by Jan Reid
When David Gergen analyzed her opening speech, he dwelled on the Texas Monthly cover with the likeness of Ann on the motorcycle. Wayne Slater, the Dallas Morning News reporter who had been standing in the wings and had gotten the first comment from Ann after her career-driving keynote speech in Atlanta four years earlier, filed his story under the headline: “Richards’ Popularity Puts Her in the Limelight Dawn to Dusk”:
Ms. Richards is bound for the network’s sky-booth to appear on Face the Nation with correspondent Bob Schieffer, who greets her in a hallway cluttered with computer terminals, portable tables and miles of television cable.
They chat briefly, but not about politics. Mr. Schieffer wants to know about the Harley-Davidson motorcycle that she straddled, dressed in white leather, on the July cover of Texas Monthly. The headline: “White Hot Mama.”
. . . Lena Guerrero, the Texas Railroad Commissioner, arrives in a black Cadillac limo. By the time Hillary Clinton, wife of the presumed Democratic nominee Bill Clinton, pulls up in a multi-car caravan, the place has the frenetic look of a Hollywood opening. . . . The chorus line does appear, people keep talking, and under the club’s deep-blue ceiling and gold sconces, in the jostle and swirl of the crowd, Ms. Richards is surrounded by a crush of well-wishers well into the night.
It is enough, Ms. Richards concedes, to make her think about next week, when she will be on vacation.
“I’m going to Switzerland,” she says. “Nobody knows me there.”
CHAPTER 26
Heartaches by the Number
Unbeknownst to Ann at the time, her fortress harbored a Trojan horse, one in the shape of that black Cadillac limo that came rolling to a halt in the bright lights outside Madison Square Garden.
With eerie foresight, Bud Shrake had faxed her a letter in mid-June that she might well have taken to heart, even if the old rounder was sounding a bit preachy.
Dear Guv:
While you were playing croquet in Wonderland I have been deeply involved in real life . . .
I’ve been reading March of Folly by Barbara Tuchman. Her definition of folly is: “Wooden-headed attraction to a goal or course of action that is against your best interest, deprived of powerful warnings and feasible alternatives.”
Do you know how hard the Trojans had to work to get that big wooden horse inside their walls?
Which reminds me that Susan [Walker] wants the Punzars to appear at [Jerry Jeff’s] next Paramount birthday show—on national cable TV.
This ain’t folly, because I have no attraction to it. But stupid?
Love, Bud
He did not accompany her to the Democratic National Convention in July. A Manhattan full of drunk and bellicose politicians and Democratic Party groupies was not Bud’s idea of a good time.
Amid campaign supporters and television newsmen, Austin State Representative Lena Guerrero beckons to her friend and mentor Ann Richards during the 1990 campaign for governor. Governor Richards was wounded by Guerrero’s false academic claims in 1992.
Stupidity would be a cruel way to describe the governor’s handling of her first political debacle of 1992, but she effectively threw herself under her own bus. Eight days after her inauguration, she had appointed Lena Guerrero to fill a vacancy in a statewide elected office, officially making her one of the stars of her New Texas. Guerrero had been elected to the Texas House of Representatives in 1984, when she was just twenty-six. By all accounts, she was an energetic and able legislator. Reviews of her performance in the 1990 campaign were mixed, but she added to her reputation as a tough customer in a reported chest-to-chest argument with Mattox at a gathering of Mexican American Democrats in Corpus Christi. When Ann appointed her to the Railroad Commission in its one-hundredth year, every previous commissioner had been a white male. At one of her early hearings, a boorish trucker insulted her. “I have just one question—what’s your bra size?”
“Not big enough,” she fired back. The guffaws signaled that she had won admission to the club.
By the early 1990s, railroads had almost nothing to do with the job Ann handed her. Railroad commissioners dealt in the intricacies of regulating oil and gas production, mapping old wells, pipeline permitting and safety, trucking regulations, coal and uranium mining, and consumer use of propane, compressed natural gas, and liquefied natural gas. And the office is a trampoline for politicians seeking higher office.
When Guerrero’s limo arrived at Madison Square Garden that summer night in 1992, she was on a USA Today list of who might be the first female president. At the Democratic National Convention that nominated Bill Clinton and Al Gore, Governor Ann Richards, as chair, made sure that Guerrero got to deliver her up-from-the-barrio speech in a prime-time slot. Guerrero was never accused of any malfeasance in her years of public service. She just got tangled up in the handiwork of creating her own myth.
According to speculation, Ann expected a Bush landslide in 1992, regardless of the Democrats’ nominee, and she hoped that a dynamic Hispanic woman on the state ballot might awaken a dormant voting bloc in Texas, one that the governor constantly courted, and erect a firewall for Democratic legislators. Guerrero had expected to run against Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander (not yet Strayhorn), a former Austin mayor and onetime local ally of Ann who had switched to the Republican Party. But “one tough grandma,” as the former mayor styled herself, lost the GOP primary to Barry Williamson, an attorney who directed the Minerals Management Service in Bush’s Department of the Interior. Williamson’s campaign consultant, Karl Rove, was then forty-two. After starting a profitable consulting firm in Austin, he had guided Rick Perry and Kay Bailey Hutchison to their winning races in 1990, but those were down-ballot offices, whatever the future importance of the occupants. Rove’s only reputation outside Texas was as a collegiate dirty trickster that the elder George Bush had to caution on what his life would be like if the FBI got hold of him. During the 1992 campaign, he provided direct-mail and fund-raising service for Dick Thornburgh, a former Pennsylvania governor and an attorney general under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush who ran for the U.S. Senate in his home state and was upset by Harris Wofford. Rove later sued Thornburgh for lack of payment and won an award of $310,000 in a settlement. That battle is detailed in Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential, by Wayne Slater and James Moore.
The Williamson campaign launched assaults that cast Guerrero as for gays and lesbians, against gun rights, and for abortion. Nothing was working until the husband of Austin’s ex-mayor, Carole Keeton McClellan Rylander, saw a University of Texas release that said Guerrero was going to be honored as an outstanding alumna. The man tipped Rove that his alumni group could find no record that she had graduated from the University of Texas. But she claimed to have a communications degree in broadcasting from the university—and to have been Phi Beta Kappa. (Dan Rather had mentioned her degree in his videotape for the Ann Richards roast in Port Arthur.)
Transcripts of students at state-supported colleges are supposed to be privileged, but Rove soon knew that her academic record was dotted with Cs, Fs, and incompletes. At the start of that summer, Guerrero addressed a graduation ceremony at Texas A&M and began, “I remember well my own commencement. . . .” Rove waited a few weeks, until she had made the ride in the limo and enjoyed her big night in New York City. He delayed his ambush until his candidate got to make his speech about the president’s energy policy at the Republican National Convention. Then he passed on the tip about Guerrero’s academic claims to a Dallas Morning News reporter. At first she lost her composure, raising her intimidating telephone voice and warning the reporter that if the paper went anywhere near that story, she was going to sue the Morning News. That was like tossing a glass of gasoline on a charcoal fire.
She then tried to stall, saying that it had to be a clerical error and that she would check with the university. Then she changed her story again. It turned out that Guerrero was nineteen credits short of her degree, not the four she claimed. Sh
e had failed a course on the Texas legislature, which an adroit team might have spun into a comic positive, given her glowing record there. But the Austin-based political journalist Lou Dubose wrote about an Austin political consultant who said, “Karl had Lena’s transcript. He held it until the right moment. The perfect moment. And then he screwed her.”
Ann had warned Guerrero when she gave her the job, “They’re going to pick through your innards when you run.” One of the consultants who worked with Ann stretched his mouth in disdain at the mention of the former legislator and commissioner. “Lena Guerrero was a bully,” he told me, “and she was the most unfit public official I’ve ever seen.” That overstated the case, but she did prove incapable of preparing for rigorous opposition research—a requisite of anyone with great political ambition. In their book Bush’s Brain, Wayne Slater and James Moore related a telling story of the Guerrero campaign’s demise. Chuck McDonald, a press aide for Richards, told them that Mark McKinnon, the media consultant, had lined up an advertising shoot that went on as planned in a simulated Texas oil field: “Lena has $2 million dollars in the bank, so we’re going to run this unbelievable bioepic—the poor, humble girl who is now running Texas. McKinnon’s got this crane. Lena’s walking—she’s got on a dress, the wind blowing. Then we go to the Governor’s Mansion for shots on the porch and patio. We’re just out there shooting this while the world’s falling apart.”
Later the same day, the commissioner held a press conference. Accompanied by her husband, her four-year-old son, and her mother, she claimed the graduation claim was a memory lapse, and the Phi Beta Kappa thing had gone out in some press release she failed to catch.
McDonald told the governor, “Nobody’s going to believe this story.”
Guerrero went on, “I now realize that I have been in a hurry all my life. In my haste, I was reckless. I made mistakes. I allowed misperceptions, embellishments, and errors of fact about my academic record to go uncorrected. I didn’t admit to the truth of those facts when questioned about them. And I betrayed the trust placed in me by the people of this state and a woman I admire dearly, Governor Ann Richards.”
Guerrero said that she would resign her office as railroad commissioner, but that she would not withdraw her name from the ballot. She would try to win an election in which, she pleaded, both candidates were now challengers. Ann issued a supportive statement in response to her mea culpa and pledge to fight on. Guerrero sent the governor a letter whose postscript read, “Please allow me to clarify one last lingering misperception: When asked why there were misrepresentations on my resumé, I said it was something I wanted to be true so badly I began to believe it myself, and it wasn’t until I was called by a reporter from the Dallas Morning News and asked about my college career that I realized the misrepresentation was over.” Which of the layered versions was hardest to believe?
With McKinnon acting as her campaign manager, Guerrero launched her “Get Up” campaign with a charge that her deception was less serious than Williamson’s activities on behalf of his family’s oil business while running for an office that would make him an oil business regulator. “I made a serious mistake,” she said in her new ad. “I misled people about my academic record. I’ve resigned my position as railroad commissioner to show you how sorry I am. But I’m staying in the race because I’m the only candidate without a conflict of interest. The only candidate whose family doesn’t make money from oil or the decisions I make. I hope you can forgive me. Growing up in Texas, I’ve learned it’s not how often you fall that matters, but how often you get up.”
Ann hosted a fund-raiser for Guerrero at the Governor’s Mansion that was roundly jeered by the Republican Party. “The Lena Guerrero that I know has worked all her life for the good of the little guy, or the underdog and for those who have had a bumpy ride on the road of life,” Ann said. “Now that her road has developed a bump or two, I’m here to help smooth the way for her—just as she has done time and time again for others during her tenure in the House and at the Railroad Commission. I make no apologies for standing by a friend as she has stood by me—and many of you in the audience tonight. Lena is a lot of things, but one thing she is not, is a quitter. She has never dodged a fight in her life. Last week, she stood before a packed House chamber and did the right thing. . . . She told the people of this state that she would atone for her mistakes and make a break with the past by resigning her seat on the Railroad Commission and as chair of the High Speed Rail Authority. In turn, she asked the voters to give her a second look. A fresh look.”
One more major bump in the road came when the Austin American-Statesman’s Bruce Hight consulted the governor’s ethics adviser, Barbara Jordan. The interview contained an emphatic nonendorsement, in Jordan’s rococo style.
Jordan: The Lena Guerrero situation has been a very, very unfortunate occurrence for Lena Guerrero personally, for the governor’s commitment to ethics, and for the whole ethical atmosphere, which has been a staple inclusion of the administration of Ann Richards. It is regrettable that it took Lena Guerrero as long as it did to simply resign the seat, but she finally did, but her name remains on the ballot because she wants to be elected. And my problem with that is that a person who is a public official, a public servant, must adhere to the highest ethical standard conceivable to the minds of the people who live and work in this state and Lena Guerrero did not do that, and that is a very sad situation.
Hight: If elected, should she resign her seat?
Jordan: In my opinion, if Lena Guerrero is elected Railroad Commissioner, the high ethical ground position would be for Lena Guerrero to resign that seat and allow the governor to have a new appointment.
Hight: But in reality that probably won’t happen . . . do you think that Lena Guerrero is of the highest moral character?
Jordan [dodging the question]: I have not seen any indication that we may anticipate a resignation post-election, if election does occur.
Hight: Have you expressed your concerns to Ms. Guerrero or to the governor?
Jordan: I have not expressed anything to Lena Guerrero because I was not asked my opinion by her at all. The governor did not ask for my advice in this matter, and as a special counsel on ethics, you give advice when it is asked.
Hight: Do you think she should’ve asked, considering you are the ethics advisor?
Jordan: I believe that is the governor’s call, not mine.
Guerrero could only respond: “I am very surprised that Barbara Jordan would make these kinds of remarks without talking to me or the governor. I have great respect for Barbara Jordan. But I believe that since I have already resigned my seat on the Railroad Commission, I have placed this matter before the people of Texas.”
Mark McKinnon deep-sixed the oil field bio-epic, and the “Get Up” campaign sank faster than the Titanic. In a year when Bill Clinton swept into the presidency and pinned down George H. W. Bush so badly he had to pour millions of dollars into Texas to avoid losing his home state—he came within 3.5 percentage points of doing that—Guerrero lost to Williamson by 13 points and 845,000 votes. The farce had a deep etching of tragedy. Although Guerrero was young when she dug herself that hole, she must have realized her political career was over. The timing of her resignation cost her lifelong coverage by the state’s medical insurance plan, and she needed it badly. She went on to start a lobbying firm and represent some high-paying clients, but an inoperable brain tumor claimed her when she was just fifty.
At the time it seemed like a pyrrhic victory for the Republicans. Just twenty months after President Bush, the decisive world leader, had assembled a broad international coalition and chased Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the humbled man carried only eighteen states and 37.4 percent of the popular vote. He lost by nearly six million votes. His family and team were particularly bitter about Perot, who nursed a grudge against the president—they believed that a majority of Perot’s nineteen million votes would have gone to Bush. One Bush ally said with contempt that
anything was possible in politics those days: “A B-Teamer just got elected president of the United States.” There was joy at the Governor’s Mansion, and Democrats frolicked in the streets of downtown Austin. But Chuck McDonald told Karl Rove’s biographers Wayne Slater and James Moore, “I think that was the beginning of the end for Ann Richards, when they blew up Lena Guerrero.”
Ann’s term as Texas’s governor can be charted as a nearly perfect parabola—two years up and two years down. Except for the local furor over Gary Bradley’s tip on how to get the Treasury lights to turn themselves off at night, she had rigorously avoided abuse-of-office accusations during her sixteen years as an elected official. But trouble brewed for Ann the ethicist throughout 1992.
The governor is the titular commander of the Texas National Guard. It is a quasi chain of command, relevant mostly when the reservists are called out to help in the wake of natural disasters. The full-time and noncommissioned officers directing sprawling Camp Mabry on Austin’s west side wear uniforms of the army and the air force, and the president is really their commander in chief. In late September that year, Carl Richie, a member of the governor’s Policy Council, alerted Ann that a federal grand jury was investigating the National Guard. Ann wrote to the U.S. attorney in San Antonio that she did not know what the grand jury was looking for, but she had ordered everyone in her administration to cooperate fully.