given to spontaneous bursts of song. On a balcony overlooking the Zócalo, the great square in Mexico City, we once watched him stand like a king or dictator and sing “The Internationale” as a band was playing. This night as Ann and Bud came through the door, Jap waved his arms and sang, “It’s the governor! It’s the governor! It’s the governor!” Dressed to the nines, Ann laughed so hard she nearly tottered into the Christmas tree.

  On Christmas night, Ann and Bud celebrated together; he had received another fax from her that day:

  Bud—A couple of years ago there was a ceremony at the little church on the square in Laredo. It was in honor of an icon that travels to Texas once a year from Mexico. I had a long talk with the Virgen do los Lagos about the governor’s race. Since she made a miracle for me, perhaps she will do the same for you or at least keep you safe from tigers and recovering women.

  Love, Ann

  Mary Beth Rogers whooped with laughter when I asked her how the Richards team had made the transition from politics to governing: “We were so far behind that we hadn’t given much thought to what we’d do if she won.”

  But for nearly two years their minds, memos, and speeches had been drummed full of policy needs and initiatives—they just had realistic doubts that they would ever be in a position to implement those ideas. After the card games and reading and walks on the beach with her family, Ann and her inner circle had gathered in condominiums on South Padre Island. Ann often said, “Sometimes you’d rather set your hair on fire than go to another meeting.” But she was disciplined. The sessions on South Padre were in dead earnest. After all the effort and stunning success, Ann’s team had to deliver.

  Most of the participants in the South Padre sessions were women who had played leading roles in getting her elected, including Jane Hickie, Suzanne Coleman, Pat Cole, Cathy Bonner, and Claire Korioth. Mary Beth led them through flip charts on goal after goal, and when they came back to Austin, she wrote a thirty-day plan. They continued with a series of meetings with state auditors at the office of Jack Martin, whose power, gravitas, and fund-raising mastery had flowed from his close relationship with Lloyd Bentsen. According to Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, on just the third day on South Padre, the subject swung to politics in 1994.

  Jack Martin . . . posed the initial question: Do you plan to run again in four years?

  The implications were clear to everyone in the room. Richards was the first person from the liberal wing of the Democratic party to be elected governor since the early days of the New Deal. . . . Did Richards want to stock the government with her buddies, declare war on business, come out swinging for an income tax, and retire, voluntarily or involuntarily, after four years? Or did she want to govern in a more pragmatic way?

  Her answer was immediate: Yes, she wanted to run for reelection.

  In the last stretch of the campaign against Williams, Ann had started wrapping up her speeches with the promise: “Come January, you and I will meet on the Congress Avenue Bridge. Together, we will march up the avenue arm in arm—and we will take back the Capitol for the people of Texas.”

  From all over the state, thirty thousand people assembled to be a part of that march on the cold, blustery morning of January 15, 1991. The crowd assembled at the south end of a Congress Avenue bridge that would one day be named for her, and then she strode out among them and led a multiethnic throng on a twelve-block hike to the grounds of the Capitol. She walked with her mother; her children; her son-in-law, Kirk; her grandchild, Lily. Back in March, someone had called the Austin Police Department and Southwestern Bell with a threat that Ann was going to be shot. Under the new governor’s white wool coat, state troopers had fitted her with a bulletproof vest. It was a sensible precaution, but it was hard to imagine anyone harboring such dark thoughts that morning.

  The marchers were singing, yelling, and skipping arm in arm. As we passed through downtown, I glanced above the sidewalk at the windows of one of the office towers. White guys in suits and shirtsleeves were looking down and smiling, charmed by the spectacle, willing to give her a chance.

  Hardly anyone who witnessed Ann’s inauguration has any idea of what she said in her speech on the steps of the Capitol. “Welcome to the first day of the New Texas,” she began, “and welcome to the official representatives of thirty-five countries and the governors of the four Mexican border states who have joined us. ¡Bienvenidos, amigos!”

  Her New Texas had begun as an ad man’s lame creation, and on first hearing of the idea, she asked, “What the hell does that mean?” But now she promised that barriers of race, color, gender, and sexual preference would fall away, and that the doors of state government would swing open with opportunity for all. It was going to be a state with clean air and water, good jobs aplenty, help for those in need, and a public education system that enabled all children to attain the full promise of their lives. She wound it up in cadences she employed when she spoke to the congregations of black churches: “And I hope that as we invoke the blessing of God in the questions we must ask, in the words of the old gospel song, may the Lord lift us to higher ground, and that we can be wise enough and strong enough to do what we have set out to do.”

  The speech contained just one concrete proposal—the creation in her office of an ombudsman who would respond to people’s complaints about state government. But Ann’s first speech as governor has not been forgotten because of the vagueness or clichés. No one could hear it. A smart-mouthed woman had come out on top of what was then the most expensive gubernatorial race in the nation’s history, and she was a national figure now, the politician as celebrity. Intent on scooping the image of her ascent to power, one television-news crew ignored its competitors’ restraint and continually hovered in a helicopter over the Capitol’s pink granite dome. The roar and echoed whacking of the rotors was like the opening credits of the sitcom M*A*S*H*, without the bittersweet score.

  Still, anyone who doubted that Texas government had changed would have been convinced by following a group of Ann’s aides into the Sam Houston State Office Building after the speech. Those aides included my wife, Dorothy; I jogged along with them. Their attire ran to jeans, sneakers, and the campaign’s satiny blue and white windbreakers, mode
led on those of the Los Angeles Dodgers. The jabbering crew ran along a corridor to a set of elevators; they were eager to claim their new desks and offices and get started. As the elevator doors opened, they lurched one step forward and then braked. The newly hired Richards staff stood face-to-face with aides of the outgoing governor, Bill Clements. Riding the elevator for the last time as the governor’s staff, Clements’s aides were well-groomed men in suits, all of them white, all carrying briefcases. They took one look at the new crowd in power and blanched. They slipped past without a word, awaiting another election, a new day.

  Bud Shrake and newly elected governor Ann Richards proceed in formal dress between the ranks of an honor guard of National Guardsmen at an inaugural ball, January 1991.

  Ann was not the only Texas politician who made a speech on the Capitol steps that day. The marked distance that Bullock had kept from Ann’s campaign had drawn considerable notice and comment. But when Bullock had come back from his necessary enrollment in drunk school, Ann was the first one to welcome him and counsel him about the new world of sobriety. And that night at the inaugural balls, the new governor and lieutenant governor put on a show that was almost mushy. Ann said of Bullock, “He knows more about government than I could learn in a lifetime,” and he introduced her as “her excellency, Ann Richards, my love.”

  Austin’s downtown hotels had long hosted balls following gubernatorial inaugurations, but the city was not accustomed to seeing the festivities extended into presidential-style galas. People outside the University of Texas’s basketball and concert arena, the Erwin Center, were hawking cotton candy shaped to resemble Ann’s hair. (One could wonder what its namesake Frank Erwin, the late LBJ confidant and onetime drinking pal of Ann, would have thought of all that.) Dolly Parton flew in for the festivities and quipped to a Houston Post reporter, “Ann and I have a lot in common. We both have a heavy load on our shoulders.” Ann looked out at one of the crowds and drawled, “This proves what Mae West said. And that is, too much of a good thing can be wonderful.”