by Jan Reid
If true, the anecdote doesn’t reflect well on Ann Richards, her team, or the Clinton administration. Burundi was one of the ten poorest countries in the world; only four countries from the developed world bothered to have embassies there. The preceding year, the country’s first democratically elected president, a member of the Hutu ethnic majority, had been assassinated by repeated bayonet thrusts of soldiers’ rifles, and the vice president and leaders of the assembly had also been killed. A retaliatory massacre of ethnic Tutsis ensued, and about 700,000 people fled the country.
In mid-1994, Bob Krueger took his wife and young daughters to the small mountainous country in central Africa. During that time, ethnic genocide in neighboring Rwanda took about 800,000 lives of Tutsis and moderate Hutus in a three-month period, and more than three million refugees and avenging militias spilled into neighboring Uganda, Zaire (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo), Tanzania, and Burundi. Almost alone among Clinton’s diplomats, Krueger helped protect people from the slaughter. When he challenged Tutsi marauders, two newspapers called for his assassination, and an ambush was soon attempted, leaving Bob unhurt but two people dead and eight more wounded. One day his wife, Kathleen, faced down a dozen African soldiers who were intent on killing one of their household workers. The Kruegers’ bravery and subsequent award-winning book, From Bloodshed to Hope in Burundi, won praise from South Africa’s Nobel Peace laureate Desmond Tutu, President Jimmy Carter, and the renowned Ethiopia-born American author and physician Abraham Verghese.
Kay Bailey Hutchison’s landslide win was immediately hailed as a novel convergence of feminism and conservatism. But according to an investigative story published by the Houston Press at the end of the saga, four days after Hutchison’s June 1993 victory, a Treasury employee approached the office of the Travis County district attorney and in a purge of guilt said he had taped Hutchison ordering subordinates to destroy possibly incriminating state records. The Public Integrity Unit under Ronnie Earle had been monitoring rumors of Hutchison abusing her staff, but the investigation had not been considered hot. But with that information, the prosecutors moved fast, serving initial subpoenas for fifteen Hutchison aides as well as telephone, computer, and personnel records. The newly elected senator hotly denied the accusations and initially said she would refuse to testify before a grand jury. But according to the Press account, thirty-three witnesses testified, including twenty-six employees of the state Treasury. “Hutchison clearly perceived Austin was brimming with political enemies,” according to a second deputy treasurer, Michael Barron. She was “constantly almost in a state of paranoia,” Barron testified. “From day one, she announced to us that Paul Williams [the governor’s executive assistant] was out to get her; that [Comptroller] John Sharp was out to get her; that everybody in the legislature was out to get her.”
Stories leaked out of the Treasury and grand jury that were not incriminating, but still shocking—the one that most tantalized Austin political junkies had Hutchison whacking John Connally’s daughter with a notebook because she wasn’t doing something fast enough. Her purse boys, characterized by the Press as “taxpayer-subsidized butlers,” were ordered to do things like put her nail polish in the refrigerator. One Treasury aide said she refused their repeated advice to open a political office and would not part with campaign funds to hire a political travel aide. The initial whistleblower—or snitch, in the GOP’s view—carried his evidence to the grand jury in a pizza box.
The Houston Press, an alternative newspaper, did not disclose how it obtained such detailed information from the sealed records of a grand jury, but the New York Times’ Sam Howe Verhovek confirmed that “one person who worked in the treasurer’s office, speaking on condition of anonymity, says the files include handwritten memorandums by Ms. Hutchison suggesting that she was aware of political activities, like fund raising and scheduling of political events, that went on in her office, and that she gave orders to destroy the evidence once it became apparent that it could constitute a legal problem.”
On one point, all parties agreed: just four months after her historic election, Hutchison was indicted on three counts of official misconduct, two of which were second-degree felonies, one a misdemeanor. The most sobering one carried a possible penalty of up to twenty years in prison and a fine of up to $100,000. Specifically, she was accused of misusing state workers and equipment for political advancement and trying to destroy evidence once an investigation was underway. Michael Barron and Hutchison’s planning director, David Criss, were also indicted.
Furious, Hutchison claimed the indictment—she spoke only of her own—was “merely another chapter in the sleazy campaign tactics employed by Democrats during the U.S. Senate campaign this year.” Bentsen would have been up for reelection in 1994. This meant that she would not only have to run again just eighteen months after winning the office, but also have to campaign with a cloud of serious criminal charges over her head. Why, the GOP’s arguments went, Ann was known to bully her top staff! She had travel aides who were expected to hang on to her purse! The Republican Party charged that the indictments were a cynical ploy designed to lure Henry Cisneros back from Washington and into the Senate race for the Democrats. And one month after the indictments were handed down, the Orlando Sentinel reported, “Rejecting an intense lobbying effort by Texas Democrats, U.S. Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry Cisneros said Wednesday night that he does not want to run for the Senate next year: ‘I don’t want to lead anybody on.’”
Ronnie Earle’s prosecution and conviction of an incumbent treasurer for misuse of his office had launched Ann Richards’s career in statewide office. His wife and daughter had worked for Ann, and Republicans knew that Earle had offered himself for the appointment that went to Krueger. The Republicans were justified in contending the odor was not perfume.
The state GOP chairman, Fred Meyer, launched a counterattack with considerable help from Karen Hughes. It didn’t take long for them to learn that nine of the twelve members of the grand jury had voted in Democratic primaries, none in those of the GOP, and that Governor Richards had thirteen telephone lines in her office. In her memoir Ten Minutes from Normal, Hughes later wrote, “That was the first time in my career I remember feeling as if I was going to war every morning.” In press releases, she branded the prosecution as a “witch hunt” and “vicious partisan politics orchestrated by a Democrat district attorney and a stacked Democrat grand jury.” Meyer claimed, “Texas Governor Ann Richards and her staff apparently run a massive political operation by telephone from the state governor’s office, using more private telephone lines in the taxpayer-funded state office than the entire Republican Party [has for] its state administrative offices.”
The counterattack’s drift, of course, was that whatever Hutchison might have done at the Treasury, Democrats in statewide office were just as guilty. Over in Bob Bullock’s office, members of his inner circle smiled at the amateurishness of that facet of the governor’s operation; one told me that the lieutenant governor had just a single telephone line of that nature, and its use was tightly controlled. Mary Beth Rogers had left Ann’s staff to write and teach at the LBJ School; an able hand from Mark White’s administration, John Fainter, was now the governor’s chief of staff. The Republican siege via open-records requests, along with disapproving newspaper stories about telephone calls, forced an admission from him that some telephone records had been destroyed in the course of removing mundane clutter, and Fainter had to write a memo to Governor’s Office personnel that read:
The purpose of this memo is to remind all employees that state telephones are to be used for official state purposes only.
Prohibited use of state phones includes: personal business calls, personal social calls and political calls of any kind. In other words, every phone call you make on a state phone should be related to your official work as an employee of the Governor’s Office . . .
We must remember that office telephones are not “Our” phones—they
belong to the people of the State of Texas, and must be used to serve them, not ourselves.
How degrading, the Bullock team’s observer said, that Fainter had to take the public fall for that. Nothing about the prosecution of Texas’s junior senator boded well for its governor. The first set of indictments had to be thrown out because a member of the grand jury had been charged with theft in 1988. Another grand jury indicted the three defendants again. A retired appellate judge named John Onion, Jr., presided over the trial. Dick DeGuerin, a Democrat and one of the most gifted trial lawyers in the state, assumed the lead of Hutchison’s defense team. Onion granted a change of venue to Fort Worth and told the prosecutors that some of the charges against Hutchison were so vaguely worded she could not defend herself against them. He gave them ten days to clarify the wording of the charges. Momentum swung back and forth: David Criss, the indicted planning director, told the Houston Chronicle that he was ready to cooperate with Earle. “I won’t be the scapegoat anymore,” he said. “Kay Hutchison lied when she said she didn’t know what I was doing.”
The trial at last began in February 1994. Shortly after the senator pleaded not guilty, a bomb threat emptied the courthouse. It turned out that the threat concerned a simultaneous trial of antiabortion protestors. When they were able to proceed, DeGuerin told me, Judge Onion said he wanted and intended to see the governor’s phone records—a chilling demand, to some Democrats. The judge began the often-tedious task of considering pretrial motions. Then, in a move that baffled many seasoned courtroom observers, Ronnie Earle asked the judge for a pretrial ruling to approve certain evidence in bulk. Onion declined, saying he would rule on each piece of evidence as it was presented. Earle said he would have to drop the charges. Onion told him to proceed with the trial, and Earle refused. The judge angrily swore in another jury and ordered them to acquit the senator. They did, and under the constitutional protection against double jeopardy, she could never be tried on those charges again.
I was having an after-work drink at the Texas Chili Parlor when this thunderous news blew through Austin. An attorney at our table said, “You don’t take it to nuclear war and then fold!” Earle shared some of the disallowed evidence with the press and threatened to make all the grand jury testimony public. But the prosecutors’ tempers cooled, and charges against Barron and Criss were dropped. Some observers speculated that Earle had thought he could get another set of indictments from another grand jury and make his evidentiary case before another judge. Onion said afterward that he probably would have approved the evidence if Earle had agreed to do it his way. After losing the big cases against Mattox and Hutchison, Earle’s reputation as a courtroom lawyer was forever besmirched.
But the Republicans never did get rid of him or his Public Integrity Unit. Eleven years later, Earle attained an indictment of U.S. House majority leader Tom DeLay for money laundering. Ronnie had retired by the time DeLay’s case finally went to trial in November 2010, and his team of prosecutors won a conviction in an upset of Dick DeGuerin. The judge listened to DeLay’s indignant speech in the punishment phase of the trial and, unimpressed, gave him three years. Even if an appeals court of elected Republicans overturned the verdict and he never served a day, as expected, the much-feared Hammer, as he was known in Congress, was reduced to being a pundit and a cha-cha-ing contestant on Dancing with the Stars.
Ann told Texas Monthly’s Paul Burka, “The minute I heard about Kay’s indictment, I said, ‘This is the worst thing for everybody.’ I knew how it was going to play out. We’re both women. We both held the same office. I knew that her guys—and I don’t think it was Kay—were going to come after me.”
Burka, who had a law degree, could make no sense of the way the senator’s trial ended. He told Ann that “everybody in Texas” believed she had persuaded Ronnie to tank his reputation to benefit her. “Absolutely not,” she responded. “And, no, everybody doesn’t. I never talked to him about the case or anything else while it was going on.
“I like Ronnie, but we’re not close. I tried to cut his budget when I was county commissioner.”
For Ann, what must have resonated from Hutchison’s trial was her former friend’s taunt when she consented to appear before the grand jury: “They know that if I have a sixty percent margin in 1994, the entire Democratic power structure in this state is finished.”
Attempting a comeback after his bitter loss to Ann, Jim Mattox ran in the Democratic primary for the Senate against a Dallas businessman, Richard Fisher, the same man whom Krueger had defeated and whom Mattox accused of being a closet Republican. Fisher dealt him another hurtful wound, winning with 54 percent. In that fall’s general election, Kay Bailey Hutchison defended her seat with flair, bashing Fisher by 955,000 votes.
Her margin of victory: 60.7 percent.
Ann takes aim from thirty feet at a target on an FBI firing range for handguns, 1993 or 1994.
CHAPTER 28
Sass
The apex of Ann’s political career had come about in a period full of events that were almost too unexpected to comprehend. Riots had erupted in the Soviet Union’s satellites in 1986, when she was winning her second term as treasurer, and in late 1989 the riots escalated into a full-blown rebellion that eventually cost the Soviet Union control of those “republics” it had claimed and held by resolute force. (What was one to make of these vast new Asian countries called Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan?) Further hastening the end of the Cold War, the Berlin Wall fell in November 1989. After the seven-month Gulf War against Iraq ended in February 1991, George H. W. Bush enjoyed the greatest stature of any man on earth. Certainly, he had the power. And once the Soviet Union collapsed completely in December 1991, amid claims that Ronald Reagan had bankrupted and brought down what he called the “Evil Empire,” one would have thought his successor would just have to bask in the glory. Yet just twenty-two months after his wartime triumph, he lost badly in his bid for reelection.
George W. Bush could not bring himself to believe that Bill Clinton had actually defeated his father. In his view, Clinton was the beneficiary of conservative infighting, not a real victor. Pat Buchanan’s guerilla challenge in the primaries and the image he projected of Republicans as the party of nativist anger had sown the seeds of defeat. “Never shoulda happened,” the younger Bush said. The time I heard him make that claim, he didn’t mention the night his dad looked at his watch during the debate with Clinton and Perot as if he had more important things to do. That was when I thought, “He is really going to lose.”
Clinton prevailed, many Democrats thought, because so many A-list candidates, such as New York governor Mario Cuomo and Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen, thought Bush couldn’t be defeated and sat it out. From the outset, Ann had a warm relationship with the young president who had shocked the GOP. Once when President Clinton needed to do some business with the Texas governor, he tracked her down to an appointment with Gail Hewitt, her longtime hair stylist. Gail handed the governor the telephone and they spoke quickly, resolving the matter. Then Ann shifted to her easygoing voice and told him a joke. “Bill? If two people get married in Arkansas and move to Texas, what do you call them?” On the other end, he chuckled or sighed and waited for the punch line. She drawled, “Cousins.”
But her familiarity and friendship with the president did not mean they would always agree. The Superconducting Super Collider was being gouged under onetime tallgrass prairie, now mostly sun-baked farmland, near Waxahachie, a short drive south of Dallas. Lobbying the Clinton administration and Congress to keep those grandiose projects alive was a top priority of Jane Hickie, who now directed the Office of State-Federal Relations. And the governor enlisted additional help in Washington from a sort of lobbyist without portfolio, the lawyer Shelton Smith. As a University of Texas student, Shelton had gotten hooked on politics and government while working for Governor Preston Smith (no relation). He had made a great deal of money in a hurry as a plaintiff’s lawyer in Houston, and he ha
d a beautiful Hill Country retreat with several guest homes along the banks of the Blanco River, southwest of Austin. Ann and her staff at the Treasury had used Shelton’s ranch for working retreats, and during her first gubernatorial campaign, Shelton had been a generous contributor. “I’ve got a deal for you,” she told him in late 1992. “I want you to move to Washington for a year and a half and make sure this Supercollider thing stays on track. And I can’t pay you. You have to do this on your own nickel.” What a deal! But Shelton agreed to do it.
The secret of why matter has mass is believed to reside in a particle called the Higgs boson, also known as the “God particle.” This theoretical particle has never been observed in experiments. Theorists’ calculations project that it exists in detectible amounts at incredibly high temperatures and pressures—such as were present at the Big Bang, which created the universe, most scientists believe. To subject it to empirical research, the federal Department of Energy set out to create the most powerful particle accelerator in the world. It would slam particles together with more force than anything known to mankind, producing a beam of protons and antiprotons that superconducting magnets would control by bending the beam around an oval-shaped tunnel fifty-four miles long and two hundred feet underground. More than half the states vied for this megalaboratory, but in 1987, with Governor Bill Clements’s promise of state funding of $1 billion, a site in Ellis County was chosen. Digging began in 1991, using a tunneling bore that was fifteen feet in diameter. Labs were going to be built aboveground to produce the superconducting magnets. The simulated Big Bang beneath the sandstone and limestone bedrock was going to be under the direction of a physicist with the University of Texas and Harvard. (As this book was going to press, teams of scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider, near Geneva, Switzerland, claimed to be close to detecting the Higgs boson. But in almost the same breath, scientists at the press conference said it would be many months before they could offer any proof.)