by Jan Reid
Ann had been fascinated by the workings of the Parks and Wildlife Department ever since she was the legislative chief of staff for Sarah Weddington, but for a while, that agency was a pain in the neck for her as governor. Ann was impressed and intrigued by the record of Andy Sansom, who had been director of the Texas Nature Conservancy and then had worked in purchasing parkland for the state agency before becoming its executive director. Andy’s office walls featured photos taken of him with the likes of President Bush; he was a conservationist Republican in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt. “I had never met Governor Richards,” he told me. “I had made some remarks about her appointees that got back to her. She called me in and said, ‘Andy, I like what I hear about the way you’re doing your job. But see, I have this philosophy—you do your job, and I’ll do mine. Your job is to manage that agency to benefit the people, the wildlife, and the parks. My job is to appoint people to boards and commissions. Now if you can live with that arrangement, I think you and I can get along just fine.’”
Unlike most Texas governors, Ann Richards often pressed her legislative agenda in person at hearings of the Senate and House. Here she discusses public education with Mount Pleasant senator Bill Ratliff, at left with glasses. Austin, 1991. Ratliff stunned and disappointed her in her 1994 race for reelection by calling a press conference and denouncing her for allegedly filling her staff with gay activists.
Andy has a ruddy-cheeked, joyous grin. “I had a solid relationship with Ann Richards.”
That spring, Ann appointed to the commission Terry Hershey, a well-heeled conservationist in Houston. In one public hearing, after listening to a staffer rhapsodize about the promoting of trophy hunting in Texas, Hershey said she wished the agency would “cope with hunters rather than encourage them.” All hell broke loose among the legions of Texas hunters; Ann felt she had to go to a meeting of the commission to calm them down. The governor could go overboard in her mastery of old-boy horseshit: “I remember my father taking me down to the Bosque River to set trotlines—blood bait was the bait of choice in those days. And when my father had the opportunity to get on a deer lease, he’d always take me with him, and I remember those times fondly, with the smell of kerosene oil and wet wool jackets and gun oil mixed with tall tales and men’s laughter. Of course, much of my courtship was spent cleaning birds that were taken during outdoor adventures with my future husband. And I might add that I hope to be able to take my limit this year.”
That might have been true, but in David’s many tales about outdoor adventures that I heard, he never mentioned firing a gun at anything. Still, she was an avid bird hunter, especially in dove season, which marked the end of summer. And she occasionally braved cold weather to hunt geese on the coastal plains and pheasant in the Panhandle. Those were great photo ops, with her out there in her camouflage shirt and cap, shouldering a gleaming shotgun.
Prominent friendships came Ann’s way because she had been a leading public figure in Austin for fifteen years before she was governor, and people of national prominence were drawn to the city. The former CIA deputy director Bobby Ray Inman, for example, was one of her supporters. Barbara Jordan became a good friend of Ann’s. She suffered from multiple sclerosis, which shortened her time in Congress, so in 1978 she joined the faculty of the University of Texas’s LBJ School of Public Affairs, where she taught courses in ethics and political values. (This was fitting, since Johnson had been one of her early supporters.) Ann appointed Jordan as her ethics adviser as soon as she was elected, and they became close. They were a whooping and commanding courtside presence during years when the University of Texas’s Lady Longhorn basketball team was a national power. Ann told a story about going out to the house that Jordan and her partner, Nancy Earl, had bought on Onion Creek. The property was a beautiful hideaway on the southern outskirts of Austin. They walked and talked, getting away from it all. Jordan walked with difficulty, and one day on encountering an obstruction that a neighbor had put on her path through the woods, she fumed that it was nothing but racism and meanness. Another time, Ann said, they walked past the same spot, and she asked Jordan what happened in her trouble with that neighbor. “Well,” she said in her magisterial voice, “that old man got sick, and he was old and weak. And so he died.” She left a pause, then added, “And went to hell.”
Ann’s second major priority was ethics reform. But on this, she found that she could not just hold forth and expect the world to applaud. Ann and Bob Bullock wanted to create an ethics commission that would be independent of the legislature, that would advise lawmakers on proper behavior, and that would have investigative power. Ann presented a thirteen-point plan, but she wound up supporting a bill and proposed constitutional amendment authored by the Stephenville senator Bob Glasgow, who had taken the lead in busting Karl Rove. House conferees balked at several of the ethics bill’s provisions, and the wrangling dragged on throughout the session. One major sticking point was House members’ rejection of any cap on lobbyists’ expenditures. Ann said she would veto any bill that did not have teeth, and tempers flared as no agreement was reached.
Ann’s warning that she would immediately call them back in session if they did not send her a bill that she could sign heightened the pressure. At one point, Glasgow erupted at the governor, accusing her of hanging him “out to dry” by retreating on critical language defining bribery. The negotiators finally agreed that to make a bribery case, prosecutors had to present direct evidence—eyewitnesses, videotape, or voice recordings.
Bullock had reservations about the ethics bill, which came in just under the wire. Several of Ann’s demands, such as requiring lawmakers to disclose their sources of income, were lost in the bargaining. But she said, “I take a lot of heart in having passed what is really progressive ethics legislation.” Then she was blindsided by another member of her own party.
Though Ronnie Earle’s wife, Twila Hugley, had drafted correspondence for Ann at the Treasury, and his daughter Elizabeth Earle was my wife’s assistant in the governor’s office for several months, Ann’s testy relationship with the Travis County district attorney went back to her days as a county commissioner. Ronnie had grown up on a cattle ranch near Birdville (present-day Haltom City), outside Fort Worth. He played high school football with some distinction and was an Eagle Scout. After graduating from the University of Texas Law School, Earle was elected a municipal judge, and then served two terms in the Texas House in the seventies. He got along well with the conservative Democratic governor Dolph Briscoe, who supported his drive to free convicts who were serving insanely long sentences over minor marijuana convictions. That played well with Austin voters in the heyday of Mad Dog, Inc., and the Armadillo World Headquarters, and in an upset Ronnie was elected Travis County’s district attorney in 1976, the same year that Ann was elected to the commissioners’ court.
In the wake of the Sharpstown scandal, Briscoe supported Earle’s founding of the Public Integrity Unit, which expanded his office’s jurisdiction over offenses by state officials that might or might not have transpired wholly in Travis County. The legislature began funding it in 1982. Ronnie was a quirky Democrat and policy wonk who once prosecuted himself for missing a finance reporting deadline by one day; he pleaded guilty and paid a $212 fine. In large part, Ann owed her election as state treasurer in 1982 to the Public Integrity Unit’s takedown of Warren Harding. Ronnie and Ann had plenty of things in common, but he once told me: “I don’t think she liked me much until she quit drinking.”
But that had been ten years before, and their most heated crossing of swords came at the end of the first legislative session when she was governor. In the first week of June 1991, after the ethics bill’s passage, Ronnie wrote the governor and the members of the House and Senate a letter that bluntly challenged her and was at once made public.
Dear Gov. Richards:
The purpose of this letter is to provide you with an analysis of the ethics bill from the perspective of those whose job it is to enforce th
e ethics law.
The most volatile issue concerning the subject of ethics is the gap between public expectations and reality. The result of that gap is a media bonanza, because conduct taken for granted in the capital community frequently is shocking to the public and is therefore news.
That is the primary reason for an ethics commission: to provide a fresh perspective from outside the capital community on the behavior of public officials.
Not only does the ethics commission created both by this bill and by the constitutional amendment not provide for a public perspective, it aggressively keeps outsiders’ comments out by giving the legislature a way to silence complaints.
The legislature gets to hand-pick who will be considered for appointment to the commission, which then gets to punish those who file what the commission decides are “frivolous” complaints. Who would be willing to raise an issue in the face of a $10,000 fine? It is a standing threat to anyone who dares question the ethics of a member of the legislature.
. . . I strongly advocated creation of an ethics commission for years, but this is not an ethics commission. It is a new rug to sweep things under.
. . . Offering this analysis to you and to the public is not a pleasant duty, for I know how much you believe in effective ethics legislation and how hard you worked for passage of this bill. But after close and careful reading it is my opinion that this legislation is not in the best interest of the public.
It has been suggested that its problems can be fixed (if those who wrote it are given another chance in a special session). Maybe so, but that is a gamble with the public trust. It will require all of our best efforts to keep ethics legislation from becoming a cynical hoax.
Sincerely,
Ronald Earle
His most serious complaint was that the bill would make it practically impossible to prosecute lawmakers who took bribes or those who offered them as long as the money was reported as a campaign contribution.
The governor was furious, and with characteristic sarcasm she fired back the same day.
Dear Mr. District Attorney:
Your letter concerning the ethics bill is interesting in several respects, but after reading it carefully, I am left with the feeling that there is no ethics legislation known to government that would satisfy your requirements. In examining your letter, it seems to me that the only ethics commission that would pass muster is one that descended from the heavens, with the angels singing. In response to your concern about how members of the ethics commission are to be selected, let me pose a question: How can they be chosen without politics being involved?
If the commission members were picked by the governor and subject to Senate confirmation, would you also consider them “hand-picked”? Shall we elect them? If so, then elected politicians are the commissioners . . .
I was fascinated by your suggestion that there is something wrong with doing the initial stages of an investigation in secrecy—particularly from such a strong advocate of the secret grand jury process. An ethics commission needs secrecy at the initial stage of an investigation for the same reasons a grand jury does—to ensure protection of the innocent, due process, and to allow a full examination to determine if serious charges are warranted.
Frankly, the critique of the bill is much like the woodsman standing with his nose pressed against the tree bark, unable to see the forest . . .
I am sure that your letter was meant to be constructive and I appreciate that. We all acknowledge that there are matters in the bill that should be addressed in a special session, once the questions about the budget and government consolidation have been completed.
Like any other complex legislation there will continue to be future activity on this bill in the legislature, and by the ethics commission itself as it begins initiating policy.
We both know that neither this legislation nor any action by the ethics commission will supplant the activities of the District Attorney of Travis County.
Sincerely, Ann
For all her indignation at having her legislative integrity questioned by a local prosecutor, this was a problem for Ann. She regained some footing and leverage by calling on the moral authority of her friend Barbara Jordan, but Jordan’s statement of support was quite measured: “On a continuum of ethics reform, the bill is a good place to start. It is not what I would have written, but I believe that, on the balance, it is a worthy effort.”
As it happened, on that day of dueling letters with Ronnie Earle, she was scheduled to go to her hometown of Waco and address the annual reunion of the Texas Rangers, whose museum is located there. The Rangers had evolved from being paramilitary fighters of Comanches and borderland bandidos to ranking as the state’s elite force of uniformed criminal investigators, a branch within the Department of Public Safety. In districts that covered multiple counties, they were called in to help investigate crimes that local authorities found too hot to handle. They were prized in many quarters as Texas’s Stetson-wearing equivalents of the FBI. Ann was fully aware, too, of the Rangers’ history of lynching and other acts of brutality during the Rio Grande border scrapes around 1900, and as intimidators when John Connally tried to halt the peaceful march on Austin of farmworkers from the Valley.
Her speech didn’t dwell on those things, of course. She began by reminding them of questions Rangers had to answer in the old days: “‘Can you shoot? Can you ride? Can you cook?’ Those were the criteria of Texas Rangers a hundred and fifty years ago.” She chuckled with the men and their wives and went on with self-assurance: “I’m pleased that retired senior Ranger Captain Clint Peoples, now in Waco after a long and distinguished career, is with us. I heard a rumor that this is the very same Clint Peoples who said during the governor’s race last year that he would never support a ‘petticoat governor.’ It’s good to see you, Clint.”
Governor Ann Richards and Lieutenant Governor Bob Bullock strike a telling pose that signals the deterioration of their relationship during the second half of her term.
CHAPTER 23
Odd Couples
Ann said she had no social life after she took office as governor. An Associated Press story on her first hundred days reported that she carried two hours’ worth of paperwork to the Mansion every night, and according to her staff, she worked forty days straight between February and March 1991. “I try hard once a week to do something I think is fun,” she told the reporter, “like go to the horse races, or go to a basketball game, or go to a movie, or something that’s just what normal people do.”
But she exaggerated that claim of her life being all work. At a movie matinee one Sunday, Dorothy and I saw Bud and the governor looking very much like normal people in the lobby. They were chomping handfuls of popcorn amid folks whose expressions ranged from startled to dazzled.
“How are you?” Ann greeted the ones who overcame their shyness and came up to have a word with her. She said it in a way that seemed to make them think she was raptly interested in their answers. Perhaps she was.
Yet in real ways, she had surrendered much of her freedom and privacy. She said that, at first, on Sunday mornings she would put on her bathrobe and slip outside through the Mansion grounds to get the newspapers, as she always had in her private houses. But one time when she did that, this man just appeared, looking like a derelict and talking nonstop, apparently with a gear loose. “All right, I’m going to have to have some security,” she conceded.
The Governor’s Mansion (which would be almost destroyed by an arsonist’s fire in 2008) was ornate and gleaming—a tribute to nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century southern style. The bed she slept in had been passed down from Sam Houston, the George Washington of Texas. But Ann was not a captive of the place. She brought to the showpiece residence her own wry touches. While interviewing Ann there, Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka encountered a green parrot first on top of its open cage, then hanging upside down, pecking at the bars. Ann told him, “That’s Gracie. It’s short for Amazing Grace.” The rear st
airs passed under a large print of an alleged quotation from Richard King, the frontier patriarch of the King Ranch: “People who come to Texas these days are preachers, or fugitives from justice, or sons of bitches. Which one fits you?”
In their communiqués by fax, Bud often added updates or gossip about Austin friends she didn’t see much anymore. One concerned Jim “Lopez” Smitham, one of the partners of the late and lamented Raw Deals. “Lopez has a beautiful beard and Kerouac scowl—lost in the 50s, his favorite era. Maybe we should open a coffee house for poets and angry novelists. I could get angry myself, if I don’t watch it.”
He may have been referring to his roller-coaster ride as a screenwriter. As Ann was launching her gubernatorial campaign, he wrote her one day:
I think I’ve taken about all the bites out of Hollywood I can swallow. And probably vice versa. If you have a nice bank you’d like to have me run, please call. I wouldn’t make foolish energy and construction loans. I’d give the money to Jap, so it stays in circulation.
Sorry I missed seeing you. Know any rich good-natured women* who’d like to take care of me?
*Or guy. This is the ’90s already, isn’t it?
But then the movie business served up a break. In the early seventies, Bud and Jap Cartwright had written a screenplay they called RIP. The central character was a Texas Ranger; the script drew on material they had observed or heard about during their crime-beat days in Fort Worth. It was often optioned, but they were turned down by one production company because the script contained a scene in which the Ranger got a confession out of a prisoner by “taking him for a ride.” A studio executive said, “Nobody would believe that, not even in Texas.” Was he being ironic? They shrugged and went their way, having learned not to brood too much over Movieland after the experience with Cliff Robertson as their convict bull rider.