Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  A young man who worked on the communications team—and for professional reasons preferred to remain unnamed here—winced at the memory of a day when he was supposed to fax three sets of briefing papers to Ann regarding an engagement in San Angelo. To his horror and the joy of the people who received the fax, he had punched in the number of the Houston Chronicle; the next morning, the paper ran the story with much humor. The aide was scheduled to travel with her, and she didn’t have to say anything, just give him the look. Bill Cryer and Chuck McDonald put their hands on his shoulders and welcomed him to the club.

  He marveled at the teamwork of Ann and Suzanne Coleman. “Suzanne was so close to Ann,” he told Shawn. “She really was the quiet partner. She was well educated, and was a voracious reader with huge intellect. Ann also had the intellect, and she was a great storyteller, a precise political thinker, and a pragmatic political thinker. Their combo was incredible. But there weren’t too many times when Suzanne would get good feedback.”

  He noted that for all her faults: “Only Ann could do what she did with such authentic Texas experience. Going hunting, canning food—only she could have created this kind of change, combining her Texas experience with her progressive core values. That wouldn’t have had a chance of working if she weren’t as true to Texas as she was. She could disarm people.”

  But there were currents of staff dissent. “During one of the more publicized death penalty cases,” Shawn Morris said, “everyone was writing to the governor. David Talbot’s office was inundated with mail.” But the execution went forward. “That was one of the things that seemed to be counterintuitive to her progressive status. I would be out protesting on the Capitol steps, and the next day I’d come to work in the office. It seemed like it was expected that we all would feel like protesting the death penalty. No one felt too strongly in favor of it, I’m sure of that.”

  Still, Shawn and others were caught up in the sheer exhilaration. One day, all the talk at the Capitol was about politics. President George Bush’s seemingly overwhelming popularity after the First Gulf War was vanishing with the sucking sound that the Texas billionaire Ross Perot ascribed to the loss of American jobs overseas. The little Texan with the gleaming crew cut, bent nose, and whinnying voice and laugh was offering himself as an independent candidate for president. Perot intrigued the public; he was climbing fast in the polls and getting a largely free ride in the press. And a strong showing in the New Hampshire primary by a nativist opponent in Bush’s own party, Pat Buchanan, added to the president’s difficulties. On the grounds of who was more conservative and alarmed by deteriorating American culture, the former Nixon speechwriter got 38 percent to Bush’s anemic 53 percent.

  One day in early 1992, Garry Mauro urged me to come over to his political office and meet his friend of twenty years, Hillary Clinton. I told him that I was then leaning to support Nebraska’s senator Bob Kerrey. “Oh, that’s all right,” Garry said. “Come on over anyway.” At the small reception, he embarrassed me thoroughly in our introduction by telling her what I had told him—I was interested in Bill Clinton’s candidacy, but at the moment I was supporting Kerrey. “Well,” she said, “we’ll have to take care of that.” And they did. In a very few weeks, Kerrey had been bulldozed out of the race.

  A short time after Hillary’s pass through Austin, tall Bill Clinton strolled into the Capitol. “We were talking about him,” Shawn Morris recalled. “He seemed to come out of nowhere because everyone was so focused on Perot and Bush. Clinton gave an incredible speech to the Texas Senate about the out-of-work guy. We were all floored. Jesse Jackson was also running and was here at the same time. Some of us on the governor’s staff were giving him a tour, and under the Capitol dome he was signing autographs when Bill Clinton tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Can I say hi to the Reverend?’ Suddenly the photographers came running, and Hillary and I were shoved together so hard our heads bumped. She was no passive wallflower. She snapped, ‘Excuse me!’ to one of them. It was one of the most profound moments of my time working for Ann.”

  Arkansas governor and Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton greets Ann and her daughter Ellen on his campaign jet. Hillary Rodham Clinton is likely the woman in the foreground. Note the sticker on the luggage compartment stating that President “Bush Couldn’t Run a Laundromat.”

  On May 1, 1992, the nation was transfixed and horrified by three days of rioting and violence that erupted in Southern California after the acquittal of four white Los Angeles police officers who had been videotaped beating and kicking a black man named Rodney King with the apparent intention of killing him, or at best leaving him in intensive care. The verdict had been rendered in Simi Valley, a Ventura County town whose residents were so white, conservative, and prosperous that it had been chosen as the site of Ronald Reagan’s presidential library. The three days of rioting, looting, and arson in Los Angeles resulted in more than 50 deaths, some 2,000 injuries, anywhere from 7,000 to 18,000 arrests (accounts vary wildly), and $1 billion in property damage.

  But it was not just that these horrid events occurred. In seventeen incredible and electrifying months in 1990 and 1991, the United States and the world had lurched into a new age of constant, real-time television with CNN’s coverage of the air assault on Baghdad in the First Gulf War and the collapse of the Soviet empire. The savage violence and burning buildings in LA held America in thrall even more than the King videotape had. The image that dominated the news and stirred the conscience and anger of America captured an attack on a white truck driver named Reginald Denny, who drove his eighteen-wheeler into Inglewood, southwest of downtown LA, unaware of the riots there. As television news helicopters hovered close overhead, four black youths hauled Denny out of his truck and battered him with a five-pound piece of medical equipment and a claw hammer. A former star high school athlete called Damian “Football” Williams hurled a slab of concrete at the head of the defenseless man and then for the crew and cameras of the Los Angeles News Service chopper flashed some signs of his gang, the Eight Tray Gangster Crips. He laughed and pointed at the unconscious truck driver and then performed a ghastly dance, like some gridiron showboat who had just scored a touchdown.

  Against that backdrop, the political and governmental network C-SPAN prepared to cover a celebrity roast of Texas governor Ann Richards in Port Arthur. The Texas native and CBS anchor Dan Rather had promised to emcee the roast, but the explosive events in California obliged him to cancel. That afternoon at the Beaumont–Port Arthur airport, Ann announced at a press conference that she was endorsing her friend Bill Clinton in his bid for the presidency. From the White House, President George H. W. Bush was calling for decency and calm in a speech to the nation. And at the request of the networks and the Democratic National Committee, Clinton, the putative front-runner, had been asked to add a short speech after the president spoke.

  The roast had become a major source of revenue for civic and charitable projects since Ann had appeared at the one honoring football coach Bum Phillips in 1989, and she had come back each year since. To accommodate the networks, Clinton and his wife, Hillary, had to leave the event early. Rather’s substitute emcee, a jocular county judge, set aside a pastor’s invocation so the young governor could say his piece. Clinton offered a joke in reference to Phillips and the Golden Triangle’s veteran congressman Jack Brooks: “Brooks brought Bum to Washington last month. Somebody from Texas said, ‘Hey, Bum!’ And three hundred congressmen turned around.” He said Ann and Lena Guerrero were “the Thelma and Louise of Texas politics.” (It left to the audience’s imagination the movie’s closing scene, in which the runaway women drive their convertible off a cliff.)

  Molly Ivins was then writing nationally syndicated columns for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, many of which were collected in a series of best-selling books. Clinton turned to Molly, who was seated at the speakers’ table, and made fun of himself and his up-and-down campaign, which had nearly been sunk by a parade of women alleging that he was giv
en to lascivious extramarital behavior. “You know what Molly does, don’t you? She’s in the business of trying to make politicians look silly. I’ve devoted my campaign to trying to eliminate the middleman.” But he changed the tone then and with considerable eloquence echoed Ann’s call at the airport that day for a renewal of bonds of common humanity, in light of the horrors in Southern California.

  On videotape, Rather delivered a herky-jerky and heavily scripted performance of himself parodying Clinton’s aspirations for the presidency in 1992. Bum Phillips then took his turn. Bum had been the most popular man in Houston when the Oilers’ owner, Bud Adams, fired him twelve years earlier, and though his next coaching stint, with the New Orleans Saints, had turned out just so-so—at one point, a disaffected fan in the stands dumped a cup of beer on his head—he commanded an affection among Texans that the Cowboys’ owner, Jerry Jones, and the team’s coach, Jimmy Johnson, who were in the audience, could never match, despite their march to two winning Super Bowls. Bum said, “Godamighty, I’m gonna tell you one thing, we’re gonna slow it down a little bit. All these people going ‘yap, yap, yap, yap.’” He paused, then said, “It’s hell to get old, you know? Everything that works, hurts. And everything that don’t hurt, don’t work.” The crowd laughed at the mild sexual innuendo. He went on: “So far, I haven’t said anything bad about the governor, so if I say something that offends you, I am damn proud of it. When I was young, I wanted to be the governor. . . . I had all the qualifications—I drank, I gambled, I chased women. . . . But then my mom made me go to school, and I was overqualified. . . . We have got a woman governor now and they tell me next thing we are going to have is women playing football. But I don’t believe that, because I don’t believe you could ever get forty-five women to go out in front of 125,000 people dressed just alike.”

  Ann, in a lavender dress and pearl necklace, was seated next to the podium. Her cackle carried through the microphone like the sound of someone having a fine time. Phillips spoke about the repetitive corniness of the roast phenomenon, and his great love of Texas, and then he said, “I’m damn glad Ann Richards is my governor. And I wanted to tell her so.”

  Then the county judge introduced Molly with a joke that fell flat, and he mangled the title of her book. “Gosh, thank you, Judge,” she said wryly. “Of all the introductions I’ve ever had, that one was the most . . . recent.” As it happened, Molly also wore lavender—a suit coat over a white sweater with a string of pearls. Molly was a prepossessing woman. She looked almost as tall and broad-shouldered as Bum Phillips. After some good-natured gibes at other speakers, she said, “Of course we’re here to salute Ann Richards. I’ve known Ann Richards since Ann and Exxon were still Humble.” Ann hooted and rocked forward in her chair.

  “Sometimes people ask me what she was like in the old days. Just like she is now. I remember several years ago there was a political do at the Scholz beer garden in Austin, Texas, and everybody in political Texas was just meetin’ and drinkin’ at a furious pace. And about halfway through it, a few of us got a little tired of meetin’ and went to lean our butts against a table in the Scholz beer garden, kinda like birds in a row: Bob Bullock, who was then the state comptroller; myself; and a black guy named Charlie Myles, who was then the head of Bob’s personnel department—the reason Bob had such a good record of minority hiring; and Miz Ann Richards, then utterly obscure, a mere county commissioner.

  “Bullock having spent thirty years in Texas politics knew every no-good son of a bitch in the entire state. And some dreadful racist judge from East Texas came up and said, ‘Bob, my boy, how you?’ And they commenced to slap each other on the back and have a big greeting. Bullock said, ‘Judge, I want you to meet my friends. This is Molly Ivins with the Texas Observer.’ The judge peered up at me and said, ‘How you, little lady?’ Bob said, ‘And this is Charlie Myles, the head of my personnel office.’ Charlie put out his hand, and the judge got an expression on his face like he had just stepped in a fresh cow pie. It took a good long minute before the judge reached out and touched Charlie’s hand and said, ‘How you, boy?’ And then turned with great relief to Ann Richards and said, ‘And who is this lovely lady?’ And Ann Richards said, ‘I’m Mrs. Myles.’”

  The laughter was generous. Molly let it subside, muttering to herself and to Ann, who was seated just below her, “Great story. Great story.” Then she launched into her second anecdote. “Along about that same era, as you know, Texas tends to be behind the cultural curves. And this was the early seventies, and the women’s movement had not made it to the shores of our great state, and there was a dinner in West Lake Hills.”

  The mike carried a groan from Ann that had an undertone of displeasure; she realized what was coming. Molly gave her old friend a glance and continued, “And our friend Tony Korioth, who is a wonderful man but a terrible sexist, got to talking about how he was driving home from work that evening, and he passed this young lady on the street who had the most remarkable set of jugs Tony Korioth had ever witnessed in his long years of jug-watching. He described in great detail how they wiggled and jiggled and bounced and jounced, and how he drove around the block to see them again and now described once more how they jiggled and wiggled and bounced and jounced.

  “You women well remember that in those days we had a wonderful social skill when men introduced topics like that into the conversation: we would gaze off into the middle distance, pretending not to be there. And all the women were gazing off into the middle distance, pretending not to be there, when suddenly Ann Richards said in a clarion voice, ‘Well, girls, have you seen any good dicks lately?’”

  The governor was leaning over toward her bouquet of flowers, dabbing at what may have been a tear in her eye. Those stories told in the company of Mad Dog, Inc., were one thing, but Ann was preparing to speak about all the appointments she had made in Port Arthur, Beaumont, Orange, and Vidor. Texas Monthly’s Mimi Swartz would soon be writing a cover story in which she branded all-white Vidor as “Hate City,” a stronghold of the Klan. The Golden Triangle was full of industrial workers and union members who were conditioned to vote in large numbers for Democrats, but the region was also Deep South in its history and orientation. Here one still could hear the word “miscegenation.” Ann could not have been pleased to hear her old canoeing friend and political ally Tony Korioth mocked in public in this way. And it was preserved for all time on C-SPAN. It was mid-1992, and already there was a lot of GOP talk about a strong challenge coming her way from George W. Bush. In a state still controlled by conservative white males, Ann was gearing up to run for reelection!

  “Molly, Molly, Molly, Molly,” Ann said when she got up to make her comic speech about her first experience hunting wild turkeys out in the bush with good old boys. “The Goodwill [Industries] fashion statement. I knew this was an important event to Molly when I walked in and saw she had combed her hair.”

  She was none too pleased to have had Molly’s little dagger of humor poked in her. She often grumbled to her staff, “Friends. They’re the ones who’ll do it to you every time.”

  During that spring of 1992, Texas Monthly’s young art director, DJ Stout, noticed a newspaper story that quoted Ann as saying she wanted to get a motorcycle license by the time she turned sixty. That birthday was coming up in September 1993. At the Port Arthur roast, a local dealer had given her a specially tailored Harley jacket, to her delight. Someone in the Harley-Davidson plant and home office saw the story also and sent her one of its rather small models, which she duly reported as another gift. And in an isolated parking lot, she learned to ride it on weekends with the help of a coach. DJ hatched the idea of putting her on a cover in boots and white leather with fringed sleeves, riding a white Harley. The governor’s publicists expressed some interest, but DJ was disappointed on inspecting the one she had. He envisioned her on a great big Harley hog, the kind he had grown up seeing before the Hell’s Angels came and went and before the American company set out to change its image in the face of stern
European and Japanese competition. Word came back to DJ that Ann liked the idea, but her schedule was so hectic that no time for the photo shoot could be nailed down—she was off to New York to chair the Democratic National Convention.

  One of her aides talked to DJ, though, and said that the governor had liked a cover that came out during the 1990 campaign in which, with new and still difficult digital magic—not yet perfected by Photoshop—the magazine had placed a stock shot of her and a grinning, Stetson-wearing Clayton Williams on the bodies of a two-stepping couple, and then run it with the caption “Dirty Dancing: Stepping Out With Ann and Claytie as They Stomp Across Texas—and Each Other!” Ann told or sent word to DJ she had gotten a kick out of that, and suggested that they just fake it again. He went to work with a photographer in Dallas and a Smithville, Texas, fashion designer who specialized in leather apparel, and the July 1992 issue hit newsstands with the governor looking straight at the camera, somewhat sternly, while astride a large Harley with the gas tank painted gleaming white. This caption was “White Hot Mama: Ann Richards Is Riding High, Can She Be the First Woman President?” Ann thanked DJ profusely for matching her face with a model that had such a “sexy body.” She remarked to Dorothy that she hadn’t had thighs like that in thirty years.

  In early July, Ann left for New York with an entourage of about forty people, plus a contingent of Department of Public Safety troopers and a makeup artist. Wary of GOP sniping and any possible ethics backlash, employees of the Governor’s Office made sure they had enough vacation time accumulated to cover the time off. The entourage included Ann’s family members Ellen Richards, Cecile Richards, and Kirk Adams; her political advisers Jane Hickie and Jack Martin; her old friends Liz Smith, Bob Armstrong, and Chula Reynolds; senior staffers John Hannah, Bill Ramsey, Chuck McDonald, Joy Anderson, Carl Richie, Marlene Saritzky, Rebecca Lightsey, and Richard Moya; Mark McKinnon and Matthew Dowd, who would later play prominent roles in the politics and administration of the second President Bush; and junior staffers, including the publicist Margaret Justus, the travel aide Chris Hughes, and Shawn Morris. Shawn spotted Bianca Jagger, Michael J. Fox, Timothy Hutton, and Oliver Stone in a Madison Square Garden full of celebrities. This show was the Clintons’, but as the convention chair, Ann had booked interviews with Jesse Jackson on CNN, Mario Cuomo on Face the Nation, Dan Rather on CBS, Maria Shriver on NBC, Jim Lehrer and Robert MacNeil on PBS, and one of the governor’s self-proclaimed heartthrobs, Peter Jennings on ABC.