Let the People In

by Jan Reid

  A week later, the adjutant general of the Air National Guard wrote the governor that Colonel Richard Brito had been indicted for perjury after the arrest and trial of his brother for trafficking illegal drugs in Grimes County. In 1987, a drug bust on a landing strip near the small town of Navasota had resulted in the capture of a private plane loaded with Mexican marijuana. Two brothers of Colonel Brito were arrested. The colonel posted bail for the suspected smugglers, and two years later, he became head of the Texas Guard’s drug-interdiction operations. In 1990, his brother Mario was found guilty and sentenced to ninety-nine years. He became a fugitive, probably fleeing to Mexico with his brother Billy, the plane’s pilot, who had not yet been tried.

  In December 1990, the adjutant general briefed outgoing governor Bill Clements on this unusual convergence of charges and relations. A Department of Public Safety official told the Corpus Christi Caller-Times he believed the 1992 federal investigation began because Colonel Brito had used a house in Brownsville as collateral when posting the suspects’ bond, and he had worn his army uniform when demanding what evidence the Grimes County prosecutors had against his brothers. Brito was never indicted by the federal grand jury, but in March 1992 the army suspended his security clearance. Although reassigned from the drug-interdiction program, he received a promotion in August, and was allowed continued access to classified military information. A month later, a Grimes County grand jury indicted him on five counts of perjury. Brito wrote to Hispanic civil rights activists that he was a victim of bigotry among Texas Guard officers.

  It was a sorry mess, and Brito was placed on administrative leave without pay. That October, the G.I. Forum filed discrimination complaints against the Guard on behalf of six soldiers, including Brito. Governor Richards met with members of the House Hispanic Caucus and asked for a list of people who could help her select an independent arbitrator. A lieutenant colonel and spokesman for the Guard called this proposed new investigation unwarranted: “We would prefer obviously to look to see if there are any problems ourselves. Military people ought to look at what military people are doing.”

  A real commander in chief would have called that insubordination. But for Ann, the messiest revelations were that Colonel Danny Kohler, the Guard’s chief of staff, and two other officers had known about the army’s suspension of Brito’s security clearance and his continued access to classified material, but still allowed his promotion to go forward. A story about the scandal in the Corpus Christi Caller-Times included a photograph of Kohler. The alleged crimes occurred under Bill Clements’s watch, but Colonel Kohler and the other officer cited in the Caller-Times story had to go.

  The Brito scandal was particularly painful to Ann and her staff because Danny Kohler, an affable part-time rancher, was the husband of Ann’s longtime soul mate and ace scheduler Nancy. For nearly fifteen years, drunk or sober, they had known each other about as well as two very funny and popular women could. Some members of Ann’s staff believed Kohler obfuscated throughout his summons during his interview at the governor’s office, but Bill Cryer, for one, claimed that Danny was guilty of nothing more than having his picture in the paper. The episode was a crushing blow for Nancy, who left the staff not long before being diagnosed with the cancer that claimed her. Ann’s handling of that inner-office dynamic did not win the admiration of some of her aides. “Ann could have at least gone up to Nancy and given her a hug,” said one. “She never did.”

  While the Guerrero and Brito sagas were unfolding, one of my closest friends made a mistake that cost him more than a trip to the governor’s woodshed. Selden Hale suspected that Josh Allen, one of his fellow members on the Texas Board of Criminal Justice, had an ongoing, questionable business relationship with Mark Stiles, a former legislator from Beaumont who supplied much of the concrete used in the construction of the Mark Stiles State Prison. Based just on that repeated name, there was a glaring conflict of interest surrounding the construction of the prison, but the name was “Mark Stiles,” not “Josh Allen.” Selden loved having a badge he could flash to get buzzed inside prison gates. And instead of passing on his suspicions and any evidence to appropriate law enforcement officers, he ordered prison system officials to investigate Allen. Word of this reached Ann at precisely the time when Lena Guerrero was resigning her office and a Grimes County grand jury was indicting Colonel Brito for perjury regarding his brothers’ drug smuggling.

  In no mood for more foolishness, Ann made a speech one night in Gatesville at the women’s drug-treatment unit. Because of my wife’s involvement in that program, she saw the speech. She said that afterward, Ann sat in a chair on the stage with her legs crossed, leaning toward Selden and doing all the talking. Selden went back to Amarillo and wrote her the resignation letter she demanded. Their exchange of letters mentioned only the settlement of the Ruiz case, the women and members of ethnic minorities they had brought to leadership roles in a prison system staff that had largely been all-male and all-white, their launch of the country’s most ambitious drug and alcohol treatment program for convicts, and, on Ann’s part, gratitude for the service to the state of Selden Hale. The “no comments” on reasons for the resignation raised GOP howls that they were stonewalling. Kent Adams, an unsuccessful Republican candidate for state representative from Beaumont, issued a press release that read in part: “In the wake of the Lena Guerrero scandal, the resignation of the state’s Prison Board chairman, Selden Hale, raises serious questions about how Governor Richards is running Texas and how our state prison system is doing business. . . . What did Hale find? Why hasn’t the Governor released the results of the investigation?”

  I thought Ann overreacted to Selden’s imprudence, that she was feeling intense pressure from the Guerrero and Brito embarrassments. She did put out the fire of that potential scandal before it got started. But the image of Ann publicly chewing out a silver-haired white guy who wore cowboy boots and had been one of her most loyal supporters for years stuck in the minds of white males in the prison system, and they made sure word of that got spread around.

  CHAPTER 27

  Troubles by the Score

  Ann’s biggest humiliation in 1993 came about not because of anything she did or did not do. It happened because her friend President Bill Clinton named Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen his Treasury secretary.

  One would think that with all the proclaimed Democratic talent in Texas that Ann personified, it would have been a pleasant and rewarding chore to appoint one of her peers to fill Bentsen’s Senate seat. She must have wanted to yank her hair out on finding out that was not to be the case. The first choice was the handsome and charismatic former mayor of San Antonio. George Shipley had introduced Ann to Henry Cisneros, and the rapport they established that day won her his active support in the 1990 campaign. George now arranged for them to meet again. “Henry was trying to patch things up with his wife,” he told me. “He had just told her about his affair and the mistress and the money he’d been giving her. He bared his soul to Ann, too, really opened up. Told her all about it.” Ann was blunt with Cisneros, Shipley said. She was there on an important political errand; she was not there to be his confessor. George said she told him, “When Republicans see something they want, things can get kind of nasty. What are you gonna do when they get to this other woman and give her half a million dollars? Are you gonna be able to handle that?”

  Henry said he thought he would, hoped he could.

  “Well, let me know,” Ann said, and she and George headed back to Austin. Cisneros was a perfect choice in so many ways—a Texas A&M and Harvard graduate who was then just forty-five years old. He was a superb orator and had star quality. When he was San Antonio’s mayor, the U.S. Jaycees had honored him as one of the ten outstanding young men of America. He had been short-listed for a vice presidential nomination. In 1991, VISTA magazine had named him the Hispanic man of the year. The Republicans would have had a hard time fielding a candidate who could beat Cisneros in the 1993 special election, regardless of th
e deceit and turmoil in his married life.

  Ann as seen from behind at one of the birthday parties in major urban centers that launched her 1994 campaign for reelection.

  “Unknown to us,” George Shipley told me, “all of this was kind of a catalyst of reconciliation between Henry and his wife. Meanwhile I flew up to Washington and set about getting senators on board. We set a date, a Sunday, for Henry to arrive and get the grand tour. [West Virginia senator] Jay Rockefeller was going to introduce him around. ‘Here, take a seat, this is the very chair where Daniel Webster sat,’ things like that. Then Henry called and said he couldn’t make our meeting on Sunday. You know, a fair amount of work had gone into arranging it, and I said, ‘Do you mind telling me why not?’ He said, ‘On the way up I stopped in Little Rock.’

  “In a hall of George’s office was an enlarged photo of Ann and the mayor in their happier days. George beat his feet on his carpet and leaned over his desk in a burst of laughter. ‘Henry said, “I told Governor Clinton the same things I told you, and he said, ‘You did the right thing, giving that woman the money.’”

  Clinton nominated Cisneros as secretary of Housing and Urban Development, and he sailed through his Senate hearing and was confirmed unanimously. But later he attracted the attention of one of the special prosecutors who were so numerous in those years. He wound up pleading guilty to lying under oath while being questioned by a federal official. It was a misdemeanor, but still a criminal act, and an admission of shameful behavior. He resigned before the end of Clinton’s first term to go into the Hispanic cable-television business. I saw him once amid a group of people who asked why he had let a personal failing like that destroy a career of great promise. “No, no,” he said. “You don’t know how people look at me. You don’t see them staring in the airports.” Politics had damaged that man, for sure.

  With her strongest candidate picked off by Bill Clinton, Ann looked anew at her options for filling the Senate seat. Though it would have been the pragmatic and Machiavellian move, appointing Jim Mattox was out of the question—their attacks on each other had been too brutal, too recent. Jim Hightower and Garry Mauro were too scarred by the FBI investigations and damning news stories; they could never win confirmation by the Senate. Ann moved from the class of 1982 to the Democrats’ down-ballot comers of 1990—attorney general Dan Morales and comptroller John Sharp. “Morales didn’t like her,” George Shipley told me. “They did not get on.” In any case, Morales would soon wind up in prison for trying to use his power and office to deal a crony into a lawyer’s share of a huge settlement Texas won in a class-action lawsuit against big tobacco companies. But what disqualified Morales was his opposition to abortion. In contrast, Ann got along very well with John Sharp, but he was raised a Catholic, and as a state senator from Victoria, he had once tried to sneak an amendment onto a bill that would have undercut Roe v. Wade. Since then, his positions on that question had been elusive. To many of Ann’s aides, advisers, and friends, Sharp had proclaimed himself pro-choice much too soon after the vacant Senate seat materialized. Both Morales and Sharp told the press that the governor had approached them and that they had turned her down. They were entitled to spin their own stories.

  As time passed and she didn’t offer a nomination, Ann looked hapless; at one point, she considered her sometime nemesis on the ethics front, Travis County district attorney Ronnie Earle. A Texas Monthly profile of Earle that I wrote in 2005, when House majority leader Tom DeLay had been indicted for money laundering, contains this scene: “At their home in western Travis County, Twila Earle was reading the paper about the impasse one morning and told Ronnie he was as qualified and as formidable a candidate as any of those being considered. ‘By the time I got out of the shower,’ Ronnie told me, ‘I was feeling positively senatorial.’”

  In the end, Ann had to face the fact that the vaunted Democrats had no bench. With such ambivalence that it must have made her dizzy, she turned to a man who had yearned and prepared for years to serve in the United States Senate—the intelligent, decent, fiscally conservative, unexciting Bob Krueger. He had a doctorate in English literature from Oxford, and in his academic career he had attained a prestigious rank, the dean of arts and sciences at Duke University (where he had earned his MA). Returning to his hometown of New Braunfels, he was part of the Watergate class of new members of Congress in 1974, and after the first of his two terms, he was voted “most effective” by his colleagues, largely because of his mastery of energy issues.

  In Krueger’s 1978 Senate race against John Tower, the election returns ticked over at two in the morning and he lost a heartbreaker by three-tenths of a percent. Six years later, with Tower retired and Phil Gramm representing the GOP, the favored centrist found himself squeezed out of the Democratic primary by Kent Hance on the right and Lloyd Doggett on the left. Once more, the twist of the knife came at two in the morning.

  Between those failed campaigns, President Carter had appointed him ambassador at large to Mexico and United States coordinator of Mexican affairs. And in a 1990 comeback little noted amid the furor of the governor’s race between Ann and Clayton Williams, Bob had run for a Railroad Commission seat, smashed an Austin liberal in the Democratic primary, and led all candidates on the general election ballot, crushing his GOP opponent by a sixteen-point margin. The great irony in early 1993, given the contempt in which several of Ann’s associates held him, was that no man could have been more aligned with the governor on issues that mattered most to her. One of his position papers offered eloquent support of Roe v. Wade and stem cell research: “When I imagine my daughters grown and making their own reproductive decisions, I want them to be able to embrace life as they define it and as they define what makes it fulfilling. I cannot side with people who would bind my daughters and their generation to back-alley solutions or coerced births, nor can I join in repressing medical research that could yield dignity and enrichment for millions of people.”

  But Ann couldn’t have been more disingenuous or blasé in her announcement of his appointment: “I had many, many good people from which to choose. Many of them also happen to be good friends. But Bob Krueger is a man who will need no on-the-job training. He can hit the ground running in Washington.” One note that stood out in those remarks, and may have been unintended, was that she did not appear to count him as one of her friends. Bob realized his dream of serving in the United States Senate, but his tour there lasted just less than five months. It had been fifteen years since he had run his best race. The theme song for his prospects in the special election could have been B. B. King’s “The Thrill Is Gone.”

  The special election was another one of those ninety-day horse races, with six candidates of note heading out of the starting gate. The state treasurer, Kay Bailey Hutchison, outspent and outperformed two GOP congressmen, Joe Barton and Jack Fields, while Krueger fended off the challenges of a Dallas businessman, Richard Fisher, and José Angel Gutiérrez, who had formerly been aligned with the breakaway party La Raza Unida. Hutchison led Krueger by 99 votes, with both candidates gaining just over 593,000. The next round would be a complicated affair for Ann because she genuinely liked Hutchison. But in the interest of Clinton’s young presidency and her prospects for reelection, she had to hope Krueger could hold the Senate seat for the Democrats. She assigned her son-in-law Kirk Adams to get the party strongly behind him.

  Hutchison veered to the right as time wore on in her career, but in that pivotal race, she held her ideological cards close to her chest. Her bumper stickers in 1993 were a jaunty bright red and simply read “Kay!” In the Democratic camp, a glum feeling arose that it had really been no dead heat. An incumbent Democrat should have gotten better than 29 percent. Krueger was a very dignified man. His idea of sport was an impromptu recitation of Shakespeare amid Texans who had last given any thought to the bard when required to read a play or two in junior high school. But flash polls showed him twenty points down against Hutchison, and like many other Democrats, he put stock in
the brainstorms of Roy Spence, who, with Garry Mauro, had guided him in 1974. The ad man talked him into putting on a Hollywood biker jacket and wraparound shades for his campaign commercial and mimicking Arnold Schwarzenegger’s line from Terminator 2, “Hasta la vista, baby!”

  The attempt to give Krueger some public flair and illumine his self-deprecating sense of humor was worse than lame. The ads were likened to a Hail Mary pass at the end of a football game; the New York Times described them as “zany.” Hutchison put him to rout by a 2–1 margin. It was the worst defeat a challenger had ever inflicted on an incumbent U.S. senator. Krueger had irked Clinton by voting against his first budget—and its tax increase—on the grounds that the government needed to be audited for waste first. But he had excellent diplomatic experience, and the president wanted to do something for a man whose electoral days were over. Jane Hickie had a fine time describing the ambassador’s appointment in an interview by Brian McCall for his book The Power of the Texas Governor. “Do you remember the movie Dave?” McCall quoted her. “They sent the vice president to Burundi. They had to send him away. Which is why Krueger went to Burundi: The people in the White House saw the movie Dave. You think I’m kidding, but no, I’m not. I was at the Governor’s Mansion when they called. There was an encyclopedia at the Mansion, and Ann said, ‘See if you can find out where Burundi is.’ We got the book, and oh, we were just dying laughing.”