by Jan Reid
That night, Ann wore a floor-length rose-colored gown designed by the Texan Michael Casey. Bud Shrake was comfortable in a tux, but ever since she had won the election, he had feared he couldn’t do a passable waltz. They took to the dance floor at the first ball, flanked by squads of young soldiers in dress whites who were holding sabers pointed upward at their jaws in a stance of utmost attention. Bud said that when she looked up and moved in his arms, it was like they had been waltzing together all their lives.
Ann declared that the former Flying Punzar, Jerry Jeff Walker, performed her favorite act of the night. He and the Lost Gonzo Band brought down the house by singing and playing Ray Wylie Hubbard’s anthem of the cosmic cowboy seventies, “Up Against the Wall, Redneck Mother.”
The rebels and Mad Dogs were winners at last.
Proud parents: Cecil and Iona Willis at the time of their daughter’s election as governor of Texas.
CHAPTER 21
Fast Start
“The amazing thing about Ann’s election,” mused her former husband, David Richards, “is that it could have happened at all. It wasn’t like she had been patiently working her way up through the Yarborough liberal wing or any other faction of the party.” Politically, the word “liberal” was now almost a curse word in Texas; electoral power was swinging fast toward the conservative wing of the Republican Party, which had been a boutique gathering thirty-five years earlier. President Lyndon Johnson is often quoted for his belief that by signing the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, he had delivered the South to the Republican Party for a generation. But in his home state of Texas, perhaps, the election of Ann Richards as governor had called that into question. The pragmatist governor that Paul Burka and other centrist pundits raised as a standard was always LBJ’s understudy, John Connally. Ann was not going to go down the path of that snob and strikebreaker, but Connally epitomized another truth about the governor’s office: those who delivered on their promises were ones who used personal charisma to its best advantage. Though it had been bludgeoned almost out of sight by the brawls on the campaign trail, Ann did have that going for her.
And she had plans to turn Texas government on its head. Ann and her team wanted to do it with the staff they were recruiting, and they also knew that the governor’s power to make appointments belied the conventional wisdom that it was mostly a ceremonial office. They wanted to consolidate the byzantine boards and commissions, and they wanted to enforce the changes they desired by eliminating the staggered terms of those officials. This part of the agenda was nothing new; the system stymied all governors in their first terms by making them play tug-of-war with agency heads who owed their appointments and loyalties to a predecessor.
As her team was being put together, areas of responsibility and top management were assigned to women who had driven her campaign. Mary Beth would again be her chief of staff, and Suzanne Coleman continued to be the indispensable lead speechwriter. Jane Hickie took initial charge of appointments, and Claire Korioth managed the transition. Susan Rieff was a skillful environmental specialist who had backed out of a job she had accepted on the staff of Bob Bullock so she could work for Ann. It was no coincidence that he gave her almost continual grief. Pat Cole oversaw social services, Sonia Hernandez took the lead on education, and Cathy Bonner was assigned to find ways to clean up a junket-crazed Department of Commerce that had spun out of control under Clements.
Annette LoVoi and Rebecca Lightsey had worked for a nonprofit consumer protection organization during the campaign (and their embrace of Ann’s candidacy infuriated Jim Mattox, who had made consumer rights a hallmark of his time as attorney general). Annette’s job was to analyze and respond to citizen complaints, launch investigations when necessary, and focus particular attention on problems that had arisen concerning the Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission and the regulation of nursing homes. She was soon fielding two hundred gripes about state government a week. Rebecca came aboard as assistant general counsel charged with helping reform the state’s insurance industry. She had testified several times before the insurance commission and offered some sharp remarks about its operation, so the hiring of a consumer advocate sent a jolt of alarm through the board and an agency that for decades had agreed to whatever the insurance companies wanted. She found herself immersed in disagreements related to car insurance rates and policy cancellations, the safety of railroad crossings, and allegations of child abuse and unpaid child support.
Joy Anderson was deputy chief of staff, again employing her legislative skills and also working with Nancy Kohler to keep the governor’s scheduling manageable and efficient. Mary Beth told Dorothy they wanted her to serve as deputy director of the Criminal Justice Division of the governor’s office. Former cops prominently staffed that clannish outfit. Millions of dollars flowed through it in the form of federal grants for law enforcement and the war on drugs. Narcotics task forces that crossed county lines and local jurisdictions were funded by such grants, and were always skirting some kind of trouble. Ann and Mary Beth told Dorothy they wanted someone who would keep close tabs on all that money. And they took pleasure in the prospect of those hard-bitten ex-cops reading the resumé of this new superior and discovering that for several years she had been employed by a branch of the American Civil Liberties Union.
The coterie of impassioned women was no welcome sight to the old-boy types who had long ruled the legislature and the lobby. But there were plenty of able men on Ann’s team. Her press secretary, Bill Cryer, and the financial whiz Paul Williams came over from the Treasury and assumed important roles in Ann’s inner circle. Williams would later serve as one of Ann’s chiefs of staff. The governor’s legislative director was traditionally a former legislator; that job first went to Jim Parker, a genial fellow from West Texas. Dave Talbot, the general counsel, was a droll black man who had practiced law for the state his whole career. Bill Ramsey was a gay-rights activist who had performed yeoman’s service in lining up political support for Ann in metropolitan Houston, and he became one of her favorites—she trusted him to make sure her office attended to the needs of legislators whom they wanted to keep happy.
Ann’s style of matching individual talents with staff needs was intuitive and unconventional. One political insider complained to me that no one in her administration was really vetted. Richard Moya, Austin’s pioneering Hispanic politician and her friend and ally on the Travis County Commissioners’ Court, had left government for a while and helped start a housing development company. The economic crash of the eighties drove him out of that business, and he took a job on the staff of Jim Hightower. He later recalled the circumstances of his hiring by Ann: “She called me one day when she was treasurer and asked me why I was over there working for Jim. She sounded kind of irritated. I said, ‘Well, Ann, I needed a job.’ She said, ‘Okay, if something like that ever comes up again, I wish you’d call me.’
“Election night in ’90 I was in the wrong ballroom at the Hyatt. Jim was losing to Rick Perry, and it was real gloomy in there. I was wondering what the hell I was going to do after the first of the year. Then after a few days Bill Cryer got in touch with me and said she was going to be calling. She said, ‘What are your plans?’ I told her I was just looking for a job. She said, ‘Well, stop looking. I’ll hire you.’ That was about as formal as it got.”
Moya was one of the deputy chiefs of staff working within the policy council headed by Susan Rieff. In the early days, Mary Beth issued orders about firings that were deemed necessary; later, Moya gained a reputation as Ann’s hatchet man. He was also her guide concerning the politics of regions stamped by their proximity to, and shared ethnicity with, Mexico. “Whenever she was going to San Antonio, El Paso, anything along the border, I’d go with her,” he told me. “She liked to go to the dog tracks, and we attended some great pachangas”—Hispanic barbecues that mixed politics with music and booze, the latter of which they had to decline. “I’d quit drinking by then, like her. But it was a lot of fun trave
ling with her. One time we were in the Valley, and she had a meeting with some officials on the other side. She always had a couple of state troopers with her. They were still packing heat. I told ’em, ‘Guys, you can’t be coming over here with guns.’” That prohibition against American guns, which is hugely ignored by smugglers, is in the nation’s constitution and is posted at every border crossing. He lectured the troopers, “This is Mexico!”
Ann knew she had to move fast in order to succeed. Her hires and appointments and policy initiatives were full of political dimensions, calculations, hunches, wagers—they had to be. Two days after the inauguration, she spoke at the swearing-in of John Hannah, her secretary of state, who was a former U.S. Attorney, three-term member of the legislature, and loser of the fierce 1982 attorney general race against Jim Mattox. Ann said that his principal task would be to help craft her ethics legislation.
A week later, she appeared at the Capitol swearing-in of Lena Guerrero, whom she had appointed to a vacant seat on the Railroad Commission. Guerrero had been a first-rate legislator, and no one could fault her quick study and her incisive votes regarding regulation of the oil and gas industry, pipeline safety, and the like.
The day after Guerrero’s swearing-in, Ann was back at the Capitol in support of her nominees to the Texas Board of Criminal Justice. The one who caused the most stir was Ellen Halbert. In 1986, a man had broken into her Austin home, concealed himself in her attic all night, and then attacked her when her family was gone the next morning. In riveting testimony to the legislature, she had described the horror of her experience: “I remember the thoughts that went through my mind: ‘Oh, God, please let this be a nightmare. Well, it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real life. Through the next hour and a half I was raped, stabbed four times, beaten in the head with a hammer so many times [the doctors] were unable to tell how many, but they think probably eight to ten times.” Ann couldn’t have stressed more strongly her approach to violent crime than by making this well-spoken advocate of victims’ rights the face and voice of her penal authority.
Ann also introduced at that press conference Halbert’s fellow appointees: Josh Allen, a black contractor from Beaumont, and Selden Hale, an Amarillo defense lawyer and her new chairman of the prison board. Selden was a good friend of mine. The press release identified him as a former chairman of the Potter County Republican Party and a member of the National Rifle Association. That was true. But it was also a feint to the press, the legislature, and the public. Selden was reviled in some Amarillo quarters for defending in court a vicious and nutty criminal known in that locale as “the Nun Killer.” When I met Selden, he was a cooperating pro bono attorney for the ACLU and a member of the NAACP. His wife, Claudia Stravato, was a senior aide to Bob Bullock. Selden enjoyed his maverick reputation in Amarillo; he often jogged his saddle mule down their street, past the houses of neighbors who included T. Boone Pickens.
Ann chose Selden in part because she trusted him to be her advocate in an attempt to settle a federal lawsuit that for years had resulted in the prison system being under the control of the federal judiciary. In 1972, a thief and self-proclaimed writ writer named David Ruiz had alleged that by measures of violence, overcrowding, and indifferent medical care, his incarceration in Texas amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. (The term “writ writer” refers to lawsuits written by hand.) Other inmates and President Carter’s Justice Department joined a class action suit, Ruiz v. Estelle, and in 1980 the plaintiffs won. While appeals dragged on without resolution, the East Texas federal judge William Wayne Justice effectively ran the Texas prison system. Bill Clements’s officials had spoken about giving criminals long hard sentences, but in order to comply with the overcrowding formulas set up under Justice’s watch, many of those criminals were being quietly released through early “backdoor” paroles. The state also allowed felons to sit for months in county jails instead of bringing them promptly into the prison system after their convictions. County commissioners and sheriffs were in an uproar over the cost of feeding and doctoring them and protecting them from one another. Harris County took the lead in suing the state over the logjam of prisoners. No issue was more important to Ann than resolving those suits and correcting the situations that had caused them.
Ann Richards and the Amarillo defense attorney Selden Hale, whom she will appoint to chair the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, strike a hunting pose in the Panhandle during the 1990 race for governor.
Selden giggled in telling me the story about his escorting the new governor on a tour of Amarillo’s maximum-security prison: “There was a big sign over the main gate that said: ‘No Hostages Will Be Allowed Beyond This Point.’ What it meant was that convicts trying to escape should not bother attempting to force their way out behind a shield of hostages. They would get the hell shot out of them if they tried it, hostages or no hostages.
“Ann took great exception to that sign. She told the warden, ‘I want that taken down. Now.’ After she left, phones in wardens’ offices were ringing and teletypes were clacking all over the state. ‘She said that? She really did?’”
Another early hire arrived because of Hightower’s defeat. Joe Holley was a journalist who had grown friendly with Ann when he was editor of the Texas Observer. Ann liked him because of complimentary things he wrote about her during her initial term as treasurer, and because he hailed from the same Lakeview outskirts of Waco where she had spent her first years. They spoke the same dialect, knew many of the same hometown stories. During the eighties, Joe had gone to California as an editorial-page director for a newspaper in San Diego. He managed a move back to Austin by landing a job with Jim Hightower, expecting that he would be writing press releases and research papers for the agriculture commissioner. But then Hightower lost his race to Rick Perry. Joe was wondering what lay in store for him when Bill Cryer and Dale Craymer, an ace budget analyst and another one of Ann’s senior aides, asked whether he would be willing to digest her varied position papers and work them into a single document. He went off with a thick bundle of papers and delivered a tome that thrilled Ann and Mary Beth. They titled it Blueprint for the New Texas. The document contained sections on eighty-two priorities.
Weeks later, the governor had Joe Holley working on the most important speech she had made since the keynote two years earlier. And this one was not show business. Texas was a mess, just as measured by the daunting lawsuits it faced. In addition to the prison court cases, Texas faced an uphill fight in another suit filed over reductions of payments to hospitals through its $2 billion Medicaid program. And just a week after Ann’s inauguration, the state’s supreme court held that the method of funding the public schools was unconstitutional.
“Ann liked the Blueprint for the New Texas,” Joe said, “and she asked me, ‘Can you make this into a State of the State speech?’ So I took it home and made it into a speech. I’d never written a speech for anyone before. But as I typed, I heard that voice. It was the voice I’d heard all my life—not just the Ann Richards voice, the Waco voice. It’s something different from the East or West Texas manner of speaking. Central Texas, I guess. I swear I could hear it through my fingers as I wrote it. I gave it to her and her staff. There was a lot of stuff to add, and I was concerned that it was getting unwieldy. Suzanne Coleman and I were working on it right up to the last ten or fifteen minutes before Ann went out to make the speech. And then I was mesmerized by how this woman could take those words and make them connect.”
The new governor delivered a stinging, ambitious, bravura performance in her first State of the State address to the legislature. She began with an assertion that she would take her progressive cues from the revered Father of Texas.
In 1841, when Sam Houston took the oath of office for his second term as President of the Republic, the frontier was still a dangerous place, only three or four towns had a population of more than a thousand—and Texans were in the midst of a gnawing recession. In his inaugural address, Houston faced the unhappy duty of infor
ming Congress that the cupboard was bare; there was not one dollar in the treasury. Listen to what he told them: “Patriotism, industry, and enterprise,” he said, “are now our only resources.” . . .
We will not sit back and let crisis overwhelm us. We will not wait until prodded by court order.
We will be active, alert—as even the most conservative businessperson is alert, on the lookout for opportunities to make the business of government work better.
Texans will know that the reins of government are in the hands of officials ready to make the difficult decisions they were sent to Austin to make. They will see us making changes that should have been made a long time ago.
Those lines brought the first burst of applause. Then she bluntly shared her opinion of what Texans thought of their government and its officials.
They are suspicious about our motives, yours and mine. They are distressed about the seductive smell of money in the political process and the influence of narrow special interests. Sit in a barbershop some afternoon or on the stool of a small-town drugstore counter and listen to what the people say.
They hate the bureaucracy. They come to Austin looking for answers, for help, and what they get is the runaround. They get bounced from one office to another until their eyes blur and their feet give out. That is going to stop.
The chamber resounded with more applause and a few hurrahs. She said that the boards and commissions would no longer be allowed to go their independent ways. Chairs of boards and commissions would meet regularly with her as an Executive Council. By audacious fiat, she was pledging to transform the wide-ranging authorities into a real cabinet system of government. In this New Texas, she said, her appointees and staff would be guided by principles of public service and ethics, not personal gain, and would be sworn to eliminate inefficiency and waste.